Better Not Make That A Double!

The owners of a small distillery on a Scottish Island came across a recipe from 1695 for quadruple-distilled whiskey.

It results in a drink that is 92% alchohol. Upon trying it out, owner Mark Reynier found that what happens first is that your knees start to tremble. Then, when you swallow it, it apparently goes "...'whomp' straight down your chest". Some drinks are strong enough to put hair on your chest. I suspect this is strong enough to take it off again. And, ladies, no wax required!

The last time this distillery was in the news was a couple years ago when the Defence Threat Reduction Agency of the U.S. government monitored the distillery's web-cams. They feared the Scots were secretly making chemical weapons.

I guess they already knew about the whiskey.

I Smell Bacon

The Fuzz...Smokey... John Q. Law...Mr. Ossifer...

Yes, the highways of Southern Ontario are awash in flashing blue and red lights. I saw them everywhere yesterday and today, in two's and three's, parked just beyond a bridge, or just around a bend.

They always say that there is no quota system in place for traffic tickets. They say that it just wouldn't be fair. Okay. So why many cars out on patrol on the 28th of February?

It seems to me I haven't seen so many cruisers since the end of January...

If Only They'd Played Like Girls!

Draw the curtains, disconnect the phone. Shed a tear and pour a few fingers in a glass.

Canada is having their best-ever showing at the Winter Olympics with 18 medals. But at the same time it will be disappointing in that the men's hockey team is going home without a medal. Again. Hopefully this won't be the start of another 50-year drought with no gold medals...

Salt Lake City was good. Torino not so good. The old New York Rangers theory is not a good one. Just getting a bunch of good players does not result in having a good team. Team Canada 2006 was slow and physically timid, which surely must question wether we had the best players available. But, more importantly, they never looked like a good team. Their first few games of the tournament were really also their first few practices. There never seemed to be much communication or awareness of what others on the ice were doing. The goaltending was excellent, but goaltending is where you can count on individual talent to get the job done. Teamwork and familiarity can help goalies perfomr better, but for the most part you have a goalie or you don't. Passing was shoddy, positioning was haphazard adn strategy appeared to be something only worked on after the game.

So here's a question. When the 2004-2005 NHL season got cancelled, why didn't Team Canada pick their olympic squad then, practice over the year, play as a team and be ready to lay waste to the opposition like a Canadian team should.

Look at our women's team. They play together. They know each other, they know how they want to play. Perhaps they face lighter opponents, but part of what makes them lighter opponents is the women's strength as a team. To outscore your opposition 46-2 over the course of the tournament must mean something. When the men faced a lighter opponent, they lost 2-0.

The worst part is I don't know who to root for in men's hockey. I would have gone for Switzerland just to see one of the little fish get to make waves in the big pond, but they couldn't come up with any magic against Sweden. Slovakia's another team that hasn't had the chance top do anything big, but they're right now only a minute away from being elimanted as well...

Well, Hey There, Cowboy!

And a friendly hello to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. How's tricks, boys? Congress know you've got time to be looking up my blog during working hours?

But D.C. is not the only American visitor to this site. It's also gotten a look from New York, Tennessee, Penssylvania, Nebraska, California, Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Arkansas, Texas and Maryland. 11 down, 39 to go!

And from further a field, there have been recent visits from the Bahamas, the U.K., Ireland, Japan and France. Bonjours mes amis! Ca va bien?

And, of course, hello to all my regular visitors from Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Toronto and Calgary!

Gerry Has Landed!

After seven months of looking at it and thinking about it, and two months after the tentative early expeditions, it's happened.

Gerry has landed! (on the landing)
















And Boo is getting nervous....

Bad Olympic Idea Of The Day - Day One

Imagine. You are Italy. You organize the olympics. Your women's hockey team is competeing. You draw up the schedule. It strikes you as a good idea to have your women's hockey team play Canada on the first day of competition.

After Canada scores 5 goals on 26 shots, and your team manages no goals on only 3 shots, you reconsider. However you take a moment and think that losing by 5 to Canada isn't all that bad. Things could be worse.

Oh, wait a minute. They are worse. That was only the first period...


Update: Game ends 16-0, Canada outshoots Italy 66-5.

What's The Big Deal Afterthought

So, just wondering...

Are the Liberals upset over David Emerson crossing the floor because he got asked and they didn't?

Or is Emerson a bad person for switching parties, or is he a bad person because he's now a Conservative and all Conservatives are evil?

One last poser. Who's worse - the person who asks someone to switch parties or the person that takes up the offer. Is it a party action or a personal action? If Harper's bad for making the offer, then so is Martin. If Stronach is bad for changing parties, than so is Emerson. Or do people's views depend entirely on which party is involved and which person is moving which way.

Personally, and call me crazy, I think it should depend entirely and exclusively on the following question: does it make government better or worse or no different than it was the day before. If the answer is worse, complain and don't re-elect people who do it. If the answer is either of the other two possibilities, what's the problem?

What's The Big Deal, Part Two

So Harper appoints to Cabinet two people who weren't elected as Conservatives. One was a Liberal, one didn't run in the election at all and will be appoited to the Senate in order to be able to take a cabinet seat.

The hue and cry over Martin giving cabinet seats to Stronach and Brison was not that he gave them seats, but that he gave them seats in order to make sure that legislation would pass. David Emerson won't make much difference to voting numbers in the Commons. Conservatives were more annoyed at Stronach and Brison than Martin. BS seemed to have sour grapes after losing the party leadership campaign, and perhaps switched parties to take a run elsewhere (watch for it at a Liberal convention near you). Layton, Harris and Duceppe watch your backs. There's more than two parties in this fair land and Belinda knows it!

Is there a double standard? Perhaps. But something to ponder here. Why did Harper do it? Parliament isn't in session, so it can't be the same kind of vote-buying move that Martin found necessary. Perhaps there are positive sings here. Neither Montreal and Vancouver elected a Conservative MP. But Harper wants a cabinet minister from each of the major cities. Apparently regardless if that city happened to elect someone from his party. This could be (and probably is) a way to entice voters to vote Conservative next time around. It could also be a sign that cities will be important ot this government, which could be important as most people happen to live in one. Maybe it's a good thing that the cabinet is made up of people who the Prime Minister feels are best for the job, regardless of party affiliation.

Now, some people have complained that Emerson wasn't elected as a Conservative and wouldn't have won as a Conservative in his riding. Unless you are a resiednt of Vancouver-Kingsway, it doesn't matter. The Liberal party has claimed that Emerson, as a Conservative would have lost to whoever the Liberal candidate might have been. This is based on the number of Votes Emerson received. If they're right, then both Stronach and Brison should have lost their seats after switching parties instead of winning. Thus suggesting that the candidate is more important than the party they belong to. Which means Emerson would have won.

Fortier's a different matter. Most people would rather have cabinet ministers be people elected to office in the first place. However, Chretien set the precedent for this (though offhand I can't remember if it was Stephane Dion or Pierre Pettigrew...maybe it was both). The better thing to do would seem to be to run Fortier in a by-election somewhere. But is it? Can there be a silver lining here? If Fortier gets appointed to the Senate, thus satisfying the consitituional rerquirements for cabinet appointments, won't it be nice to see a Senator in action somewhere other than the Corel Centre (or whatever it calls itself this week)? Perhaps he'll be a role model for work ethic for other Senators.

Now, if the NDP wants to complain about things, that's fine. Liberals should keep quiet. Harper appears to be following the example of both Chretien and Martin. Canadians gave the Liberals enough votes for over 100 seats, so they must be okay with the Liberal way of things and perhaps shouldn't complain about it too much. But perhaps the other Martin cabinet members are just jealous that Emerson is the only Liberal left on the governing side.

What's The Big Deal?

So Rick Tocchet likes gambling. So does Janet Jones (Janet Gretzky, whatever you want to call her). So what?

The facts: Rick Tocchet is facing charges related to a gambling ring operating in New Jersey.

The speculation: Tocchet and Gretzky are friends and co-workers, therefore Gretzky must be involved in some way, and as they're both former hockey stars now coaching the smae team, the implications for the NHL are massive in proportion, if not downright biblical.

You'd think with the Winter Olympics starting, that people would find something mroe interesting to talk about. If the NHL wants to investigate something, perhaps they should investigate why, in the new NHL, do Pittsburgh, Washington and Chicago still suck beans. Or formulate a theory as to why the NY Rangers do better now, spending about the same as other teams, when they couldn't make the playoffs spending more than every other team.

New Jersey's problem with Tocchet isn't that he likes to gamble. Or that New Jersey thinks gambling is bad. Yes, gambling is illegal in New Jersey, except in Atlantic City's casinos, where an awful lot of gambling goes on all the time. The gambling law is not so much a statment on morals as it is a way to ensure the monopoly of the casinos. New Jersey's problem with Tocchet is that his alleged gambling endeavours weren't taxable.

The inevitable leap in the assumption game is that because Tocchet is a hockey guy, he must have bet on hockey. Therefore he must have bet on games involving his own team. Therefore he must have bet against his team. Therefore, he engineered losses so as to make money. Therefore Gretzky must have been involved. The fact that the Coyotes have never been a good team is proof of match-fixing.

But here's the flaw. The Coyotes have never been a good team. In order for athletes to make money by throwing games, the team has to be good. There's not much margin betting on the Harlem Globetrotters to win, just as there's not much margin on betting on the Washington Generals to lose. The NHL had a lockout because player salaries were at the level of stupidity. With the amount of money players make, there's no financial incentive to throw games. If they were paid twenty grand a year, different story. Also, coaches can't do much to influence a game. Glen Sather won many many games with the Oilers in the 1980s. His coaching was responsible for a few. the players on the roster wre responsible for the rest. Sather did not have the same luck with the Rangers. A potted plant behind a bench occupied by Gretzky, Kurri, Fuhr, et al would have about the same coaching record as Sather, give or take a few. So, for a match-fixing scandal, you need most of the players involved.

The fix works like this. Players on good team bet against themselves in game involving opponent who couldn't possibly beat them, therefore getting great odds and taking home wads of cash. The Coyotes have never faced an opponent that couldn't possibly beat them (check today's NHL standings for confirmation). To play the odds and make money, Coyote players would have to collectively decide to win games, which they've tried to do for years, with fair-to-middling success.

Basic upshot: no big deal to talk of. It's a tax issue. Report On Business readers will be fascinated. That's about it.