Friday, June 23, 2006

Mind If I Piss In Your Coffee?

Used to be when you went into a restaurant in Montreal, you were ushered to the back of the room if you were unfortunate enough to be a non-smoker. It didn't help, of course, but on top of that the sight of the smokers occupying the good tables next to the large bay windows coupled with their noxious fumes easily reaching you anyway made you very, extremely displeased.

So I smoked for ten years. I smoked a lot for ten years, like, uh, my life depended on it. But I don't any more. And I don't appreciate having to smoke when I don't want to, which is what I have to do when someone lights up next to me, or even 50 feet away from me.

So since the new non-smoking laws went into effect May 31, instead of the smokers getting the best seats inside the restaurant, they get the best seats outside the restaurant, on the terrasses that are the mainstay of hundreds of restaurants and coffee shops all over the city. Just walking by one on the street envelops you in a noxious plume of carcinogens, so imagine actually having to eat something in the middle of one.

Quebec just doesn't get it. There should be a blanket ban of smoking in all places where children can sit down on chairs. There, that makes it easy to understand, doesn't it?

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

God Does Play Dice


It was delectable garlic, melt-in-your-mouth, still wet on the outside, the inside almost delicately pink. It had been pulled fresh from the ground of a small farm lot in Nara, Japan, and I'd put twelve of the amazing bulbs into a plastic bag and into my suitcase for the long journey home, praying that Customs wouldn't smell it and take it away. They took away a bunch of things (see below) but they inexplicably didn't take the garlic. I was in luck!

The first meal I made with it was incredible; an amazing pasta aglio oglio in which the character of the garlic really shone. And I still had eleven and a half bulbs left!

Since they were so fresh, they were beginning to smell a bit musty from being cooped up in newspaper and a plastic bag, so I opened the bag and put it into an open box in a dim corner of the kitchen so the garlic would dry out somewhat. And then I planned my next feast: Spicy Garlic Shrimp with Fresh Rosemary served over Penne Pasta.

Salivating over what I knew would just be the best garlicky feast I had ever had, today I assembled all the ingredients and prepared all the ingredients except for the garlic, which I wanted to leave for last. Slicing garlic is one of the most sensual kitchen duties I know. I went to get the box. It wasn't there.

I think the cleaning lady threw it out yesterday.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

More Japan Photos

Thanks to Blork's prodding, I actually took a spare 5 minutes out to learn how to use Flickr, so I posted some of my Japan photos there. Thanks, Blork!

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Japan Photos

Much like Blork, I also took lots of photos when I went to Japan recently. The beauty of the digital is that you can snap away like a madman and never have to worry about paying for it (assuming you have enough card space.)

Unfortunately, I don't know how to use Flickr, and don't have the time to investigate it yet, so I'll have to store large files on my own server and have Blogger resample the ones I send to it.

I went through all the photos last night (365 of them, not even close to Blork) and picked out three I'm going to make 20x30" prints of, have them dry-mounted at Atelier 68 on St. Laurent for about $53 each and put 'em up on my wall. They're all landscapes, and I decided to make a triptych out of them (larger size version is on my server.)


In this photo, they're much closer together than they're going to be on the wall, but I was struck by looking at them after I'd chosen them that all the lines seem to line up — ie. the distant mountains proceed in the same line as do the nearer mountains and even the foreground shapes, vaguely. And I hadn't purposely done a panorama shot — these were from completely different vantage points.

If I ever get a life, I'll learn how to use Flickr and put up some more.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

The Sweet-but-burned Smell of Satisfaction

Marvel: Abu Baby is just about now reaping the rewards of his lifelong wish to enter Hell. Have a safe and long, long trip, dude!

Friday, June 9, 2006

Flightmare

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Sunday, June 4, 2006

Land of Noise

The chorus of living things provides an almost white-noise of sound at 10 p.m. on a warm spring evening in a countryside corner of Japan. Thousands of tiny newly-minted frogs compete with hordes of noise-generating insects in an insane chorus that sounds like 10,000 mini-747s all taking off at the same time.

But that doesn’t compare with the man-made cacophony that greets a traveller to Japan. Inside the airport, things begin talking, singing and beeping from the moment you exit the aircraft. An escalator tells you to be sure to hold onto the handrail and be careful of the last step. The robot trolley-car that ferries you from one terminal to the next tells you first when it’s about to arrive. Then it tells you where you’re going once you’re on it.

Trucks run to and fro during daylight hours everywhere in Japan yelling on loudspeakers about everything from elections to gummy rice. Supermarkets blare the supermarket theme and food hawkers yell at you to come try their wares.

But it’s twilight near a rice field where you find tranquillity.

This is why you reluctantly come to terms with Japan.

Saturday, June 3, 2006

Land of Shoes


It’s not often one has to make a decision regarding the purchase of a new pair of shoes in terms of how easy it will be to remove and put them on again where I come from, but not doing so, and not doing so at length, is something that must not be easy to do the fiftieth or even hundredth time in this, the Land of the Shoes.

Because you’re going to have to take them off and put them on again if not five, but fifty times a day in Japan. And the rules seem to be muddy. Private houses are a no-no for shoes, but that’s easy to enforce. However, even within private houses, there are yet more rules. If you wear the “knock-around-the-house” slippers into the bathroom (well, there aren’t bathrooms here—there’s a toilet but it’s always separate from the bath area) your hosts will blanch, aghast at this violation of sanitation rules and the slippers will be thrown away, pretty much along with your hitherto stellar reputation.

Public spaces seem to be a free-for-all. In an elementary school, for example, you seem to be prohibited from wearing shoes anywhere that the dirt becomes concrete. The kids are indoctrinated from birth to wear this set of shoes for this purpose, then carry around another set of shoes, or maybe two, for various other purposes. Shoe lockers abound; hundreds upon hundreds of them, with the kids’ names dutifully inscribed above.

Restaurants are a crapshoot. More traditional ones have a genkan, or foyer, where all the guests have to remove their shoes and replace them with nasty, ill-fitting rubber replacements, and more modern places don’t have any shoe rules at all, thank God.

Hospitals? Lose the shoes. The typical ante-room in a large institution will harbor hundreds of pairs of shoes. There even seems to be a shoe-master who carefully vets every “guest” to make sure they’ve properly doffed their pair and have successfully mated with a replacement.

Needless to say, this shoe-centric society’s rules and regulations makes for some honest tooth-gnashing. How can the bathroom slippers be somehow cleaner than the living room slippers? Are we somehow implying that most people urinate on the floor? And the well-trodden halls of primary schools and hospitals are hardly modicums of hygiene. What’s next, remove your shoes before boarding the train?

One thing’s for sure: the slipper industry is undoubtedly concocting new rules as I type.