Category Archives: Canada

multiculturalism in action: stealing Japadog post!

Posted on by

I’m simply stealing this from Raj, cuz he stole the idea from me. Thus, the Internet comes full circle; no longer a series of tubes, it’s become a series of hula hoops. And I’m not apologizing for the hotlinking, either. At least not till he’s bought me one.

Famous Japadog

Japanese hotdog? Sound appealing? Well it is! On Lorraine’s reccomendation, I took a chance at the hotdog stand on the corner of Smithe and Burrard, close to the Sutton Place Hotel.

So what’s in a Japadog anyways? There’s two varieties that this particular stand sells.

The Terimayo which hosts Teriyaki Sauce, Mayo, Japanese Seaweed and Fried Onions on a 100% beef hot dog.

The Oroshi is composed of special Soy Sauce, Oroshi Daikon Radish, Green Onions on a Bratwurst (white pork) sausage.

I tried the Oroshi on my last visit and look forward to trying the Terimayo next time. Delicious! The Daikon made the bun a bit soggy towards the end tho but upon comment to the ‘chef’ she said that she’ll endeavour to squeeze the radish out a bit better next time. Photos posted below.

Hunting and Gathering: The Only

Posted on by

from the Archive:

Wednesday, September 04, 2002

Have I told you about shopping for food in my neighborhood? Of course I have, and here I go again, but this time we will have no naked people (haven’t had any in quite some time, but nevermind) we will have no Italians. We will have diner burgers. And where will we have them? At the Ovaltine Cafe and Vic’s Cafe and we will have a good Yuppie bouillabaisse at the Cook Studio Cafe. In fact, I think I will go have one right now to refresh my memory and also check out all the hot uniforms at lunchtime, subsequent to which I will update the blog.

Love that word, blog. Blog, blog, BLOG! cool…

Back from lunch. Alas, Cook Studio Cafe closes at 2, just before I got there; story of my life, born a month late and trying unsuccessfully to catch up ever since. Went to mosey down to the Ovaltine or Vic’s but felt guilty I was ducking my work, so decided to eat closer to where I had to work today. Somehow that made me feel less irresponsible.

Ended up at the Only, The Only Seafood Restaurant, the oldest restaurant in Vancouver. It’s in a hellish stretch of Hastings amid pawn shops, storefronts that have been boarded up for twenty years, and really last-chance social agencies. The Only has been there since the early part of the last century, 1912 to be exact, and is now run by a nice Chinese couple. They got a very nice writeup last week in Malcolm Parry’s social column.

If you are one of the sorryass losers who goes to a seafood restaurant and orders beef you are SOL here, bud. There is nothing, I mean nothing, NOTHING on the menu but seafood. Halibut and chips, cod and chips, oysters fried raw stewed two ways, clams, mussels and/or chips. And there is nobody here except almost-geezers with ballcaps on their heads and windbreakers on their backs who all look like they just came in from a round of golf or maybe a suburban barbeque. As soon as you sit down the woman shoves half a loaf of bread and a platter of butterpats at you, along with a half-quart of water in the kind of glass that can take a bullet and remain standing.

It was the most expensive lunch I’ve had on the Downtown EastSide, which is to say that it came to $10 with the tip and pop. But then, my oyster pepper stew (half order) was yummy, and so thick with oysters that it really should be called Bowl-O-Sters With Some Tomato Sauce. There were three fragments of vegimatter, God knows what it was, but there was about a half-pound of oysters, all cut up. You know, when you cut them up like that they look kind of like jelly rolls with tentacles on one side and it gets you to wondering what all the different colours are made up of. A friend of mine went to high school out here and they made her dissect clams, oysters and mussels and now she can’t eat shellfish anymore because she looks at it and knows what’s the liver, what’s the pulmonary apparatus…I’m glad I went to school in Ontario and I’m glad I don’t eat at restaurants that serve fetal pigs or frogs, though I’ve heard some very expensive ones do.

But about the stew: never mind what it looked like, it was nice and peppery, with the true dinery flavour of Campbell’s Tomato Soup hiding in there somewhere underneath the tsunami wave of pepper. Yummylicious. And this is definitely a place you can dunk, so it was Dunk City for my lunch and I got through most of the bread.

The place is filled with mirrors: one long one running the length of the left-hand wall, and one huge, got-to-be-expensive one that makes up the back wall, about 8’x15′ or so. I’d be very surprised if it weren’t one of those that you can see through from behind. The kitchen is along the right-hand wall, behind a half-wall, and the counter comes out from there and makes two loops to the left. There are no tables. Ceiling is way up there, maybe 20′, and covered with either Lincrusta or a real old pressed tin ceiling. Very Edwardian. Along the top of the left-hand wall above the mirror runs a very sixties mural of fishing, all in pastel marine greens and oranges, like the sort of thing Toni Onley might have done in Grade Nine.

Adding to the atmosphere are the snippets of conversation, screams, and shouts coming through the completely clouded-over front windows. It’s like flipping though channels if only cop shows, Alfred Hitchcock, and Permanent Midnight are on tv. Ever seen Da Vinci’s Inquest? This is the kind of conversation that preceeds the arrival of the coroner. And the nice thing is: it’s OUTSIDE!

looking black for Conrad

Posted on by

But they're easily confused

All is not well in Conrad Black‘s heart of darkness.

Possibly Canada’s most literate alleged criminal, Black has just successfully defended himself from an attempt to revoke his bail and stick him in the pokey. He was less successful, however, in his attempt to prevent charges of tax evasion from being added to the sordid mix.

The CBC has the story:

On Aug. 10, a U.S. judge raised Black‘s bond by $1 million in cash to $21 million US, saying the toppled media baron had misrepresented how much he was worth.

The Canadian-born 61-year-old is scheduled to go on trial in March 2007 on racketeering and fraud charges, accused of looting millions of dollars from Hollinger International Inc. when he headed the media empire.

Judge Amy St. Eve of the U.S. District Court in Chicago, who is overseeing Black‘s upcoming trial, agreed with prosecutors that Black had misstated the worth of his assets, but denied their request to revoke his bond and jail the 61-year-old.

In related news, he’s filed a revised “oops, forgot about those millions” statement listing additional money his wife has loaned him since his income stream became uh, became uh, constrained. Relatively speaking.

AccountingWeb (whodathunk there’d be such a thing?) has his number:

A revised affidavit, filed last month, says that his wife loaned him $2.3 million between January and April of this year. “Essentially, it appears that whenever Black needs money, his wife (or at the very least, her corporation) stands ready to provide millions of dollars in cash without so much as a promissory note,” prosecutors said in court papers filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. “The Blacks have a unique financial arrangement into which the government and this court have little or no information.”

Now, Barbara Amiel-Black, known previously as Lady Black Barbara Amiel Blackof Crossharbour and before that simply as Barbara Amiel and, around Toronto newsrooms as a bit of a femme fatale, is a journalist. She’s a columnist. Sure, being Conrad Black‘s wife didn’t hurt her when she was out knocking on doors, asking papers to carry her column (like Chicago, where she was not loved). But it must be admitted that very few journalists, not even Polly Toynbee, are so vastly overpaid that they can loan out $2.3 million at will. Maybe she’s taken some of those rocks she’s so fond of to the pawn shop.

Between 1999 and 2003, according to the Hollinger International report, Amiel Black received more than $1.3 million in salary, director’s fees, bonuses and payments for columns written for Hollinger papers. Yet according to the report, “she performed no meaningful work in return…”

But the report — prepared by the company’s special adviser, Richard Breeden — mocks Amiel Black‘s own description of her duties, describing them as “nothing more than euphemisms for ordinary activities such as reading the newspaper, having lunch, and chatting with her husband about current events.”

The report cites a wide range of personal expenses the Blacks allegedly charged to the company, including $2,463 for handbags and $3,530 for silverware for the Blacks’ corporate jet. Amiel Black is said to have charged the company for tips she gave a doorman at Bergdorf-Goodman, an expensive Manhattan clothing store. In 2000, Hollinger International paid $42,870 for a “Happy Birthday, Barbara” dinner party at New York’s La Grenouille restaurant. Guests at the $212-a-plate party included Oscar de la Renta and Barbara Walters…

and there’s this:

Timson also recalled the time Barbara was walking along Toronto’s Bloor Street with a friend when a man passed by, smilingly acknowledging Barbara. “Who was that?” the friend asked.

“I’m not sure,” she replied, “but I think it was my first husband.”

I must say, however, that he has lawyered up in quite an impressive manner indeed. It may never be the same attorney twice, but they all seem to be a dab hand with the snappy quote:

Black’s attorney Ed Genson told the Sun-Times: “They ought to start filing their pleadings like lawyers and not short story writers.”

Very nice. When I’m down to my wife’s last $2.3 million, I want Ed Genson in my corner too. Mind you, it must be maddening to work for Black; by the time you’ve gotten back from giving your press conference, he’ll have faxed you a complete, footnoted and annotated list of where you could have improved and the changes he’d like to see for next time.

TWAT: new crime, flying while brown

Posted on by

Raise fears, sink foes!

Rohinton Mistry had the right idea years ago; after being body-searched one too many times, he simply refused ever to fly into or through the United States again.

But it’s not just the US. Let’s go to BoingBoing for the report of panic-striken Brits fingering each other at airports. Although we could go anywhere in the blogosphere, really. This is major, major news.

Two brown men were forced off a plane by a bunch of non-brown British passengers who became convinced that they were behaving suspiciously and were therefore terrorists. Shocking — who’d have thought that putting signs everywhere telling you that you were in danger of terrorists and that terrorists were everywhere and that you should look out for suspicious terrorism behavior would turn normal people into witch-hunting racist mobs?

scared shitless and Proud!

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic. Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it…

Websites used by pilots and cabin crew were yesterday reporting further incidents. In one, two British women with young children on another flight from Spain complained about flying with a bearded Muslim even though he had been security-checked twice before boarding.

Link

Ahmed Farooq, the hottie doctorNow let’s look a little closer to home. Winnipeg, in fact, where we meet hottie doctor Ahmed Farooq, who was kicked off a flight for praying.

Naturally, the hotel room he where he had to spend the night, plus the flight home the next day, were out-of-pocket expenses that for which the airline takes no responsibility.

A Winnipeg doctor is demanding an official apology and compensation from United Airlines after being kicked off a flight in the U.S. this week, an incident he has characterized as “institutionalized discrimination.”   Dr. Ahmed Farooq, a Muslim, was escorted off an airplane in Denver on Tuesday. 

According to Farooq, reciting his evening prayers was interpreted by one passenger as an activity that was suspicious…

Farooq said the allegation came from a passenger who appeared drunk and had previously threatened him during the trip.

When flight personnel were alerted, the 27-year-old radiology resident and two colleagues — a man and a woman — were taken off their flight. They had been returning from a conference in San Francisco.

Farooq said that even officials from the Transportation Security Administration soon realized the flight crew had overreacted, but by the time that conclusion had been reached the trio were forced to stay in Denver for the night and catch a flight the next day — at their own expense.

“There’s no recourse,” Farooq said. “There’s no way to really be able to talk to anybody to really be able to reason it out. The police officers who talked to me afterwards and subsequent officials within the first three to five minutes, they were like, ‘You know what? The crew made a mistake. We apologize that they took you off. They overreacted.‘”  

Thank god I’m not tanned! But if I may be permitted this remark, I’d just like to say that, having checked out the picture, I wouldn’t mind detaining him…in my apartment!

garden gnome Chomsky

Posted on by

from Anton Sledgehammer, who are, if I am any judge of landscape, a Vancouver organization. They could probably sell this thing at Art Knapp’s for twice what they’re asking.