Rose's Cantina

Well, isn't it interesting that Justin Trudeau's image was plastered on the cover of the Globe and Mail today while other newspapers spilled much ink on why the Liberals should resist a coronation. It's the passive-agressive nature of Canada's media to look for prophets and visionaries hoist them up on a pedestal only to later claw them down and serve their livers with nice wine and a salad. Funny, it happens more in Canada than in many other places. Led by an often immature and shallow media we here in Canada are quick to tire of our leaders and want to toss them out of office before they can get their shoes shined and their locks shorn by the Parliamentary barbers. Part of the problem is that our leaders, of late, have been alienating figures. Stephen Harper is hard to love and doesn't even try to appear nice. Tom Mulcair is brooding and has the looks of a Heathcliffe on the moor. And Bob Rae is just, well, kind of weird. Enter Justin Trudeau with his g...

I was recently Facebooking about the fact my son, Nick, finally got his G licence and a job so he can start paying rent. The post ended with me saying that all seemed to be right with the world. Then I got blindsided by a model train loving, crankypants senior who was lurking in the weeds, ready to bounce. Someone asked the question: will your son be getting a car? Before I could answer, I saw this posting. Gord Lovelace :  If your son bought a car, it would be like a self-professed poor person publicizing efforts to repair effete Italian coffee machines and imported furniture that millionaires like me could never afford. Well, well. The glove has been thrown down. He has been at me in the past few weeks over the fact that, while my family may be fiscally challenged, I continue to spend my money repairing  luxury items such as a Starbucks barista machine (gift from my son) and an Ekornes chair (which I won in the divorce settlement). Gord then blorges on abou...

I was noodling around the Menopause Canada website, and decided to calculate my Body Mass Index. It was 32, which is still fat, but a lot less fat than the 36 where I started out. By the way, I challenge the BMI because you calculate it based on your height and weight and it doesn't take into account that I have at least 10 pounds of boob weight, which I didn't ask for, unlike Anna Nicole Smith who is pictured above. Oh well, at least I know I'm making progress thanks to two years of personal straining at the Athletic Club in Trainyards and those magical diuretics Dr. Ben prescribed me along with my blood pressure medication. Speaking of blood pressure meds, I found out this week that I am not supposed to eat grapefruit while on them. And according to Doctor Oz, who is the expert on everything, I'm not supposed to take Ibuprofen either. What a shock. Grapefruit and Advil are among my favorite substances. Along with tequila, which I've decided it's time...

Every fall, Scott and I have the same discussion about pay television. We wonder if getting the VIP package from Rogers cable with TMN and HBO is worth the hundred bucks. We love our Dexter and Nurse Jackie, we adore In Treatment; True Blood and Bill Maher not so much. But watching the Emmys the other night got me wondering why we're missing apparently the two greatest shows on television -- Homeland and Boss , starring Kelsey Grammar. We get hundreds of channels but not the bloody channels that carry the greatest shows on television. To get these shows, we would have either invest another hundred bucks in SuperChannel, which would be insane, or switch. We're not going to do either because we've tried SuperChannel and it pretty much sucks except for carrying the two greatest shows on television. Recently, we added NetFlix to our entertainment portfolio and we found that there are an amazing number of television shows we've missed altogether up the dial. I...

These last two weeks have been a journalism professor's dream. Imagine teaching second year journalism students and being handed the Margaret Wente affair, a shining example of what not to do as a columnist or reporter. Down at the Mop and Pail , I'm sure the mood is not so jovial. Imagine being Jeffrey Simpson and being handed guidelines to follow (published yesterday in the Globe ) -- as if you were a Grade 10 history student who's just got caught cribbing the text book. How incredibly insulting. By publishing those guidelines in yesterday's paper, Public Editor Sylvia Stead dug herself in the shithole even deeper. Now she's tainting all Globe reporters with the Wente brush and sending a message that no one in the newsroom can be trusted. I've got my eye on you, and now your mine. I'd love to be a fly on the Globe newsroom now that editors will be acting like prison guards inspecting everyone's bunk for contraband. Hee-hee...

“When I was a kid…if you were caught plagiarizing, you got a zero”. Margaret Wente, as quoted in the blog Mea Culpa by the "anonymous blogger" Carol Wainio. See what I did there? It's called attribution. I attributed the quote to the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente, but since I got it from Carol Wainio's blog, I double-attributed it. You can't be too careful these days in journalism. It's easy to get caught. Before I was doing this non-paying gig, I wrote for one of these lifestyles blogs for which I got paid a cent a word. Even in that rinky-dink operation, you found yourself in hot water if you quoted  verbatum a piece that was available on Internet. This happened to me a couple of times, but in my case, I was quoting my own writing. The software picked it up and rejected my work as plagiarism. In this day and age, it's hard not to get caught cribbing from other folks, especially when you are a national columnist for the Globe and Mail and ...

As I sit on my perch surveying my kingdom, I watch the weirdos and drug addicts walk down the street and I try not to be judgmental. Who am I? I know nothing about their lives. Maybe they used to be rock stars or soccer kids. Somebody must have loved them. Maybe they had jobs and dreams.  Not today, not on this journey down the road to despair. I live on Saint Laurent Boulevard, a trashy street in the east end of Ottawa, a block from a Quickie convenience store, and directly across from a grow-op. It might not be a grow-op but it certainly is a quick stop for drugs. Stretch limos arrive at all hours and there's a lot of foot traffic, in and out, sure signs of nasty business being transacted within. The place is a dilapitated war-era house, the kind that might have started out as a trailer but somehow morphed into a single home dwelling in what was once an Ottawa suburb. It's certainly seen better days with its unkempt lawn, wooden deck that is oddly out...