Rose's Cantina

Well folks. It's come to this. I wasn't sure what to call it. Panhandling? No I'm not begging. Scott says it's more like busking, you know, providing a little entertainment on a wintry afternoon for you folks. Instead of taking my guitar to the Sparks Street Mall -- which would be ridiculous because I can't sing or play guitar, heck, I don't even have a guitar -- I'm busking right here in my kitchen. Using Bell Fibe Internet and the ten falanges attached to my wrists. Think of me as a virtual busker. My greatest hits, you can enjoy them over and over again. They are to the right of this blog along with something called a Donate button. That's what you click if you want to support my silly hobby. Along the way, I might have a few things to sell as well. Scott has this cool flag from the time Nunavut first became a territory. As with all things up that way somebody probably had a bit of hooch and made a bunch of flags with a mistake i...

There's something psychologically disturbing about the Canadian character. Perhaps it's the lack of vitamin D. In the nice weather months, we slather ourselves with enough oil to make a bean salad. We do burpies and watch our diets. We get nice new bouncy hairstyles. We work out like fiends. By the end of each summer, many of us are fit as fiddles, looking fine. But something happens when the sun disappears to the other side of world. Something happens as we enter the heart of winter darkness. We press the pause button on life. The yoga pants -- once hilariously called "sweat" pants -- come out. The carefully prepared veggie concoctions rot in the back of fridge as we dive into mounds of mashed potatoes, vats of beer and bottomless bags of Doritos. The insides of running shoes begin to stiffen and the gym rarely sees its door darkened. Winter is for tablets and televisions, PS3s and laptops which become the...

  The good folks at Bell Media have done this community another solid this week by firing a gaggle of very popular on-air personalities. You might have heard of them: Sandy Sharkey, Steve Gregory (Bob-FM), Red Allen (Majic 100), Eric Longley (weatherguy, CTV Ottawa), Corey Ginther (sportsguy, CTV Ottawa). In the television game, essentially, they've gutted the Saturday news team, with only Kimothy Walker left to carry the can. It's not about "economics" says Bell Media apologist Richard Green. They simply want to go another way. In the case of CTV Ottawa, another way is to downgrade the two on-air positions to part-time. In the other cases, well, I guess Bell is thinking of changing the formats of the radio stations once again. Guess the suits have nothing better to do. The fact is that each of these individuals has long tenure and higher salaries than Bell Media wants to pay. By packaging them, they can hire young folks without families and mortgages, kids ...

They might as well have called it The Strawberry or The Peach. Did the eggheads at Research in Motion really believe that if they changed the name of the company and installed a new charismatic CEO (Yes, I am making a joke), they would somehow erase the public's memory of the last five years of ineptitude? What a bunch of maroons. I was quietly chortling to myself last night, watching the news, as the cameras panned over the buildings once proudly named RIM. All that is left of that legacy is the shadowy letters above "Blackberry" remnants that the workers couldn't scrape off. It's no wonder that RIM, er, Blackberry, stocks sank like a cellphone drunkenly and accidentally tossed in a swimming pool. Blackberry had its RIM shot. The boneheads who ran things, in a typically Canadian fashion, chose to believe their own press clippings. They had one good idea and a lot of government backing and figured: why innovate? Instead the former CEO became preoccupie...

Columnists like Margaret Wente are shouting from the editorial pages about the fact we have now have a person with a vagina in the Premier's office in Ontario. They point out that the provincial club of living dolls has grown to six and we'd better watch out. There are a bunch of new bitches in town, warn the wags. It's like the Dixie Chicks invaded the White House. Meh. As a long time journalist, I've covered my share of "firsts". First female rowing coach. First female cop. First female construction worker (I'm not kidding). I was sick of it back then and I'm sick of the whole business now. I've been around long enough to remember Iona Campagnolo, Judy Erola and Monique Begin at the federal level. Sure they weren't the top dogs but they were a tough bunch of old broads with hefty portfolios back in the Trudeau cabinet. And Joyce Fairbairn was running things behind the scenes. You could have asked Bert. (The nickname Joyce gave ...

When I was going through a particularly manic phase about ten years ago, I was at the press club everyday chatting up the regulars, spending aimless afternoons playing shuffleboard. Then, like that, I was gone for weeks. During my hiatus periods, I would get frantic calls from my buds. They would leave urgent messages on my answering machine wondering where I was. Had I put my car in a ditch somewhere? Was I lying in a pool of my own vomit in the upstairs bathroom? It was never that glamorous. Usually, I was working. My pat answer to them when I finally went back to the club was this. "You don't have to worry about me when you don't see me. You only have to worry about me when you do see me." The sight of a Rose cut in the afternoon was a sign of trouble. I was trying to outrun my problems. Being a single mother is a tough road, fraught with potholes and detours. The schools are against you. The banks are against you. Your ex-husband is against you. And...

I have a slight political hangover this morning, kind of like the feeling you get just after Christmas when the presents are delivered and you realize that you have no idea  how you will pay for them. I've always been a convention junkie from the time I worked at the Tory leadership way back in the mid-seventies as a volunteer VIP security officer. It was the weekend Joe Clark got elected when we first saw the evil genius that was Brian Mulroney who was paying delegates off with hooch, hot pizza and hookers, with a side of Ginette Reno. Since then, I have travelled the country in search of serious political tail. I have eaten from lavious seafood buffets while being screeched in by John Crosbie. I have taken the bus with life-sized cardboard cutouts of my favorite political characters. There are convention memories I hold dear, and some I'd rather forget. I often found myself fighting off, or succumbing to, the advances of men twice my age. I once got into a nea...