Rose's Cantina

Here is more evidence that Justin Trudeau is really a man of the people. His family leaves the back door wide open. In Rockcliffe. Presumably without flipping the alarm. What? It's not like somebody would just walk in, pick up a butcher knife and lay waste to the family. This is Rockcliffe. It's a lot like Papineauville, except for all the money people have. And fun things to steal. Like Bose systems. Priceless artifacts. We used to leave our doors open, and we live across from a crack house. Like Justin, we got schooled. Our tenant was downstairs, minding his own business, and some random crackhead walked right in off the street and sat on his bed and began to conduct a conversation. "Hey man," the guy told Bill, who was gaming at 2 a.m. "You look pretty cool." Then the guy left. Upstairs, we have no worries. We don't lock the doors, either. We, the poor people, however, learned early how to keep the perps at bay. We have a dog. ...

#182155848 / gettyimages.com I've always considered myself a bit of a hipster, the sort of woman who will be the cool granny someday, like Betty White who is in her 90s but remains unafraid to talk smack. But recently, I've experienced some blow back from the younger generation especially the ones who work in customer service. They treat me like I'm stupid. I went to Howard's Pawn Shop the other day to see if I could buy a used Apple Shuffle because I lost the one I had at the gym. These little devices cost $60, half of which pays for the incredibly overly expensive headphones. Mostly, the Shuffle is little more than a flash drive which we can get at the Quickie for five bucks. Because flash drives don't have head phone jacks, we have to pay Apple $60. Anyway, the woman behind the counter presented me with something that looked like it came from Walle, a strange little device that might have been made in the 1980s. She wanted $60 for it. ...

#143175379 / gettyimages.com   I'm troubled by a recent media circus over remarks made by the director of a local food bank. Karen Secord, the coordinator of the Parkdale Food Centre, says she has been turning back food she doesn't believe is good for her clients, things like Kraft Dinner and canned soup. The interview set off a media feeding frenzy and ruffled a lot of feathers among people who donate to the Ottawa Food Bank, which does not share Ms. Secord's policy. Media trainers must be lining up right now to give Ms. Secord some advice about how to do media interviews. Meanwhile she's been threatened and called names by people, and by the looks of the follow-up story she has no idea why. I don't think anyone disagrees with Ms. Secord that disadvantaged people need, and deserve, nutritious food. From what I've seen looking at the bin at my local Loblaws, most people are making good choices concerning what they put in their food bank do...

#165066088 / gettyimages.com This might make some people uncomfortable. Canadians don't like other people knowing their business especially things like how much it costs to bury their beloved relatives. Oh well, the cost of this particular funeral is in the public record. In other words, you and I paid for it. Most funerals that are paid for by the state are for people on welfare, or for the homeless to give every family some dignity in their time of grief. But this funeral was not that kind of funeral. It was a state funeral, the kind usually reserved for kings or queens, prime ministers or Governors General. I'm am writing, of course, about the state funeral for Jim Flaherty, the one we paid $400,000 for. Frankly I was shocked when I saw that number. And I think Jim Flaherty would have been shocked, too. In fact, I have no trouble saying that if he'd heard about it when he was alive, he would have died of shame. Jim Flaherty was a well known penn...

#165586949 / gettyimages.com How lucky we were to have Robin Williams in our lives. My generation fell in love with him as Mork. Then our kids fell hard for Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire. Robin Williams was lucky, too,  to be able to live his life as a creative tour de force, to put his joy out into the world like a boomerang. Joy begets joy. That's the beauty of creativity. It's one of the greatest gifts a person can be given by God, if you believe in God. It's also a tremendous curse for many, people like Robin whose art came from inner pain. We couldn't see it, but it was there. He talked about it, tried to rehab it. It just wouldn't go away, the pain. It is the devil's pain. The devil waits, he is the patient sort, standing in the shadows at the AA meetings, and hiding in the closet in the dark. And it hides in the bottom of the bottle of Glenfiddick, just sitting there all warm and cosy. It is a fortunate man who can escape the demon. ...

I spent the better part of two years working in the hearing industry. As with nearly all the journeys I've taken for work, I knew nothing about hearing loss. Nothing. I don't believe I knew anybody who wore hearing aids. I saw a few around, those bananaramas sported by old folk when I worked in a nursing home for the summer. A lot of those folks still cupped their ears and yelled at people, mostly because the people in question also suffered from dementia and no one bothered to check their hearing aid batteries or clean the wax out. Sucks to be old, suffering from dementia AND have hearing loss. I once heard a funny story about Eddie Fisher who suffered both hearing loss and dementia in his latter years. His daughter Carrie had to keep replacing the aids because Eddie thought they were candy and kept eating them. That's pretty expensive candy, with the average pair of hearing aids costing more than $3,000. You can buy a lot of jujubes for that. Anyway, along my ...

#170956370 / gettyimages.com I've never thought much about Denmark. I had some Danish cutlery once and it was lovely. And my Danish friend Viggo fed me Aquavit one night. I don't remember much of that night; I think there was also raw fish involved. Raw fish is probably the reason so few women are obese in Denmark, that and the fact they ride a lot of bicycles. And some of them -- not my friend Viggo whom I adore -- but some of them are rude.  Like a Danish tourist with her English pal who came to Canada and wrote an "open letter" to the media about how fat we are here, how we live in disgusting smoggy cities, and how much we like our cars, none of which are made in Denmark. Imagine if we rode in cars made in Denmark. They'd be like Chevy Chevettes, those horrible little cars from the Seventies which had power nothing. You practically had to push the damned car down the road. The local media picked up on their open ramblings and...