2012/06/27

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  2012.06.24
  Scènes de Montréal - Montreal Scenes
  

  Above

  Ordinarily, the flags are those of the countries having participated in the 1976 Olympics. On Fête Nationale Day, I don't think anyone will mind a little chauvinism. I don't know if the podium has always been there. It's the first time I notice it. It happens often with pics. You discover afterwards stuff you didn't notice when you were there on location. I take a lot of pics for this purpose since digital came our way. What a blessing...

  

  Fête Nationale

  It was nice most of the day (the 24th), the parade was ok (lots of giants, some new ones this year), and the evening megaconcert was the best I've seen in years. I'm waiting to see if some excerpts will show up on Youtube (the ones I'd like to post). The over two hour show is available on the net on TOU.TV but only to Canadians.

  

  Long poles

  I am not on Facebook. I don't like bandits, whether they are in three-piece suits or in jeans/t-shirts and sweat in interviews. A crook is a crook. Facebook for me has always rhymed with the last of these two categories. Zuckerberg may be a pretty face (I find him sexy), the way he acted with his co-founder is pretty much tell-tale of his dark side. After serious confidentiality issues, then the recent stock exchange rip-off, they are now screwing their own members by pirating their contact email address present in their user profile, diverting it to a Facebook email account these users never asked for, without either warning them nor asking their permission to do so. In my book this is spelled steal, rob, deceit, fraud.

  A lot of people put up with this because they centered their lives around that type of social media and now they can't live without it. They are screwed, kind of. I'm sorry for them, because they don't deserve to be treated like this. Me, I don't need what Facebook provides, at least not at that cost. I knew from the start it would turn out like this, there's no free ride, ever, and that's why I kept away from it with a hundred-foot pole.

  

  Me Myself and I

  Yesterday: Radio-Canada, mid-morning radio show. One segment's topic: Vacations - A political gesture when you are a head of state. Guest: François Brousseau, international politics columnist at Radio-Canada (and at my paper Le Devoir). Loosely translated:

  «A president of the United States who would dare pass, if only two days, of vacations in a foreign country, it would be very, very badly seen. [..] When Obama, after his first European tour following his election, in the Spring of 2009 I think, for one day, we're not talking three weeks at the end of the world here, he profited of his being in Europe for work to take one day off with his wife to go to one or two nice restaurants in Paris to eat things French, not American. He was scorched for it by the right-wing press for this crime of patriotism-treason consisting of having a good time elsewhere than in the United States. [..] Same thing for his wife, I think it was in the summer of 2010. Michelle Obama, it wasn't vacations with her husband and it was short vacations, but she was with one of two of her daughters, at least one, and it was in Spain in a palador, one of those old renovated castles, sure that it was not a slum I can understand that, well then again she was called a Marie-Antoinette. I googled [at the time] the word Marie-Antoinette and many of the results contained Michelle Obama Spain Vacations Summer 2010 Marie-Antoinette.»

  Yesterday, in the news: an online article from the Washington-based magazine Foreign Affairs, written by two Canadians, a former ambassador to Washington and a professor at Carleton University (Ottawa). The title: How Obama Lost Canada. The article enumerates a series of "problems", such as the delays he put in the Keystone XL pipeline (between Alberta and Texas), the protectionist measures of «Buy American», and even the absence of consideration for the military Canadian contribution in Libya and Afghanistan.

  Well, first, Obama didn't lose ME on the Keystone thing. Quite on the contrary. Tar sands oil is dirty oil, period, and also much heavier than light crude, which makes pipelines more prone to break. And in Canada they have artificially boosted the Canadian dollar and this is destroying the manufacturing economy in the eastern provinces, starting with and including Ontario but also Quebec and the Maritimes. It is what is called, and what we are already seeing signs of here, the Dutch Syndrome. That's long to explain but essentially it means that if you put all your eggs in the same basket and stop maintaining your garden at the same time and for some reason no one wants your eggs any more you're stuck with your basket and you're left with nothing else. I'm schematizing , but barely. Second, it must take compulsively naive people to think, in view of what I've mentioned above about Obama's or wife's travels, and of the last 200 years, to think one second that the U.S. would ever do something nice for another country if they didn't have an obvious financial and/or political stake in it and that it didn't serve first and foremost its own interests. Thirdly, it boggles the mind that some fighter-plane-loving pricklet like Stephen Harper can come to think that militarily, a country like Canada having slightly more than the population of Mexico City can be a military kingpin on this planet and be at par with the big guys. Someone should tell him that Canada is only in the G8 because the Americans insisted, and this against the will of the other 5 (it was the G7 initially), so as to have two votes around that table. He's like that woman I talked about in my previous post who really thought she was the Queen and not the political ornamentation vase she was supposed to stay. Harper is like that frog from the fable who thought he was a bull. That one ended up with a messy blow-up, in the fable I mean.

  

  Out of order?

  Since early June, I have no more email feedbacks from Xanga (comments, replies, etc), although all my settings are ok. Someone else is stuck with this problem?

  

  Changing time

  London's Big Ben will now be known as Big Liz. Well, maybe not exactly that, since there are two Big Bens. The clock and it's home, the tower. It's the home that's being lizzed.

  

  The shit hits the fan

  After Harper started this in 2006, inspired by his look-alikes from south of the border, negative ads (a euphemism for personally oriented political trash campaigns) have now hit Québec, thanks to our current Liberal government which, after its disastrous handling of the student strike, is desperate to get re-elected most likely in the early fall. Many are not thrilled about this kind of politics and it could well backfire in their face (the face of the Liberals). In this as in many other aspects, Quebec a) could be different than the rest of North America and b) often acts unpredictably.

  

  Obamacare or Obamagone?

  We're supposed to know tomorrow. I think I've mentioned what others now think of the U.S. Supreme Court these last years... I don't expect much [elevation] from them.

  

  Not smelling oneself

  Conrad Black, that former media mogul who voluntarily relinquished his Canadian citizenship so as to become a British Lord, and who spent almost four years in prison in the States on convictions of fraud and other related economic crimes, and who's back to his plush home in Toronto with the benediction of Stephen Harper who let him back in like nothing, Black, I was saying, gave a conference at the Empire Club in Toronto, in front of 1,000 members of the cream of the cream of Canada's financial world, who applauded him like there's no tomorrow. These people also are the first in line to blabber everywhere that Quebec is a corrupt province. I guess they must talk out of personal expertise in the matter. It's nice to see an applied application of the hypocrisy concept. Hypocrisy is another great Canadian thing, like the discovery of insulin and the cultural and not so cultural genocide of Amerindians.

  

  Smelling others

  The Austrian Press Agency reports that the police have intercepted three truckfuls of garlic, 9½ tons of it, stolen in Spain apparently, while they were preparing to leave Austria for Hungary. The police were suspicious because of the smell I think. I don't know if this says something nice about Hungarians or not. I knew that they made fantastic paprika, but that garlic craze is new to me.

  

  Da food section

  Back by popular demand (really?? ) here is another instalment of this world famous segment. Due to a nosy neighbor on the other side of the yard and who's often there on his balcony when I eat outside on mine, I hesitate to take pics when eating there. It's pretty stupid of me because I owe him nothing and I really don't give a damn what he could think of me, not to mention that a guy between thirty and forty who systematically puts on a apron when he cooks and this for meals which look bland as the color of his walls and which take about the time to read the recipe to prepare, is not at all the type of person I'd like to mingle with. Furthermore, in the last few days, we've been under rain or a cold spell so eating outside was not even an option.

  Yesterday I had this favorite of mine, which I've mentioned before in the mammoth food section of my May 3 post, as the last dish of the list. Called "Salade au lard et au mesclun" (Lard and mixed lettuce salad), it's a hot/cold salad combining just cooked and still hot cubes of potatoes, pan-fried pancetta cubes, cold lettuce, hot and reduced red wine vinegar, salt and freshly gound pepper, all tossed together. This time around, I had the right salad. This mixed salad (lettuces) is called mesclun in French and some in the States erroneously call it California mixed salad I think. It's a perfect meal for days when the weather is more fresh than hot. Light but hearty still the same. Accompanying good bread is almost a must. And this time around I had rosé instead of red, which is better. This Bordeaux wine was said to be perfect with a niçoise salad so I bought one the day before because Friend was here and we elected to make a Caesar's salad for supper and as far as moi is concerned, and as far as vinaigrettes and tastes palettes go, it's pretty much the same thing, except for the mustard in the niçoise vinaigrette (which is the typical French vinaigrette). As I mentioned in the previous instalment of this recipe, I don't bother buying the two lards the original recipe calls for, first because pancetta is tastier (or at least I like the taste better), and it's much less fatty than lard, streaked or not.

  

  This one is another re-run, this time on June 19 when the weather was more friendly: veal liver with chips of garlic. I'm still not sure if I like garlic cooked this way, since overcooked garlic becomes quite bitter, but in this recipe, maybe because I put steak spices on the liver, it somehow seems to fit together. I don't remember the name of the wine but by its color I don't think it had the balls to go with this dish.

  

  Finally, since it's almost heavy enough to be considered as food, I'm having this just right now (well, it was right now when I first wrote the sentence). Hadn't had a Maredsous in many years and didn't remember if I liked it or not. Now I can say: good stuff! It's a Belgian abbey brown (dark?) beer boasting a nice 8% alc/vol, brewed according to a Benedictine monk recipe. Monks, besides having sassy roles in movies of the Roses disguised as young Christian Slaters, also spend (spent?) a lot of their time either getting drunk or figuring ways to get other people drunk on fine beers, in both cases a very noble gesture, as far as I'm concerned.

  

  

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