Colossal Opera

The Vancouver Opera season opened officially last Saturday with Puccini's final opera, Turandot. For those who've seen the ads about town, they've been pitching it as Colossal Opera!

As part of my class experience, we went to see the final full dress rehearsal on Thursday night. The best part is that dress rehearsals are only $12, and general admission, so you can sit in truly excellent seats. The seats I and my companions were in would normally have been $87!

In theory, a dress rehearsal can have anything happen; after all, this is a rehearsal and the last chance to iron out any bugs. However, the performance was smooth and uninterrupted.

The big draw for this rendition of Turnadot is the soprano, Audrey Stottler, who has reprised this role many times around the world. She was truly on form and put on a terrific vocal show. The lead tenor was decent, and the staging was splendid. I highly recommend it (and tickets are almost sold out, so don't delay!)

Amarone

Ostensibly, this blog is supposed to be about food and philosophy.

Looking back at my postings of late, I’ve not written about food a lot, so herewith, some overdue food posting!

The nice thing about a great bottle of wine is that you get to talk about it for several weeks before enjoying it. (I don’t pretend to be a wine expert, but I know what I like; I did take the WSET Intermediate program which doesn’t hurt.) I had a bottle of 1997 Amarone that needed a special dinner to go with it, and Thanksgiving two weeks ago was as good an excuse as any to open it up.

My wife and I had invited our good friends J&E, which we had not seen in too long, over for dinner. Since we and they were both having turkey later in the weekend, I looked in my freezer to see what I had available.

Now, it is said that Amarone and Osso Bucco are a marriage made in heaven, so I went for the beef shanks that were in my freezer. There are many great ways of making beef shanks, but I went with a slightly Creole variant to go with basil mashed potatoes and some very simple sautéed vegetables.

Dinner was fabulous. The wine was stellar. 1997 was one of the best years in recent times for Amarone, and this one didn’t disappoint. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to get more of it, seeing as this bottle was purchased two years ago, but if I can find it again, I’ll buy a case.

Musings About the Teacher Strike

The teacher’s strike is now in its second week, and I suspect that it will not be much longer before the public support the teachers currently enjoy will slowly but surely turn against them. The BCTF leadership has unfortunately painted the teachers into a corner and now they can only lose.

The headlines in the Sun have both the labour minister, Mike de Jong, and the head of the BC Business Council saying, respectively, that they will not negotiate while the teachers are engaged in an illegal action, and that the rule of law must prevail or else (in a fine example of hyperbole), anarchy will reign. People forget that social change often comes through technically illegal actions. We don’t have 40 hour work weeks, benefits, and so forth out of the goodness of business owners’ hearts.

The government, no matter their history of legislating away contracts they didn’t like, ignoring “binding” arbitration rulings, and general roughshod approach to negotiations with public sector employees will soon not only still wield the legislative hammer but also public support to use it. As H.L. Mencken said, "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." It’s like watching a train wreck.

The problem is not the illegality of the strike per se, but rather that other public sector contracts are all due for negotiation and renewal this coming spring. If the government accedes to teacher demands now, then it will set some level of precedent for negotiations to come.

Unfortunately, it’s going to go very badly for the teachers. For all they are right about classroom conditions having deteriorated badly in the past decade, they have resorted to playing a high stakes “all-in” game which they can’t win.

The judge who didn’t fine the union but rather innovatively froze the BCTF assets gave the teachers a graceful out. The teachers could have gone back to work in the classroom and then worked on creative solutions to continue their protest. One very simple way would be to evaluate and mark work and communicate that to the students and the parents but refuse to report it to the administration. This then allows students to learn while putting pressure on the PSEA to come to some kind of accommodation. (Incidentally, this worked exceptionally well for the teaching assistants up at SFU a number of years ago).

They could also work to rule, which means no extracurricular activities for anybody. This might annoy parents enough to have them put pressure on the government to improve working conditions.

The dispute isn’t about money. Yes, they would like a raise. So would you. Show me someone who wouldn’t like and take more money for the work they do; the banal whine that it’s about money is a red herring.

The problem is much more complex than the newspaper headlines would have us believe; the challenge I’m putting to people is to become genuinely informed. Learn what the issues are, and then do something helpful to help get it resolved.

Essential Services

The teachers are still out on strike, and today the court imposed no fine on the BCTF for their "illegal" strike action, but did prevent them from paying strike pay to anyone, nor for third parties (i.e. other labour unions) from doing so. A good primer on the history of teacher-government negotiations in BC since the mid-1980's can be found here.

I put illegal in quotes because I find it disingenuous of the government to simply put forth the rhetoric that the teachers are breaking the law and engaging in illegal activity when they pre-emptively passed legislation (Bill 12) making it so only last Friday; indeed, the passage of Bill 12 precipitated the full scale strike - up until that point, the BCTF had not engaged in strike action (and for the hairsplitters out there, yes they did engage in labour action, but were most definitively not on strike and were only planning on rotating one day strikes down the road).

I got into an interesting debate with a friend of mine here at work about it - she contends that teachers are an essential service. I contend they are not.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

I’m a fan of the funny pages in the newspaper. I keep my subscription to the Vancouver Sun as much for the comics page as I do for anything else they print, and there some days I’m so busy that all I get to read are the comics.

There are many strips I really enjoy: For Better or for Worse; Betty; Monty; Bizarro; Speed Bump; Fisher; Mutts; Dilbert; Adam; Ben; Big Nate; 9 Chickweed Lane. All of those are comics that I read daily; some of them are only available to me online because my papers don’t carry them.

But if there’s one strip that I just adored, it was Calvin and Hobbes.

"Calvin and Hobbes" – named after the 16th century theologian who believed in predestination, and the 17th century philosopher who called human life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" – follows the adventures of a boy with an adult's maturity and penchant for finding mischief. – ABC News

A couple of days ago, I received my copy of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes.

If you’re a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, it’s worth every penny. The books are beautifully bound and printed on nice heavy coated paper; this is the kind of binding and paper you might well expect of those tomes of artworks museums publish – they weigh a ton! This edition is definitely meant for the dedicated fan as a permanent addition to their personal library.

If you're daunted by the price, relax. If you bought every single book, you'd spend more and still not have all the comics. If you have all the books, buy this set anyways.

The first volume includes a preface with the history of the strip and commentary by Bill Watterson, the cartoonist. It was educational reading about his battle with the comic syndicate over the licensing of spin off products like t-shirts, coffee mugs, greeting cards, plush toys, etc. Bill said no to all of that, and I admire him for both his reasons for that and more importantly standing by his principles. Any Calvin and Hobbes merchandise you find is bootleg.

My first adventures with Calvin and Hobbes were as a university student. The strip was funny and enjoyable and really appealing to me on many levels. I particularly enjoyed Calvin’s snowmen and his irrepressible enthusiasm for adventure. Now, a decade after Bill Watterson put down his pens and ended the strip, I’m rediscovering the joy of his humour. As a parent, some of the strips are even more poignant and meaningful, and yes, funny; some have made me laugh so hard, I had tears in my eyes and difficulty breathing.

It’s been like welcoming home an old dear friend that you haven’t seen in too long.

Home Canning?

I’ve been following a series of articles in The Tyee called The Hundred Mile Diet. I’ve enjoyed the articles more as they’ve strayed away from the political soapbox and delved more into the food side of things.

Their latest article talks about canning, and they say the following:

Preparing for a Hundred-Mile winter is like adding a part-time job to our full-time lives. Like most Vancouverites, we're stupidly overscheduled most of the time. Adding hours of gleaning and canning to our days has more than once pushed us into the wee hours of the morning. "Sometime in the winter, this will all pay off," says Alisa like a mantra. "We won't have to buy any food; we won't have to cook any food." In the meantime, though, tempers flare as midnight ticks past and there are still 48 ears of corn to husk, blanch and cut into niblets for freezing.

I can so relate to that comment. The first year I tried my hand at pickles, in my small but very functional apartment kitchen, I was up until past midnight making batch after batch of them – five different kinds in all. My wife laughs about it now, but at the time...

The summer my daughter was born, I was still able to make a lot of stuff. Since then though, I’ve started grad school and have a toddler at home. This summer I’ve made nothing. Not a single jar of jam, no pickles, nothing. Stupidly overscheduled is certainly one way to put it.

Ok, I lied. I did manage to make and jar some applesauce on the weekend because we got some free apples from our friend’s tree; but compared to the cases of jam I made in the summer of 2004, and the several dozen jars of marmalade in January, I’ve done nothing.

We are beginning to realize that a Hundred-Mile Diet doesn't only hint at a more ecologically sustainable way to eat and drink. It also points to a deeper shift – an actual change in life patterns.

I wish them luck in their quixotic enterprise. Let’s see if they apply it to everything else they buy, like clothes, furniture, glassware …

As for me, well, maybe I'll get a chance to make some marmelade after Christmas, but I won't hold my breath. At least the cellar still has lots of the bounty of 2004.

Welcome Back

The CBC has apparently reached an agreement with its employees according to several news sources, and will shortly be back on the air – quite possibly this week.

This is happy news to my ears. As much as CKNW has been entertaining in my morning commute, I’ve missed Radio Canada (the French CBC station).

During the lockout, I’ve heard a lot of commentary, especially by the neo-con business commentator Michael Campbell both on NW and in the Vancouver Sun, about the cost of the CBC to the taxpayer. The wisdom goes something like this: we should spend the roughly $1B we currently allocate to the CBC on programs or tax cuts and let the CBC float free to fight it out with commercial television and radio. At best, they would have the CBC become voluntarily funded entities like PBS and NPR in the United States.

To support this position, they cite polls showing that somewhat over 61% of Canadians don’t care that CBC is in lockout and don’t miss them, whereas only 12% have expressed strong support for the CBC.

However, despite possibly valid arguments that CBC programming caters only to the “eggheads” and “intellectuals” among us, I think the CBC is an important and culturally vital entity. It is the only place which has uniquely Canadian content – this includes a lot of stuff that I freely admit I find tedious or boring or just don’t care about. However, nowhere else will you find shows like CBC radio’s “Ideas”, television series like “Canada: A People’s History”, or shows by and for teenage consumers like “Common Cents”. Incidentally, “Canada: A People’s History”, was an enormous success when it first aired – in terms of ratings, it was absolute king of the Canadian airwaves.

PBS in the US, for all that it has a lot of good programming, doesn’t have anything like this – they have more highbrow fare than you’ll find on the mainstream broadcasters, but they also show an enormous amount of foreign entertainment to get the $$ flowing in. In terms of cultural content though, it doesn’t have anything comparable to the CBC.

The CBC isn’t perfect, but there’s nothing else like it on television or radio. It’s worth keeping.

Smoking or non-smoking?

I’m not a smoker, and I despise the scent of cigarette smoke. Indeed, possibly the only thing I loathe more than the stench of cigarettes is the bilious aroma of pot, which if you live in Vancouver, as I do, is unavoidable in certain parts of town.

I want to be crystal clear on the following point: if I were king for a day, I would ban all smoking, period. I don’t care how “medicinal” your pot is; I don’t care how addicted you are to nicotine; I don’t care how nice your pipe smells or how tasty your Cuban cigar is with that glass of port – if I’m king for a day, boom, gone. Never to be seen again.

While I have little sympathy for either smokers or tobacco companies, I nevertheless feel bothered by yesterdays Supreme Court decision that allows provinces to sue tobacco companies for smoking-related healthcare costs.

Let’s be clear – the Supreme Court was only speaking to the constitutionality of the law, not, and let me emphasize this again, not about whether or not said attempts to sue will be successful; but I have a problem with is the galling hypocrisy of the provinces suing tobacco companies for smoking-related healthcare costs.

This might seem to be a paradoxical position, but for at least twenty years, and possibly longer but I’m only going by my own personal experience, cigarette companies have been telling people “hey, our product is poisonous and might kill you!” That it was government regulation that required these warning labels is beside the point – the labels have been there! Let’s also not forget the millions of dollars that the federal government has spent on ads and education initiatives to tell people (and especially teens) that smoking is bad for you. Endless studies have shown the potential and real harm that result from smoking.

So, there is no excuse for any individual to claim ignorance of the risks – smoking is bad for you. Not might be, will be, or could be – IS! It costs our healthcare system a lot of money to treat people’s smoking-related illnesses.

But wait a minute. Governments at both the federal and provincial level have been complicit with the continued sale of tobacco. They collect huge amounts of taxes from cigarettes – billions of dollars annually. Some pundits claim that the amount we spend on healthcare for smoking-related illness is actually pretty close to the amount of taxes we already collect on tobacco.

Furthermore, cigarettes are trivial to get. Compared to beer, wine, and spirits, which are only available at government operated liquor stores or specialty private shops, cigarettes are available almost everywhere – corner stores, gas stations, grocery stores, … The list is almost endless. If the provincial government made cigarettes as difficult to buy as booze, I might have more sympathy with their attempts to sue.

I don’t like the tobacco companies and I wish smoking would go away, but this is hypocrisy writ large.

The Monkeys Are On Trial Again

In the United States, the ugly debate over evolution has erupted again. Parents in Pennsylvania have taken the Dover school district to court over their insertion of intelligent design into the science (specifically biology) curriculum.

The parents claim it's an attempt to reintroduce religion into the schools contrary to the US Supreme Court ruling on separation of church and state.

Proponents of intelligent design (ID) claim that it is simply a “competing scientific theory” of life on earth and therefore is perfectly valid to teach.

Many people make the assumption that evolution means Darwin, but he was only the beginning. Darwin himself admitted that his theory had problems, but we have accumulated a lot of supporting evidence in the century plus since his book On the Origin of the Species was first published.

My intent is not to take up the debate between ID and the theory of evolution. While I will hereby declare up front that I'm firmly in the evolution camp, my intent is to show that ID does not belong in science class. My thanks in advance to the Great Spaghetti Monster for His divine providence and assistance.

The word theory in science has a very specific meaning. It means that someone had a hypothesis, a set of reasoned and logical assumptions that can be tested. A hypothesis can fail testing. A hypothesis becomes a theory when it is tested and the test can be repeated with the same result.

All scientific theories are also open to revision if new data comes along. This has happened countless times in the course of human history. More importantly, it is an open process; the validity of a theory is not shrouded by secrecy, hand waving, a magician’s black box, or smoke and mirrors. If you don’t think a theory is valid, you can go and test it. You are even free to use work that has come before to see how the theory evolved (there’s that nasty loaded word again!)

Therefore, the theory of evolution firmly belongs, right along with the theories of gravity or Newtonian physics say, in science class.

ID on the other hand is a notion immune to empirical study and falsification, a word that in this context means the ability to disprove it. We are simply supposed to accept that some creator waved its noodly appendage and set the world in motion.

That is not science. This is the presentation of an alternative that is de facto immune to empirical study and falsification and trying to get it wedged into the science curriculum.

The theory of evolution does not attempt to explain how the world was created, but rather the mechanism by which change takes place. ID proponents are exhibiting the classic logical fallacy known as the straw man argument, namely "evolution does not adequately explain how the world was created, and we know that the creator waved his noodly appendage and set the world in motion!" That's nice. Evolution isn't about how the world was created.

Science does not claim or attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God or a creator, noodly appendages or no. Therefore, we shouldn’t undermine an entire system of inquiry that serves us well in our human and secular attempts to understand how the world works.

Ideas about how the world came to be belongs firmly in philosophy class where ideas, rhetoric (in the classic rather than pejorative sense), logic, and open debate can be freely exchanged.

Children should be taught about the gaps in evolutionary theory. This might spark intellectual curiosity on their part and perhaps lead some to become scientists who develop satisfactory explanations for those gaps. Maybe some of those gaps cannot be filled with our current level of technology and understanding. There are many things we now know and take for granted that had a mystical belief or explanation in the past.

Either way, students should not be taught it is acceptable science to fill those gaps with mystical supposition.

ID is not a scientific theory, and therefore has no place in a science class.

Frackmusik

The date was the 31^st of December 1999. I was in a melancholy mood, being alone and also officially on call just in case for the great Y2K non-event. I rented a movie and bought a bottle of Asti. The Asti was cold, refreshing, and delicious. The movie was The Harmonists.

I’ve been smitten with the music of the Comedian Harmonists ever since hearing it that fateful night. Larger than life, they were arguably the world’s greatest musical act of their time. Formed in depression era Germany, they took the world by storm into the 1930’s until the Reichskulturkammer banned them from performing; in part it was that half of them were Jewish. In part it was that the prevailing artistic climate was, shall we say, not kindly inclined toward that kind of music – it wasn’t epic or patriotic enough. Ahem.

Nevertheless, the group split in two. The three who left Germany continued their performances in prewar Europe, Australia and the United States usually under the banner of the Comedy Harmonists, while those who remained and performed in Germany became known as the Meistersextett, the name Comedian Harmonists having been forbidden along with the three Jewish members. The former lost popularity with the outbreak of World War II, while the latter were simply eventually banned outright.

Since that night, I’ve managed to collect quite an assortment of their music, which I’ve recently learned is often known as Frackmusik; frack, in English, means “evening dress”, specifically the tux jacket with tails and all that implies.

Through Internet happenstance, I stumbled across Ensemble Six, who have revived the genre and have a large number of Comedian Harmonists songs in their repertoire. Andreas Wellen, one of the Ensemble Six tenors, has a project to collect all 179 78rpm recordings of the Comedian Harmonists and put them out on CD. The first set of CD’s was printed last year; the rest of the project is temporarily on hold.

I made the rather silly assumption that the Comedian Harmonists were the example, singular, of the genre, never mind that The Revelers from the United States were one of their big inspirations. They just happen to have history on their side; after all, there is a lot of material available about them, including many CD’s of their music.

While there were many groups that were their contemporaries, who themselves had good songs, you won’t likely get to hear any of it unless you buy the modern Ensemble Six renditions on their recent CD, Zieh Dich Wieder An, Wir Gehn Ins Bett, (translated: Put Your Clothes Back On, We’re Going to Bed!) It is a collection of songs by 1930’s Frackmusik groups that are all quite amusing and entertaining in their own right. I particularly like Mein Bruder Macht Beim Tonfilm die Geräusche (translated: My Brother Makes the Sounds for the Movies, although the reactions to "My Brother is a Foley Artist" are more fun).

I’m both happy and thrilled that Ensemble Six are around, and I hope they produce more CD’s for my collection. To them I say, “Viel Glück und viel Erfolg!”

Cycle Paths

Vancouver’s a city where you’re expected to have the right gear for whatever sporting activity you participate in. If you’re a cyclist, you’re supposed to have the look – the de rigueur gortex jacket, full coverage lycra cycling pants (or cycling shorts), the right shoes – cleats optional for mountain bikes, and oh so fashionable wraparound (e.g. Oakley) sunglasses. This informs the casual observer that you own a bicycle and might occasionally ride it.

I live on one of the designated cycle paths in Vancouver and after my daughter was born, seeing as going to the gym as often as I used to was not going to be in the cards, I bought a bicycle. Of course, it was six weeks before I actually finally rode it, but I have used it ever since. I admit up front that I don’t want to ride in the rain or the freezing cold or the dark – in part it’s because I don’t want to invest in all the gear. In part it’s because I do have a membership at the YWCA, and they have ample facilities to meet my fitness needs in the “it’s not fun to be outside anymore” season.

I love my bicycle, and in the two years I've owned it, I’ve been using it more and more for mundane things like picking up take out on the Drive (I managed to get from my place to Memphis Blues, pick up the platter I’d ordered, and get back in under 15 minutes – I can’t even drive there and back that fast).

But the thing I enjoy the most is Sunday morning rides around Stanley Park – it almost exactly 30km round trip from my front door, around the sea wall, and back.

On my ride yesterday, I noticed my back tire was kind of mushy just as I got to the tourist info area at Coal Harbour. I looked back and my tire was definitely low, so I stopped, pulled out the tire pump and … pssssshhtt! … goes the tire. Fortunately I had a spare innertube and patch kit (best $6 I've spent). I’ve never replaced one before, but it only took about 15 minutes, and replaced innertube securely in place and inflated, I decided to head home instead of around the sea wall.

Good thing too, because just as I was riding past Provence Marinaside in Yaletown, the back tire went flat again! This time I notice a puncture in the tire, and hear the air hissing out. Merde.

I walked the bike to the Stadium skytrain station and took the skytrain home.

But I still got a good workout!

This Sunday was probably my final ride for the season. I got a late start this year, but after getting the bicycle a spring “tune up” and installing the bike computer I got for Christmas, up to yesterday I managed to get about 335km in (thank you bike computer odometer).

Singing in Italian

Opera was invented in Italy near the end of the 16th century to recreate the classic Greek drama experience, as it was believed that the parts of the Chorus were sung.

Indeed, most of the Greek tragedies that we know and love included a chorus, and some manuscripts include some form of musical notation. Unfortunately, the meaning of these notations are lost to history, and nobody knows how to interpret them. There's no Rosetta Stone for the music.

Since the Italians invented opera, it's not a big surprise that they were all, at least originally, written in Italian. However, as opera naturally evolved and changed over time, the language stopped being exclusively Italian. French composers started using French librettos, British composers started using English librettos, and German composers ... kept using Italian librettos.

Why did German composers like Mozart continue writing their operas in Italian?

The answer, oddly enough, is that Italian is easy to sing. Italian has no dipthongs in the language whatsoever, and the vowel set only uses one primary pronunciation. Note that in making this statement, I am using "proper" Italian as the basis; no doubt there are regional accents and exceptions, as there are to any linguistic rule one cares to name. With German on the other hand, dipthongs abound and there are numerous ways of interpreting the vowels with every sound from long to short to umlauts possible.

Mozart didn't exclusively write Italian operas of course, but the three he is most famous for, namely The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutti all are.

Barbecue Sauce

In the kitchen, I like to know how to make things so I don't have to buy them. For instance, I routinely make my own salad dressing; I haven't bought bottled premade salad dressing in years.

On the other hand, many condiments I just buy. Take mayonnaise for example. I know how to make it, I have made it on occasion, but generally I find it more convenient to put a jar into the shopping cart. I've never made mustard or ketchup, and while they're easy enough, they fall into the same laziness category as mayo.

One condiment that I love is barbecue sauce. There are a few I like out there, but on the whole, commercially made barbecue sauces aren't all that great. For the past few years I've been experimenting with my own recipe. Lest anyone think I've devoted huge amounts of time to this enterprise, my consumption of barbecue sauce is quite small, and a 1 litre batch lasts me quite a long time. That disclaimer aside, I've dabbled with barbecue sauce making about half a dozen times.

I needed some earlier this week, and I decided not only to make a batch, but to be bold and experimental and just wing it.

Well, hot damn, if I didn't make the best barbecue sauce I've ever made. I wrote the recipe down in my kitchen journal and it's now my official canonical barbecue sauce. Sweet yet spicy with just the right amount tang and smoke (and for the record, I didn't use any liquid smoke), and best of all, the right consistency. Previous sauces were on the runny side. This stuff is perfect.

No, I'm not going to post the recipe. :-)

Zut Alors!

Well, my intended travel plans for a study-travel in Scotland towards my MA have been alas been cancelled.

There are many reasons... but the main one is money.

The course, three weeks in Scotland, is $3,800 per person. This was only a little bit more than I expected (I was expecting in the realm of $3,200-3,400 for the whole thing, but the $3,800 figure would have included a rental car at my family's disposal so my wife and daughter could do something off-tour).

The $3,800 includes the following: all travel within Scotland, all accomodations, all breakfasts and dinners, most lunches (but the places we would have stayed in had kitchenette facilities), and admissions to all the various sites on the itinerary. Not bad value for the money! I must hasten to add that SFU travel study is run on a cost-recovery basis - that is, there's no "profit" margin built into that price. If I went out to replicate the itinerary day for day, I would probably even end up paying more since I wouldn't be getting any group rates.

But outside the base price, the costs started to escalate. Airfare, what's currently available for the dates in question, was going to add about $3,400 to the mix. I know that you can get $600-700 flights to Glasgow from Vancouver right now at flightcentre.ca, but that's for travel in the very near future. Come May, those fares might still hold, but I'm not willing to take the risk.

Then there's the unfortunate surprise that in order to get course credit for it, I would have to pay the tuition equivalent to one course, which, factoring in textbooks, adds another $1,000. I should have expected the need to pay tuition above and beyond, but still...

A $12,000 commitment before even buying one dram of whisky in a Scottish pub.

$12,000 is "trip of a lifetime" money.

I'm sure Scotland is a beautiful country (and my wife assures me it is), but it's not a trip of a lifetime destination.

So no travel study this year. As I won't be done my MA until 2008, there's always the summer of 2007's travel study trip, wherever it might be. Last year's trip was four weeks in Italy and Switzerland; this year is the Scottish trip; next year's is yet to be announced, but will undoubtedly be somewhere in Europe again.

Teacher Teacher, What Can You Teach Me?

There has been a lot in the news lately about the possibility of a teacher strike here in BC.

Indeed, from the newpaper headline hyperbole level and the shrieking harpies on radio call in shows, you'd think they were already on strike when they haven't even had the vote yet; a strike vote is being held by the BC Teachers Federation BCTF starting today, we should know the results by the end of the week.

The only thing missing is parents on the human interest segment of the evening news wailing "Think of the children! Oh, won't somebody please think of the children!"

I've been following this story a little more closely than I might have in the past since my daughter would be starting school around the time the next contract would theoretically be due to expire, assuming they have a three year deal in place like most public contracts tend to be.

Some facts first. For over a decade now, there has not been a negotiated settlement between the BCTF and the Public School Employers Association (PSEA). Every single contract has been legislated by the provincial government. Yesterday, the government appointed a "fact finder" to hopefully find some middle ground, as the PSEA has said they and the BCTF are at an irreconcilable impasse.

The PSEA is offering 0%, 0%, and, no drum roll required, 0%. A friend and classmate in my grad program is a teacher in Burnaby and she said that she has not had a raise in 5 years. I'm not going to dig into the details to see if there were some benefits improvement in that time, but I think that this fits my recollection of the past few teacher deals. The PSEA claims the BCTF is demanding over 35% in wages and benefits increases.

The BCTF for its part says that the figure is both ridiculous and contrived, seeing as they haven't even tabled their demands. They did say yesterday that they are looking to get a cost of living increase and also some level of parity with Alberta and Saskatchewan, both of whom pay a fair bit more than BC does.

I know it's popular to bash the public sector as both lazy and greedy, but a 0-0-0 offer sucks. I got a 2% raise last year, and about the same the year before that, and will probably get something along the same lines next year. If I can get a 2% raise, then why can't they? Oh, right, I forgot, these are lazy greedy public trough feeders. Never mind that it would probably mean fewer opportunities for the government to give tax cuts to the rich.

Those who are facing the possibility of a strike from the student side of the equation are trotting out the same tired old arguments: teachers shouldn't be allowed to strike because they're an essential service (like nurses I guess - someone might die!); the burden on families who suddenly have to take care of the kids because there's no school (and what did you do this summer?); and the best one I've heard, "there are no other options, the school system is a monopoly!"

The last one is no joke, I heard that one this morning on my way in to work from none other than the parents association (what was once called the PTA, but I don't recall offhand what the acronym is these days). They should know better - with the number of home-schooled children on a steady rise and the availability of private schools (albeit for those who can afford it), it's a bald faced lie; it gets good headlines though.

I also love the statements you often hear that teachers don't work that many hours and have all those vacation days in the summer. I'm not a teacher myself, but I know several people who are or have been, and they work harder and put in more hours than I do. Another argument that's been popular, especially on the facile yes-no radio call in shows is that if the teachers don't like it, they should quit and get another job.

You know what? The best, brightest, most creative, and most talented teachers have been doing just that. They're leaving because they've had enough and they're smart and talented enough to get something else. Some might even have stayed in teaching in a private school, but most will have left the profession entirely.

Great! The best and brightest are leaving because they can, leaving the average ones, the truly dedicated ones, the fresh from university ones, and the ones too close to retirement to quit. Need we mention the thankfully small minority who might love to leave but can't because they aren't one of the best and brightest?

This isn't the system I want for my daughter, or for the people who will be teaching her. We pay a lot of lip service to how important teachers are, and how important our kids are for the future. I guess lip service will have to do since there doesn't appear to be any cash coming.

Arr Me Mateys!

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Everybody should do their part and Y'arr!

If you need help getting into the mood, head over to fidius.org and get your Pirate name.

I'm Dirty Roger Kidd. Y'arr!!! My daughter's Iron Ethel Flint, and my wife's Mad Dog Flint. Flint's they may be, but they're part of the Kidd clan now, y'arrrrr!!!

Advanced Education Redux

While I wrote here yesterday about the UCFV press release, one thing I did not mention is that I wrote to the UCFV communications office. In my email to them, I said essentially what I wrote here yesterday – that they could have phrased things a little better.

Jane Jacobs in her book Dark Age Ahead writes about what I’ll dub credential creep; what used to be elite education (a university degree) has increasingly become mass education. With the societal push for everyone to become a certified whatever, the piece of paper has almost become more relevant than the skill it’s supposed to certify.

It’s only reasonable that universities (and university colleges, and community colleges, and anyone who can hang out a sign saying “get a certificate in …”) are trying to get a piece of the action.

I won’t reproduce the entire UCFV response here, but I will highlight a few passages.

“The evolution of universities from university-colleges is not unprecedented. UBC was once a university-college under the auspices of McGill University; UVic was once a university-college under the auspices of UBC. …. We believe that this natural development will increase the credibility of our degrees, including those that have gone before.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what how I feel they should have said it in the first place.

One other excerpt:

“Over the years we have had to verify the value of our degrees to various places that did not know what a university college is. For example, President Bassford has written to graduate schools explaining that we are full members of AUCC, that we are a public BC institution and that our programs are all vetted and approved by the province's ministry of advanced education. There simply is a tendency for many people to rate a credential more highly if it has the "university" name attached to it. This is truly unfortunate, because the situation is one of perception rather than reality.”

I wish them success in their campaign. Hopefully they'll come up with a suitable name - anything except Fraser University!

Advanced Education

My Alma Mater, the University College of the Fraser Valley (UCFV) had a press release today stating they wish to ascend to full university status, much like the former University College of the Cariboo is now Thompson River University. The full text of the press release is here.

There is one part of the press release that irked me, namely the statement from Skip Bassford, president of UCFV, that “changing the name would increase the credibility of degrees earned by our graduates, [emphasis mine] enhance our reputation nationally and internationally, and simply make it easier for people to understand what we do.”

Now hang on a minute. What exactly is being said here? Is the implication that somehow I wasted my tuition money and school time by not going to a “real” university? Good thing I’m getting a masters degree at Simon Fraser University! Who knows what would have happened to my education if I’d attended a school that wasn’t “credible”.

Ok, I am engaging in a bit of hyperbole here, but the point remains. I went to UCFV for many reasons, not the least of which being that they were a degree granting institution covered under the University Act. The importance in attending a recognized institution is to ensure yourself and others that you didn’t get involved with some fly-by-night organization that may not give you a worthwhile education.

A Ministry of Education website says, “Students in British Columbia have many institutions and programs to choose from. Whether you decide on a public institution or a private institution, it is your responsibility as a student to ensure the program and institution you choose is a good fit with your educational priorities and expectations.” [emphasis mine]

I agree wholeheartedly with this. Apart from getting the education you want in the first place, I don’t see why college vs. university-college vs. university should be a make or break issue.

A former professor of mine at UCFV also puts this spin on it, “While I do think that there is modest attention paid to the place in which one studies, in my opinion, the real value in becoming a degreed person in our society has more to do with the qualities of the person one becomes through the process, than does the name of the institution that one attended, or, for that matter, with whom one studies. It is not that these latter things are of no consequence. But attending a 'recognized' institution or program is often a 'sufficient' condition for one's future, but a more 'necessary' condition is the judgment about who that person became through the process. Some of you who have been with me in class may recognize my distinction between ‘getting a degree’ and ‘becoming degreed’.” [emphasis mine]

Of course, I’m probably getting irked for nothing. UCFV is trying to become a full-fledged university with all its attendant trappings. The comment that somehow this will make their degree more “credible” is just marketing spin, plain and simple. Still, they could have at least tried to spin it without demeaning the alumni and the institution!

UCFV is a great place, really. I enjoyed my time there even if the commute from Vancouver was sometimes tedious, and the quality of instruction was fabulous. I wish them every success in continuing to serve the needs of BC students.

Lamb

By good fortune, my winemaking friend knows people up the valley (the Fraser Valley) that raise sheep, pigs, and chickens. The critters are well cared for and free range, and the quality of the meat is excellent. At the start of the "growing season" I put in order for a whole lamb, a side of pork, and some chickens (turns out I'll be getting four).

I was told today my lamb is at the butcher's, and that I'd be getting a call soon for cutting instructions.

The cutting's being done by Davis Meats on Mt. Lehman Road in Abbotsford and they are splendid. They know their meats, they know their cuts, and if you want the "offal", namely the liver and bones and all that, they're more than happy to package it all up for you (unlike many places).

$3.49 for whole lamb, top quality, cut the way I like. YUM!

I can hardly wait for my side of pork, coming next month!

The Sweet Smell of ... Smoke?

I can’t abide cigarette smoke (although pot is far far worse on my scale of unpleasant scents), yet I generally like the smell of pipe smoke and a very small selection of cigars. In general, I find smoky hazy places uncomfortable and unpleasant.

I mention this in passing because Burns Bog is on fire and a pall of smoke haze and a gentle rain of ash is settling over the lower mainland. It has irritated the asthma of several people I know, and has been quite irritating to those colleagues of mine who live in the vicinity of the bog.

Still, when I went out at lunch yesterday I couldn’t help thinking the aroma, while cloying, was not unpleasant. Indeed, there was certain sweetness in it, and I found myself smacking my lips a little and thinking food thoughts.

It wasn’t until last night that it struck me – of course! Single malt! The sweet peaty aroma reminded me of scotch.

Figures. Most people find the smoke from the fire annoying, and here I am finding something pleasant about it.

Into the culinary realm, I like many smoked foods, from pretty much everything available at the JN&Z Deli, to my dad’s smoked salmon, locally available apple wood smoked cheddar, and I’ve even made tea smoked chicken. On my list of things to build, buy, or find is a smoker I can use in my back yard.

Maybe I can sneak some peat and test it out on a batch of sausages.

Singing All Day

Singing all day, singing 'bout nothing,
Singing all day, singing 'bout nothing,
Singing all day, singing 'bout nothing,
Oh, my, my, my, oh, my, my, my.

Jethro Tull, “Singing All Day”,
from the album Living in the Past

Last night was the first class of my Opera in Context course, and it was a lot of fun. The professor, Rodney, is absolutely passionate about music and it’s a joy and a pleasure to listen to him. It’s going to be a great semester.

One thing we talked about, tangential to opera per se, but relevant even so was – when and why do we sing? After all, in opera, there is a lot of singing (and dialogue, and melodrama, and recitative)

If you think about it, we seldom sing at all anymore. We sing to children (although Rodney mentioned on his last trip to Toronto, he saw advertisements for a course for new mothers to learn how to sing to their children). We sing “Happy Birthday”. We might sometimes sing at a funeral or a wake or similar situation.

But in our quotidian lives, we hardly ever sing.

For myself, I like singing, even though I have no training and possibly sing off key – still, I don’t see why I shouldn’t indulge in such a simple pleasure. Maybe more of us should!

"New Orleans is sinking man and I don't wanna swim"

With a nod of appreciation to the Tragically Hip for the title of this post.

One of the nice things about my summer vacation was that I missed most of the news, had no internet access until I got home, and only was peripherally aware of what was going on in the world.

The hurricane that has simply become known as the disaster named Katrina did a lot of damage, including to the levies that protected New Orleans.

New Orleans was once a beautiful city. It's too bad that I didn't have the opportunity to visit before its essential destruction.

But here a comment; to the mayor of New Orleans, the governor of Louisiana, and the US feds, who have all said "we will rebuild!", don't.

Don't dig out the mud and toxic sludge that was once a city. There are times to wipe the slate clean and start again, and this is one of them. The New Orleans of old is gone. The French Quarter is destroyed, rebuild it above sea level.

It won't cost any more to build anew than to rebuild, and it will be better. Let the sea wash away what's left and build on higher ground.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Ah, summer vacation. It’s a time when you get to flee the city and the domestica that commands your time even when you're not actually working. In theory, you get to decompress and enjoy yourself.

We were all more than ready for a break. It had been far too long since we'd fled the confines of the city and home and we started our trip with several days in Logan Lake.

Logan Lake is a small town about half an hour from Kamloops. It was originally built to house the workers at the Ashcroft mine, but nowadays only 10% of the residents work at the mine. Many people are starting to flee the rising real estate prices in Kamloops and looking to Logan Lake a bedroom community. What might have been a $150K home as little ago as March would now sell in the $200K range, although that's still cheap by Vancovuer standards.

We went to visit my friend D, who retired there from Victoria and is really enjoying the rural life. It's close enough to the "big city" (Kamloops being the 3rd largest city in BC after Vancouver and Victoria) for all the amenities one might need, and far enough away that two or three cars is a lot of traffic. It's also higher up in the hills so even though it can get almost as hot as Kamloops during the day, it cools off quite nicely at night. Even so, it seldom snows in winter and doesn't get much below -10C.

It's really a nice small town, and I hope that by the time I want to retire and flee the large city for something a little quieter, that I end up in a place like that.

There are several provincial parks in the area, including many lakes, and the amount of wildlife to be seen is quite lovely. I had some fun trying out "quadding" for the first time ever - riding one of those 4WD ATV's. They have a lot of torque and can take you over some amazing terrain, and they don't behave one bit like motorcycles...

On the subject of provincial parks, there are several of them between Vancouver and Kamloops off the Coquihalla highway, but there are no signs! We had thought it would be nice to stop for lunch in one of them along the way to visit Logan Lake. Perhaps some of the tolls could be rolled into some signage? Hello!

My good friend is working on a travel photography book, and I think he's eminently qualified – he’s been shooting between 125-150 rolls of film a year for about 40 years now, and if anyone has an opinion about photos and their relative quality, it'll be him.

He's broken down and purchased a digital camera, a Canon D20, which he considers, compared to his Leica film cameras, a piece of junk. However, he knows that just like VHS won over Beta, digital photography has won over film. Indeed, he is finding it difficult to get film processed these days; it’s very quickly becoming a niche market. Many of the premium films have vanished, B&W film is becoming hard to find; in short, an era is passing (if not already gone).

My good friend C, who was best man at my wedding, is also a shutterbug. He says that every time he spends a few days with me, he has an overwhelming urge to cook for about two weeks afterwards. I take it as a great compliment. Similarly, D has the same effect on me with respect to photography. I sometimes regret not buying that used Leica he had for sale.

Having recovered from city life in the country, we spent a pleasant half-day traveling to Summerland on Lake Okanagan. My daughter had a delightful time at the beach, and we bought some “eat now!” plums and pears, more than we could possibly eat, for only $1 per bag.

We only stayed one night in Summerland and then headed south to Oliver, with a shopping stop in Penticton on the way. Penticton is home to the best used bookstore in BC in my opinion. I haven’t encountered any other shops with as much selection as they do. I bought a biography of Orwell, the complete works of Oscar Wilde, and a book called The Turk about a mechanical chess playing machine from the early 1800’s.

Oliver is a beautiful small town; we’ve stayed there several times on getaways. It bills itself as the wine capital of Canada, and given the plethora of vineyards in the area, it would be hard to argue with them.

The treat of the entire trip was staying at the guesthouse at the Tinhorn Creek Winery. We had a gift certificate for a two night stay there – a good friend gave it to us because she doesn’t drink wine, but I think had she known she might not have cared. The house was beautiful! Expansive views of the valley, nestled right among the vines (Syrah was closest to the house), a pool, and more square feet than our place in Vancouver, even though it was a one bedroom. Just to make things complete, our names were on the sign as you entered the winery tasting room, “Tinhorn welcomes its special guests…” If that weren’t enough, there were two bottle of wine for us in the house – their pinot noir, which is good, and a chardonnay.

Now, I’m not a huge chardonnay fan; indeed, as a rule I avoid it. Tinhorn’s was very drinkable though and I daresay I liked it! One of the few chardonnays I like.

Tinhorn does make my favourite BC Gewürztraminer, and their reds are also very nice. I particularly liked the Oldfield Collection Merlot and bought some for the cellar. I signed up for their “Crush Club”, which means I get a 15% discount on all their wines (and any merchandise with their logo) and twice a year I’ll be getting six bottle of wine delivered to my house – whites in spring, reds in fall.

Dinner, with a gorgeous view, was accompanied by the pinot. The next morning, after a leisurely breakfast (with a gorgeous view!), we spent the day in Osoyoos at the beach. It was a delight to let my little gal play in the sand, and the water, and then the sand again, and then the water. She’s a real delight.

That evening, we went for a walk among the vines along the trail that runs through the winery and encountered two of the dogs who live there. Zoe, a friendly border collie, accompanied us up and down the hill and at one point wandered on ahead, went into the vines and started barking. She then scampered back to us and stood beside us as a black face popped out among the rows of syrah – a bear! A cute fuzzy, um, wild, black bear. It was pretty small and given there was a notice that a bear and her cub had been spotted along the trail, it was a good bet this was the cub.

The bear didn’t like our singing so went off into the vines and Zoe walked us back to the house (good dog!). It was splendid.

We also saw other wildlife including a brown and green praying mantis, a pileated woodpecker, quails by the dozen, and many other birds.

The second morning we had pancakes and bacon for breakfast on the deck with a gorgeous view.

Did I mention the view? Spectacular.

We found out during our sojourn that the guesthouse is not available for rent. The absentee owners use it when they’re in town, and they also make it available to folks in the wine trade (by invitation only). Sometimes, they give a gift certificate for a stay to a charity auction – that’s what we had. Maybe they’ll invite us back.

The trip back was uneventful. We stopped at the always interesting Grist Mill museum in Keremeos and had a chance to enjoy a nice picnic lunch and see the latest discoveries on the site. The grist mill was on the Klondike gold rush route and is a mill constructed with belt and pulley systems instead of gears. It was all for the sake of expediency! It's truly a worth a visit if you're in the area. My one disappointment is that they no longer sell the flour they mill there - instead they have flour from ... Chilliwack!

We spent the weekend at my parents place and let them get their fill of playing with their granddaughter. She pulled out all the stops and was her delightful charming best.

We arrived back in Vancouver on Sunday, late in the afternoon, and unpacked an astounding amount of stuff from the car. Who knew you could pack so much into a small car?

Now if only I had more vacation time. Another 48 weeks would suit me fine!

Wine Country

Tomorrow I head off on a much needed and well-deserved (if I do say so myself) vacation that includes a bit of time in the Okanagan, which is beautiful wine country as nice as I've seen anywhere. I've been to vineyards in Europe (Germany and France), Australia (both Victoria and South Australia), and Washington State; the Okanagan has places that are every bit as nice as those locales. To be sure, they are different experiences, but they all have a certain conviviality and joie de vivre about them.

Part of the pleasure of going to wine country is sampling. One blog I particularly enjoy reading talked about wine tastings and asked "what wine tasting type are you?" I laughed when I read it since I've seen all those types at various wine and food events I've been to; it was the laugh of recognition. I myself like to live in mostly in the Happy Drinker category, but I also have enough interest about wines and personal edification that I am also frequently to be found in the Student group.

I don't know how many wineries we might get to with a 16 month old in tow, but I will at least be able to report back on Tinhorn Creek as we'll be spending a few nights in their guest facilities.

BC has come a long way with their wines and indeed, there are some truly spectacular wines to be had.

Soup!

As I mentioned yesterday, I made veal stock. I ended up with 17 liters of it when all was said and done.

Stock is a wonderful thing. It’s amazingly versatile. You can cook rice or vegetables in it and they will taste richer without having added any fat or many calories. It’s a great base for sauces of all kinds, and I love what Bourdain calls dinosaur sauces (the old fashioned kind with a roux base).

Best of all though, I now have plenty of stock to keep me going this fall and winter with soup; nothing like a nice bowl of hot soup on a cold wet rainy slimy day in late autumn.

I won’t even resist the pun – my freezer’s well stocked!

Memphis Blues

If you like barbecue, as in slow cooked southern style ribs and all the fixings, then run, don’t walk, to Memphis Blues. They have two locations, one on Broadway near Granville (east of Granville), and one on Commercial Drive north of 1^st. I live closer to the latter and although the former is the original restaurant, I think the latter does it better. Don’t know why that should be, but there you go.

Memphis Blues is not a place to be a vegetarian. Everything has meat in it. The collard greens (the one thing I’ve tried there I haven’t liked) have meat in them. The beans have meat. The coleslaw and potato salad don’t have meat, but I wouldn’t risk feeding it to a vegetarian even so. It’s a carnivore’s paradise!

If you’re on your own, I highly recommend the classic pulled pork sandwich with all the trimmings. If you’re feeding a small group (4 say), get the Memphis platter, which has a sampling of everything – sausage, ribs, short ribs, roast chicken, pulled pork, beef brisket, beans, corn bread, seasoned fries, coleslaw, potato salad, and barbecue sauce. Larger groups, say 6-8 will get by with the Elvis platter, which is the Memphis platter with double the meat.

The food there is delicious! Serve with lots of beer and a stack of napkins.

M^HTaking Stock

Today is a warm day. Notwithstanding the heat, I'm making veal stock today using the Cajun cooker I bought for the deep fried turkey. So as the stock simmers happily outside, I'm inside enjoying a quiet afternoon.

It's funny, but having taken the trouble to attend my 20th high school reunion, I've been thinking about what the heck I've managed to accomplish since those days of potential, when theoretically all options were open to me...

I started an engineering degree, which turned into a comp sci degree, which turned into giving up on the university experience altogether, although that in itself took several years and many thousands of dollars. No surprise really; although I had graduated high school with honours, looking at my transcript from those days, all my A's were in literature, French, German, English, ... and all my B's were in computer science, math, physics, chemistry... Let's just say that my undergrad grades from those days were atrocious.

I had a series of part and full time jobs doing things that were interesting and fun; at one point I had one full time night job and two extensive part time jobs at the same time. There was one week where I went literally from one to the next with no break in between followed by a scant opportunity to sleep, and culminated with a sleep of the dead.

I muddled along happily enough.

But then I had enough of just muddling along and decided to go back to school. I'd picked the program I wanted to do at UCFV in Abbotsford, was making plans on how I was going to pitch it to my parents whose basement I would have had to live in for the duration, even though it would have meant a commute from their place in Chilliwack.

That was right around the time opportunity knocked and I damn ripped the door off its hinges to let it in; I was hired by a high tech company in Vancouver in the winter of 1998, a balmy west coast February, and they required me to have a BA but as part of the benefits package, paid for it.

Life's been pretty rosy ever since. Finished the BA with honours in 2002. Got married a month after graduation to TOIL (the one I love :-). Was laid off by the company that brought me to Vancouver in September and was still an official employee there the day my current employer hired me. Bought a home in Vancouver four or five months after that. Delighted father of a beautiful daughter a touch over a year after that. Started graduate school when she was four months old. I'm looking forward to her being one of the cute little kids that hands their parents flowers when they walk off the podium after getting their degree.

So here I am, making a lovely veal stock, living a modest lifestyle in the beautiful city of Vancouver, working for a high tech company with an education degree and working on a liberal arts masters.

La vie est belle.

A Poetic Salad

This little gem popped into my mailbox today…

Recipe for a Salad
Sydney Smith

To make this condiment your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boil'd eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen seive,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half-suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault
To add a double quantity of salt;
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procur'd from town;
And lastly o'er the flavour'd compound toss
A magic soupcon of anchovy sauce.
Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat!
Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
`Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.

Pondok Indonesia

To celebrate the rain finally coming to give a break to the seemingly and I might add unusually endless series of hot days, we ordered out for dinner. Around the corner from us is a place called Pondok; we've been meaning to try then out ever since we moved into the neighborhood.

I can say I'm sorry I waited so long! While three dishes (satay chicken, a spicy beef stew, and mixed vegetables, plus two orders of rice) came to almost $40, it was an ample quantity for the two of us and it was all delicious.

The satay particularly impressed me - this was no simple peanut butter based peanut sauce but rather a rich complex sauce that kept my palate guessing as to the next flavour that would burst onto my tongue.

The beef stew (Rendang Sapi) was hot, but not the burning heat of chilis like you might get from Szechuan cuisine; while it packed the same punch, the other herbs and seasonings in the dish mitigated the chili oil and left a pleasant taste and feeling behind.

Even the mixed vegetables were exceptionally flavourful and cooked just so.

Highly recommended and a new favourite local locale!

"You haven't changed a bit!"

So my 20th high school reunion was last Friday, and I had a really good time. I took the 3pm ferry to Victoria, and a good thing I'd made a reservation as there was a one sailing wait already. I went stright to my friend J's house (his wedding was in 1991, so my memory's not that bad) and had fun chatting with his wife L and their two very sweet kids.

As we were heading out, J's daughter asked "why do you have to go out again?"
J: We're going to a reunion.
E: What's a reunion?
J: Your mother can tell you all about it, but it's a meeting for people who knew each other once upon a time.

The event was at Swans, which is one of the brewpubs in Victoria.

I had a great time. I reconnected with a few people who were in the "I wonder what happened to..." camp, and had my general curiosity satisfied about how everyone turned out. Of the roughly 50 people who turned up, most were married, some were divorced, many had kids but not all. Several people were, like me, doing a masters degree of one kind or another. In short, results you might expect from a random group of people if you were to do a study.

Kierkegaard said "Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward."

What surprised me the most was how far some people had come to attend. From Vancouver, it's a plausible trip, but people had come from various cities in Alberta and as far away as Saskatchewan.

Of course, despite being 20 years older, everyone kept saying, as they recognized yet another face "You haven't changed a bit!"

That's why we go to reunions. Because for just a brief slice of time, we get to revisit the fork in the road...

To Boldly Go...

Tonight I’m heading to Victoria for my 20^th high school reunion.

If you asked me why, I would be hard pressed to give you an answer save perhaps “I missed the 10 year reunion”, which happened while I was still living in Victoria.

So why am I going?

There’s a series of documentary films, the first of which is called “7 Up!” In 1964, the filmmaker took a group of children, all age 7, and has since revisited them every seven years to see where they are. I watched “35 Up” and it compelling viewing, even though I didn’t know any of the people being documented.“ 42 Up” is the latest and possibly final installment.

So, if nothing else, I’m curious as to how other people turned out. High school at the time I experienced it was a pressure cooker. Every situation was the Most Important Life Event Thing Ever™! Everything that happened was writ large; of course, the perspective of time makes one realize that high school is merely a phase in life, and a rather insignificant one at that.

Of the 203 grads of 1985, there’s only one with whom I have anything one might call regular contact; I was best man at his wedding oh so many years ago (1990? 91? See, I can’t even remember), and we exchange Christmas emails and birth announcements. That’s roughly the extent of it. My good friend S who’s back in town at Emily Carr is a friend from high school days, but he graduated the year before me.

The woman who was our student council president in 1985 is organizing this 20^th reunion; as I browsed through my yearbook last night before bed, reading the little blurbs beside photos of the grads of 2005, I noticed next to her entry that she hoped to become the first female prime minister of Canada. I said I wanted to “design a popular computer” and “make gobs of money”.

And yet, here I go, to meet people who are essentially strangers to see how their lives turned out. I wasn't one of the popular kids in school; indeed, I was one of the nerdy geeks in the enriched program.

Oh well; it’s being held at Swans, a fabulous brewpub I frequented while I was still living in Victoria. If nothing else, the beer will be good!

Cheese Please!

“How can anyone be expected to govern a country with 325 cheeses?”

– General Charles De Gaulle

I love cheese. Among the many things my ancient French genetics have contributed, it’s my liking of all kinds of cheese, everything from hard cheeses like Gruyere and Gouda, to runny Camembert and soft Brie and the deliciously creamy Brillat-Savarin, to the really smelly cheeses like Roquefort and Livarot and Munster.

A couple summer ago, I made an off hand remark that my wife may never let me forget; I said BC cheeses “weren’t there yet”.

She took this to mean I didn’t care for the cheese she had asked me to purchase, but that was not it at all. At the time, the artisan cheese industry in BC was still in its youth; in start up mode you could say. They were producing all manner of things, experimenting and developing flavours for consumption by an eager public. While it was all a lot of fun to try these early efforts, compared to what you could get in Quebec (not that you can buy Quebec cheese here by and large, and a pity it is too) it was nothing special; and in terms of bang for the buck, it was hard for a BC soft cheese to compare to a soft cheese like Le Coutances from France when the latter not only tasted better but also cost less than the former!

Today, two summers later, I am happily eating those words – BC cheese has arrived. Every Saturday at the Farmer’s Market I’m buying curd (as good as anything I ever had in my youth in la belle province) from Little Qualicum Cheeseworks, who also make a very nice Brie and what they call Qualicum Spice, which is a Gouda style cheese infused with garlic, onion, and bell pepper. I love the Tiger Blue from Poplar Grove in the Okanagan. I like the sheep and goat cheeses that are available now too.

Prices for the local cheeses are also now very competitive with the imported stuff, the effect of both maturation of the industry and the strength of the Canadian dollar relative to the Euro.

BC truly is a foodie's paradise.

The Trout Lake Farmer’s Market on Saturdays usually has two cheese makers on site, but most of these cheeses are available from either La Grotta del Formaggio on Commercial Drive or at Les Amis du Fromage on 2^nd between Fir & Burrard.

A Liberal Education

One of the joys of a liberal education, and the term is being used here in the classic context of an interdisciplinary broad based schooling, is that you get to explore ideas, topics, and places that are not part of ones usual quotidian experience.

In the GLS program at SFU, they usually have a travel-study course during the summer. This year, a group went to Italy and Switzerland following the trail of the poet Shelley (among other things).

Next May, a group is going to Scotland – Islay, Isle of Skye, and Edinburgh (and points in between). My wife is keen on the idea, the prof escorting the trip has said my family is welcome to come along, my boss has said I can take the time off, and I get credit toward my degree. Three weeks sampling scotch, talking about literature, visiting sites with a professor who's contributing erudite lectures, I don’t think a liberal education gets better than that!

The Hundred Mile Diet Part Three

The Tyee has an ongoing series called the Hundred Mile Diet; they recently posted the third installment.

The third installment was one I quite enjoyed and could feel kinship with – YES! Finally talking about what’s possible and available locally instead of ranting about the evils of fossil fuels and globalization (both of which are facts of life, like gravity).

Peach season is finally upon us, the tail end of cherry and blueberry season is overlapping this nicely, and there is a bounty of fresh local produce available.

It’s a great time of year!

And once the local fruits and vegetables fade into fall and winter, we’ll start buying bananas and oranges again. Because they’ll be in season, even if they’re not local.

As I Please II...

After nearly a month of houseguests, first my friend S who stayed with us for two and a half weeks followed quickly by my in-laws for the past nine days, we finally have the house back to ourselves. I think it’ll take the next two weeks to recover enough to be fit to go on vacation at the end of the month. Sociable as I am, I am at heart an introvert and need some away-from-everyone time to recharge…

Why I Hate Buffets

Last Wednesday, there was a BBQ held at MOA for the ChemEd 2005 conference. Since my father in law and my wife were both presenting, and my father in law’s friend had a booth at the show, yours truly was a “registered participant” at the event so we all went.

ChemEd is an event for Chemistry teachers. From the outside looking in, I can’t say I was impressed with the event – the session my wife participated ostensibly for two hours when in fact it ended up only being booked for one hour and she had to do all the running around to change rooms an so forth when it wasn’t even her responsibility to do so. However, nobody else seemed interested in taking up the torch… Sigh.

Anyways, the BBQ…

The BBQ was of the usual variety – many buffet tables set up with food and a server at the end doling out the freshly grilled salmon.

The food was quite good, but it was definitely cattle call. There was a rush for seating and we didn’t sit with anyone we knew (not that we knew anyone anyways), there was a line for the food, there was negotiating two plates of food among the gaggle to get back to where my wife and daughter were. URGH!!!

I far prefer table service. I like to relax at my meals.

Culinary Capers

Saturday was a great day from a culinary perspective. My folks came for lunch to see their granddaughter (and visit with us and my in-laws) so I made pizza on the grill.

Pizza on the grill is really quite easy. You need pizza dough (of course), and whatever toppings you care to put on the pizza. We had pepperoni, green peppers, mushrooms, grated mozzarella, pizza sauce, thinly sliced onion, slivers of smoked side bacon from the JN&Z deli and sour cream with nutmeg. The latter three ingredients are for a favourite of mine, the classic Alasace tarte flambée.

To make pizza on the grill you need to make small pizza crusts about half a centimeter thick. Get your grill nice and hot, brush the crust with olive oil, and put it on. It will puff up, so be prepared to deflate it by poking it with your grill tongs. After a few minutes, brush the top with olive oil, flip it over, work quickly to put on your toppings (and only use a thin layer of them, otherwise they won’t cook) and then close the lid. After a few minutes, you have lovely thin crust pizza.

It’s easy, delicious, and will impress your guests. It’s also rustic enough to make a nice communal meal outdoors.

Deep Fried Turkey

Saturday night, I finally made use of the Cajun Cooker I’d bought at Magnet Hardware (it’s the Home Hardware on Commercial Drive) and deep-fried a turkey.

Let me begin with the end result – it was DELICIOUS!!! I’ve never had turkey that moist and juicy before. It was not at all greasy.

Now for the sequence of events… I bought everything I needed, oil, bird, potatoes for fries, and prepped it all. I started heating the oil a little after 4pm, anticipating a 5:30 or so frying… Well, it didn’t work out that way.

I think I need a more powerful burner – the one that came with the kit is a 70K BTU burner, and full out, the oil was rising about 2F every minute. One error was blanching the fries (using the approved Anthony Bourdain Les Halles method) since that caused some water to get into the oil and it took a lot of heat energy to evaporate it off.

It then took a while for the oil to get hot. Once it got to about 330F, the room temperature turkey was lowered into the oil. The oil bubbled happily around the turkey, but the temperature dropped and dropped and dropped some more until it got to 225F and stayed there.

The end result of all this was that the turkey took the 3-3.5 minutes per pound to cook, as advertised; it browned beautifully; it was absolutely delicious! The skin was only crispy in some places, but also fabulous.

There were nine of us feasting that night. Much Riesling was drunk, a beet and potato salad was devoured, a green salad likewise, and the fries, well, they’re an experiment for another day (and in small batches on the stovetop methinks!)

More importantly, it was a lot of FUN! Who knew you could entertain so many people with a boiling pot of oil?

Cats and Turkey

My cat is profoundly fond of turkey, and so, it turns out, was the young female kitten that came to visit while we were sitting outside on Saturday night.

I can only assume she is the cat of someone who moved into the neighborhood recently, as the 1^st would have been moving day and it’s common practice to keep your cat indoors for a week to get used to its surroundings before you let it out. However, she had no collar.

Last night, she came to visit again, and even snuck into the garage, apparently to settle for the night, and after we managed to extract her, found an open window to climb through (sneaking past my cat who’d chased her off Saturday morning when he saw her on the deck) and found my wife and I upstairs!

I put her out, but if she’s around again tonight, I’m going to fill the litter box in the garage and keep her safe until her owners can be found…

Taking Stock

Now that the Great Turkey Experiment has been completed, I need to figure out how to clean the pot – a 30qt pot doesn’t exactly fit in the sink. I have over 40lbs of veal bones and about 10lbs of chicken backs taking up space in my freezer and I’m out of stock of any kind! Inconceivable!

Stock is just convenient to have around. It’s easy to make, but it takes time to simmer and do its thing. It’s also summertime and it’s been very hot lately. Finally, stock is something that is best made in big batches.

As time permits in the near future, I’ll be making stock, outdoors, where it can simmer away happily without turning the house into a sauna.

Veal stock is particularly good as it has a very neutral flavour and is fabulous in both soups and sauces. With such an excess of riches in veal bones, I’m even going to make some demi-glace.

Vancouver’s New Landfill

On Sunday morning I went for a ride around the Stanley Park sea wall. As the summer’s progressed, I’ve been getting fitter and able to sustain a better speed; yesterday I managed to shave 10 minutes off my usual time (admittedly, I was in “workout” mode rather than my usual sightseeing one). Since I was driving my in-laws to the airport later that morning, I was underway before 7am.

As I went past English Bay, it occurred to me that Vancouver doesn’t need to find new landfill site, they could simply use the beach. The amount of garbage on the beach and sidewalks was absolutely disgusting. Even though the city crews had already been working for an hour, they had barely put a dent in the massive amounts of plastic bags and empty 7-11 cups and Subway wrappers.

And on a tangential note, how long does a “temporary detour” need to be in place before it’s actually deemed permanent? More importantly, how long should one tolerate private interests usurping public property?

On the stretch spanning roughly from Plaza of Nations to a little past the Granville Bridge, the Seawall cycle path has been on permanent “detour” for over a year now. The latter stretch is understandable as there has been ongoing condo tower construction. At least there, when they finish various phases, they have made the path accessible and they have even installed pavement to link up a segment that’s currently blocked by construction fencing.

Plaza of Nations is more disturbing however. The Edgewater Casino is there now, and the event planners there have seen fit to extend the modular fencing right to the edge of the retaining wall, thus forcing any pedestrian and cycle traffic out onto Pacific Boulevard. I want my public space back!

Deep Fried Goodness

Today is the day! An experiment in silliness, I bought a Cajun cooker - a device one uses to do, among other silly things, deep fried whole turkeys!

After spending the time and effort to acquire all the bits, we're going to have some friends over to join in on the silliness and eat turkey and pommes frites.

A Fine Weekend Indeed

This past weekend was quite pleasant. The weather cooperated in being nice and warm without actually being very hot and I managed to get a lot done.

The ongoing trucker strike is keeping a lot of the containers at the Port of Vancouver idle including some of the produce imported by the local grocery chains; what is in the stores looks a little tired. Fortunately, on Saturday morning we got to the farmer’s market at Trout Lake and stocked up on lots of fresh fruit and vegetables for this week.

Saturday evening, we managed to get out for the evening and enjoy the Illuminares at Trout Lake. My daughter was particularly captivated by the fire weaver show, shrieking with delight and clapping with glee. It was way past her bedtime by no way she was going to be missing any of the fun! Public Dreams is a group that promotes and puts on public spectacles. They have been very successful with their events at Trout Lake and it seems to be getting larger every year.

Sunday was a good day for getting things done. I slept in, despite good intentions of getting up early, but went for my bicycle ride around Stanley Park along the seawall and back and had a nice late brunch of croissants, generously dosed with the Straßbourg terrine from Oyama on Granville Island. I then went out to Magnet Hardware on Commercial Drive. This is an independently owned Home Hardware, and the staff there is fabulous! They know their stock, and if you go in and say, “I need a ___”, they will take you to the right spot in the store and show you their selection. Anyways, I finally spent the money on a turkey deep fryer! For $139, I got the complete kit with outdoor burner, 30qt pot with insert, turkey stand, and the all-important deep-frying thermometer. I’m not sure exactly when I’ll do a turkey, but in the interim I have a lot of veal bones and chicken parts waiting to be turned into stock, and when I do canning later this summer, there’s no reason I can’t do it outside.

After the shopping trip, S and I went to La Casa di Gelato over on Venables. They boast over 168 flavours of gelato – everything from vanilla to pear & Gorgonzola and back again. My favourite flavour of ice cream has always been pistachio, and they make a nice one here. I also like many of their other flavours, including the aforementioned pear & Gorgonzola, basil Pernod, and, yes, dill pickle! Of course, these novelty flavours are best as samples – I’ve never had an entire scoop of them.

I managed to clean out the garage and get all the recycling down to the depot and most importantly get our lawn furniture! My reward was I spent part of the afternoon sitting outside under my pear tree, reading my latest issue of Gastronomica, listening to the birds at the feeder, enjoying the shade and drinking wine spritzers; when you make your own wine, making spritzers out of it is a fine thing to do on a hot day indeed.

Tonight, we’re hosting a barbecue for H&M and our good friend T who’s visiting from Montreal with her beau; we haven’t seen T since she moved to McGill to take up a professorship, almost two years! It will be nice to see her again and to meet V, of whom we have heard many nice things.

The Hundred Mile Diet Revisited

The Hundred Mile Diet series on The Tyee has had its second installment posted, this time on the subject of trying to find chicken eggs that are not only from local organically farmed sources, but also fed from local feed – as the authors discovered, most of the organic chicken in the lower mainland is getting their feed from Alberta.

There are two items I will comment on.

One is from the article itself where the authors state:

“The strange fact is that vegetarianism as commonly practiced is, like the rest of the industrial food system, propped up by the globalization of food and everything that it entails, including a total disconnection between food consumers and producers, and the cataclysmic ecological costs of shipping food around the world.”

The statement from the article is actually several ideas rolled up into one, but let’s begin with the idea that shipping food around the world has “cataclysmic ecological costs”. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have here a fine example of hyperbole.

We live in a highly urbanized society, and the fact is that almost everything we city-dwellers wish to buy has to be transported to us; this is accomplished, shockingly enough, through some combination of rail, truck, and airplane!

It should then come as no surprise that there is a disconnection between consumers and producers. I live in an urban part of Vancouver, a block or so away from a nexus of busy streets (one of which is a trucking route) and Skytrain. The main reason I have any connection to what I eat is that I am passionate about food. I take the time and effort to make wise food choices.

In terms of the ecological shipping costs, the solution lies in educating and informing the public, and putting our money where our mouths are. I generally don’t shop at Safeway since most of their produce comes from the US; but this also begs the question of whether it is ok or not to buy hothouse tomatoes in February. Is it?

It’s all well and good to ask the questions the authors asking, but it seems to me they are taking a good idea to its unreasonable extreme.

The other item is from a commentator who goes by the handle Fiat Lux who responded to the article with the opening salvo:

“Trade is a necessary fact of life, but commerce for profits is not trade.”

Our societal model is based in no small part on the writings of the philosopher John Locke. Two of the tenets put forth by Locke are the notions of the earth held in common and the right to private property. This may seem to be contradictory at first, but they are actually complementary. The second notion, of private property, is of key importance to this discussion.

If I am a manufacturer of widgets, then I want to trade the product of my labour, widgets, for goods and services I need. As a civilization, we long ago created a very cool tool called money! I sell my widgets for money, and I spend money to buy what I want.

Ah, but then we have to address the notion of commerce for profit.

If trade is a necessary part of life, but profit is bad, then I should only make as many widgets as I need to sell to meet my needs and break even. This is ridiculous. Perhaps there is a great need of widgets and I have the capacity to fill that need. Why then should I not make as many widgets as I can sell and then keep the “profit” of my labours (being the difference between what I have earned from selling my widgets and spending on my needs)? That, my friends, is trade.

Now I return to Locke’s notion that we own the earth in common. We do. We all need to live on this fragile planet and share the resources. The best way we can do that is make sensible choices about the resources we use to minimize our impact. This includes trying whenever reasonable and possible to buy food that’s local, seasonal, fresh and raised in a sustainable manner. This includes both organic and traditional agricultural methods.