Rose's Cantina

#181600697 / gettyimages.com I may have slept through the Summer of 2014. Certainly, I didn't do much else. Last week, it hit me. I'd only consumed corn on the cob, my absolute favorite vegetable, twice. When I was a kid, the oldsters teased me that I could eat a dozen corn on the cob in one sitting -- when I was twelve!  For some people that would mean hugging the toilet for a couple of hours. In my case, living in a house without indoor plumbing, that would not have been an option. It just didn't seem to affect me that way, whether I ate one cob or a dozen. I was like a little beaver sawing logs. RRRRRRR; in thirty seconds the cob was done. Alas, as I get older, corn does get me runnin' a bit, but I still love to slather the butter, salt the little number and scarf it down. It's a horror show really, with condiments dripping from my face. Shirts are never the same after a good feet at the trough. But this year, the oompf went out of my corn dog...

      Perhaps the graphics department at CTV News decided to have a little fun at the expense of embattled Senator Mike Duffy this week. It's gotta be tempting. I mean, he is a pretty big target, just like Rob Ford who is constantly shown in a gonzo state on the late night shows.   If the graphics team was to blame, that might be CTV's best excuse for running this photo last night of Mike Duffy, shown in hues of pink and grey, resembling one of the Gargoyles that dress the stone facades in front of Parliament Hill.   While Lisa Laflamme solemnly read the story that Duffy's court case was ripening and finally being hatched, the graphic was a clear signal that Old Duff was still a pretty fine piece of catnip for the news cats to play with, have fun with, to swat back and forth before finally being consumed in bite sized pieces.   While some people in the newsroom might have had a great guffaw over this -- the stoning of one of ...

#88621286 / gettyimages.com If he's still there, Mr. Bloom must be having a challenging time teaching world history and politics to his high school students. How do you talk to students about ISIS or ISIL, whatever name that's being used these days, especially when you're teaching in a school that has already raised a homegrown terrorist -- a white kid, no less? Mr. Bloom was the best teacher the kids had. Marissa hated high school, but she loved Mr. Bloom. Ditto Stef and Nick. That's because Mr. Bloom was a straight shooter, a teacher who was unafraid to tell it like it was. He'd been an English as a second language teacher in Korea. He smoked pot. He drank gallons of hooch on his off hours. That gave Mr. Bloom cred. I had a teacher like that in high school, Ralph Eising, who wasn't afraid to teach students about the real world.  In Grade 12, Ralph gave us a book of essays to help us understand the curse of being aboriginal in this damn...

Having three dogs is like having three kids. No matter how wonderful their worlds appear to be, one of them is always out of sorts. This week, it's the junior pug, Sophie, who has developed a kind of honking sound, like the noise emanating from a flock of Canada Geese as they bid farewell to the North in the fall in search ways to irritate our Southern neighbors. Like all pugs, Sophie has her peccadilloes. She has been itchy for a year and has developed a rather unsightly sore on her right ear. Itchiness is a permanent condition for some pugs; Ming had it her whole life and had to be on steroids in her latter years to prevent her from self-harm. Sophie is going the same way, I'm afraid, but we've managed to keep her off the medication by holding her, calming her, using the tried and true Temple Grandin squeeze box technique. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. The itchiness is bad, but the honking makes the whole thing worse. The new affliction is un...

#145062127 / gettyimages.com I don't usually watch the CRTC hearings. I don't think I'm alone in this. But I was riveted by them on Friday, when the captains of Canadian culture started grilling Netflix's director of global public policy, challenging her to open the corporate books, while suggesting that Netflix should pay, essentially, a Canadian culture tax. Most of the media took to Twitter to share their embarrassment over how the CRTC commissioners conducted themselves. You'd think they were starring in a Canadian roll your own, like the Heritage Minutes, carrying muskets to fight a phantom war against technology. We didn't ask the CRTC to do this. Canadians are grownups; we don't need a cultural crossing guard. Justin Trudeau was right the other day. Old men belong in gentlemen's clubs, smoking cigars. They are not needed to be the guardians of taste, or biology. It's our party and Canadians should be able to choose w...

Did you hear the head honchos from CBC at the CRTC yesterday? Usually, the CRTC hearings are dry affairs, so you can be excused for not paying attention, but these hearings are both entertaining and important because they will determine how much you will pay for cable service and whether or not you get to "pick and pay" for the services and channels you actually want. Like the executives at all the other for-profit television networks, the CBC brass are saying that they believe Canadians will pay to subscribe to the nation's broadcaster. The CBC is different, of course, because it is, for the most part, funded by you and me.... Wait, wait. So the CBC is saying we will be happy to pay to subscribe to the CBC and yet we are already paying for the CBC. Huh. That's stupid, isn't it.? Public television in the United States is, indeed, paid for by subscribers and also appears as part of a cable package. I watch PBS to see who will die on Downton Abbey as determ...

#175489173 / gettyimages.com Bell Media was hoping to scare consumers yesterday, with its pronouncement that local programming could disappear without us paying for it through some sort of subscription plan. Its head honcho suggested that Bell, Rogers and Shaw will have to find other revenue streams to keep local fare alive; otherwise the local news will be on the chopping block. Perhaps. But would we really miss it? Anyone who watches the current local shows knows they are already on live support. Our local CTV affiliate in Ottawa has all but stopped doing remote satellite feeds that once made the audience feel like they were part of the action. Even the host of its once lovely little program Regional Contact has had to resort to covering only stories that are bussable. CTV Ottawa's noon hour program has been turned into a repeater for news from the night before, and its local segments are nothing more than infomercials for local restaurants and stores. I saw a...

One of the great delights of life is to tool around to the different farmers' markets, stalls and farms in search of autumn's great bountiful. This past Sunday didn't disappoint. I'd been hoping to make a cranberry-apple crisp for a birthday, and we scored some frozen ones at the Ottawa's Farmer's Market along with Carleton's famous jerk rub. Oh yes, and being the farm girl from St. Catharines, how could I pass up the luscious concord grapes that had just arrived from Beamsville? The corn proved a tad expensive, so we moved down to Cyrville Road where there's a chipwagon and a fresh produce stand with corn from the countrified part of Quebec. Why stop there? We head down Hawthorne Road to Kiwan Farm, an actual working farm just past Hunt Club Road. We used to get our stuff from across the road, but alas, poor old Ivor, who used to run Limeydale, was felled by a heart attack this year. His farm lays untouched, tractors unridden, crops untended. H...

#85183166 / gettyimages.com Right now, your BMI is 35, said Dr. Ben. After the breast reduction, you'll be 30.1. So, I'm not obese? No, you're just overweight . I stood in front of Scott the other day, in my underwear, and showed him my rapidly shrinking middle. He couldn't believe it. I had to show him in my underwear because, to the outside world, I don't look a hell of a lot different. And that's because of my boobs, cup size G. They are all you can see when I'm coming at you. They hide the middle, giving off so much shade that it really doesn't matter what the rest of me looks like. Nothing can live under there. To repeat a hurtful joke once told to me, I haven't seen my feet in years. And so it was, at my last physical, I asked Dr. Ben to book me a breast reduction, something I've been fighting for years. I always thought that breast reductions were selfish things in a world when women were losing their lobes to canc...

#477196997 / gettyimages.com Christopher Hitchens, the late gasbag contrarian wrote at least twice in Vanity Fair that women aren't funny. Joan Rivers might have suggested that perhaps Hitchens water-board himself one more time. Maybe the next time it would take. She didn't say that. I just did. But I said it because of Joan Rivers, the patron saint of sassy-assed women everywhere. Sure there were foamy-mouthed dames before Joan. Mae West. Totie Fields. But nobody did it as long and as well as our Joan. She set the bar and kicked it over a few times. I learned how to be funny because of Joan Rivers. I learned the smart comeback, honed the ability to cut down a stupid man about eight inches with a flick of the tongue, to demolish the swells, and to show the beautiful broads that, after all, their shit does stink. The high road? Come on. How is the high road funny? If you haven't got something good to say about anybody, sit next to me. Joan didn't ...

#499134775 / gettyimages.com I've been trying to make sense of the debate over the theft of celebrity images. I've also been trying to find a way to get my point across without pissing off all the right-minded citizens who see this activity as a crime, nothing more, nothing less. So I've decided to channel Louis C.K. to see how he would have assessed the situation. Woo. Here goes. Jennifer Lawrence and a hundred other celebrities nobody cares about got their photos hacked off something called the iCloud. I never use the iCloud but people who are more saavy than me do so to make sure their photos don't disappear when their piece of shit computer batteries melt down. This happened to me twice and nearly caused a fire, so you at Apple don't be so damned smarmy about your technology. Sometimes even Apple sucks balls. The stealing of these images is a terrible, terrible crime. The people who violate a person's privacy should be prosecuted to...

#166678267 / gettyimages.com Gordon Ramsay has put me off eating in restaurants, and staying in hotels. We watch Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell religiously, giggling as we follow Ramsay dumpster-diving into the kitchens of restaurants throughout the U.S. After seeing what happens behind the scenes, I've been seriously reluctant to enter into any dining establishment. Even a few years ago, we didn't really care if the pizza was cold or the crust was a bit gooey, or even if there was toilet paper on the floor with overflowing toilets. We sort of saw this as part of the experience of visiting the local dive. As long as it had cold beer, we didn't really care. But Ramsay scared us straight as he took us to the back-of-the-house to show us what some restaurants were actually serving. I learned never to order the special because "it" was the piece of meat rotting and swimming in its own gruelly sauce in the fridge or laying at the bottom of the fre...