Month: April 2012

ASTROLIQUOR for April 27–May 3—What the stars say you should drink!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Here’s your booze horoscope:

You realize you’ve spent the last two months in hell, Aries. Take heart; things are getting better, but you still have to work to avoid a bar fight. This week features new friendships—in particular, a new bond with someone eerily like yourself, which you think is awesome. In psychology circles we call this narcissism. The condition is further fueled by some work success. Your big danger right now is hubris and the associated bar brawl that typifies an Aries weekend. Stay home and teach yourself how to make an Irish coffee.

Taurus, that anxiety you’ve been feeling eases off this week. Now that you’re not afraid of getting reamed out at work, you speak freely—ahhh! A long-absent sense of personal sovereignty returns, and so does your inner hedonist. Do only things you really want to do! Indulge your creative side by messing around with some paint. Or, if you don’t feel like venturing into Walmart to buy paint, make yourself an Absolut Zero: two parts each of vodka, Kahlua, and cream to one part peppermint schnapps. Lovely! Your inner hedonist wants you to have ten of them.

It’s a comfort week, Gemini. You’re all about staying warm, cozy, and non-serious—and you’re on a mission to minimize work. With no patience for deep thought or conversation, you’ll be actively trivial for the foreseeable future. Jettison any tasks that matter and break out the Bacardi 151. Add equal parts brandy and peppermint schnapps, then light the whole thing on fire.

An Aquarian colleague is interested in you, Cancer. Even though this person is creepy, you feel drawn to explore the possibilities. It’s happened to you plenty of times—sheer horniness conquers logic and you end up humping in a closet. This isn’t the only arena where bad judgment will figure this week. You really ought not to drive at all, with all these rutting hormones confusing left from right for you. Oh yeah, and you’ll buy a lot of Hypnotiq for strangers at the pub.

Leo, don’t stew about your recent bad luck. Instead, find the idiots who brought it on you (Libra, Aquarius, or Leo) and let them have it. At least one of these people is a masochist who won’t mind an abusive tirade. After spending the week being an asshole, you’ll find love on Saturday. I see a lot of sherry and tequila involved.

You’ll meet new people this week, Virgo, which is a relief, because you’ve worn out your existing friends. So novel are these newcomers that you’ll feel free to be yourself. Careful! Forcing new friends to read your languishing screenplay is a sure-fire way to drive them off. Why not mix up some Southern Comfort with triple sec and listen to their stories? Just sayin’.

Libra, an industrious urge comes over you, leading you to volunteer every which way. Be careful! If you take on too much, you’ll end up as everybody’s bitch. There’s nothing wrong with the initial impulse, but you do have some douchey friends who’ll take advantage if you let them. In fact, douchey friends are going to come out of the woodwork soon. That’s because you’re finally going to complete your dream bar. It’ll have everything……rum, amaretto, Jager… But how will you pay for it? That’s easy. You’re going to win the lottery on Monday.

Not everyone gets your sense of humor, Scorpio. An acquaintance will try to one-up you this week in the prank department and be totally out of your league. Nothing is out of bounds for you; you’re fully capable of preparing an earthworm sandwich and watching your pal eat it. But there is a hazard to you. In your quest to win, you’ll overspend, leaving only enough cash for paint-thinner gin instead of Bombay Sapphire.

Sagittarius, this week it occurs to you that there are two people in the bed: the other person and you. When you ask your partner how you’re doing, you get an earful—oh, snap! That’s what comes of trying to perform after half a dozen bourbons. The good news is you’re talking about it. The bad news is you might need to modify your lifestyle a little. When it comes right down to it, life’s pretty good—someone offers you money this week for very little work. Yeah!

You get an uncomfortable surprise this week, Capricorn. In fact, everything that happens is a surprise because you’ll be spending 100% of the week hammered. The culprit is (typically) Captain Morgan. When you start drinking that shit on the bus to work, you might as well not show up. Your colleagues think you’re a total space cadet, but you can get away with it for a few days.

Aquarius, good things come in threes, so start counting. First, you’ll meet someone nice—either totally new or someone from your past. Second, work will go smoothly; you won’t even need to take a flask. Third, you’ll go liquor shopping and spend your whole paycheque. How awesome! Start with Jack Daniel’s and fill a shopping cart.

Pisces, you are charmingly oblivious to how offensive you are. That’s a real gift. It enables you to behave in a vacuum, unencumbered by considerations of others. What a perfect state of mind when you’re solo. But it gets better! You’ll meet someone who mirrors these tendencies exactly—perhaps even someone from your old cell block. So immediately connected are you that you almost read each other’s thoughts. When one of you thinks vodka and the other thinks gin, you combine the two.

BROKER’S GIN—PART 8!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Do you ever feel you have a psychic connection to another person? Just yesterday I had the impulse to write to Julia Gale, Business Development Manager for BROKER’S GIN. At least three months had passed since our last contact, and I started worrying. Just before Christmas she had some knee surgery done to correct an injury sustained while busting out to the B-52s song “Love Shack.” I found myself anxious about the operation, the surgeon’s ability, and the general quality of the National Health Service.

Recently my Nana acquired a bionic knee, a procedure so painful that all she could say immediately afterward was “Ow.” (Once she got some meds in her she said things like “That knee surgery turned” and then conked out before finishing the sentence.) So I had a sense of how painful knee surgery could be and I started worrying about Julia—not just about her health but about the general state of things at BROKER’S GIN without her. Conceivably BROKER’S could be falling apart while she hit the nurse button for a double dose of morphine, and then how would any of us get any gin?

So I determined that I would write to her and, if it turned out she was in a terrible spiral of painkiller abuse, attempt to talk her off the ledge and back into the juniper-scented heaven of BROKER’S GIN.

But she’d read my mind and beaten me to it!

Greetings young LB

Are you worried that you’ve been forgotten?  Do you think that Broker’s Gin have given up on a listing in British Columbia?…

I’ll keep you updated!

Jules

Giddy at receiving this email, I sent a response:

Julia, you must be psychic! I was just drafting a letter (in my head) to you. I was getting worried about you and your knee. Just recently my Nana had knee-replacement surgery and was in tremendous pain. She had to exercise considerable strength of will to push away the pain killers. So of course I started thinking about you and your bothersome injury and the Love Shack-style gyrations that induced it. Are you recovered now? Are you off the pain meds or have they become a monkey on your back? Did the surgeon do a good job? I was a bit worried because I know your health care system is similar to ours…you wait a very long time and then sometimes the doctor smells like scotch, but not having to pay is nice.

Anyway, I hope you are well. I hope Martin and Andy visited you in hospital and brought you a flask plus a hefty salary increase.

Did you have an actual knee replacement or something less invasive? I do know something about having foreign objects in one’s body–my ass is full of dried lentils. Just imagine, if there’s ever a famine my family might be tempted to rip my backside open to find soup ingredients. And then I’d have a sagging behind, just like those teenage guys you see slouching down the street with their pants slung impossibly low so the crotch is at the knees and you get the impression that some waist-mounted dwarf is working the controls. Just recently I saw a posse of these dudes in orbit around an attractive teenage girl who was texting purposefully as she walked and thoroughly oblivious of all the falling pants around her. In the space of two minutes I saw each lad yank up his ill-fitting jeans at least once.

So if I lost my lentils, my rear end would look like that. The difference is that it would be naked.

Do you ever get drunk on beer, Julia, or just gin? I recently tried a beer that’s brewed much closer to you than me: Innis & Gunn Original oak-aged beer. It’s one of those sublime products that makes one suspect there is a higher power who cares deeply about one’s alcoholic needs—much like Broker’s Gin. I did check my local government booze shop the other day, incidentally, to see if Broker’s was there yet…but it’s not. But I know that with you back in the game the precious elixir can’t be far now. Ahhhh!

Be well, Julia! I missed you very much and honestly thought I was going to surprise you with a letter…but here you are, you’ve beat me to it.

Cuddles,

LB 

INNIS & GUNN ORIGINAL OAK-AGED BEER really is superb—enough to warrant its own review, written soberly. So that might take a while, but it is percolating between my two brain cells.

In the meantime, especially for you Canadians hanging on every new BROKER’S GIN post to find out when we can expect this ambrosia back in government stores, stay tuned.

Spare the rod…and spare the mindlessness too

My Fellow Inebriates,

Where parenting issues arise at LBHQ, my place is on the sidelines. Being a mere bear and not a biological child means I don’t quite represent the same hope for tomorrow that Misses P and V do in our parents’ eyes. (Would they even rescue me if the house caught fire? OMG! I don’t know.) Not to mention the disappointment of my drinking—my parents aren’t investing too much parenting in yours truly.

But the bio-kids pose all the typical dilemmas that parents encounter. How to build their confidence…how to instill life skills…how to engender empathy…how to provide guidance and discipline? Even if my parents are total screw-ups in myriad ways, they are genuinely anxious about raising the girls properly.

So we all read Unhappy Mommy’s thought-provoking article I don’t spank, and you shouldn’t!

Child abuse at LBHQ 😉

Even though spanking is a non-issue at LBHQ, where the only physical punishment that occurs is administered by children to a certain bear, we live in a demographic that reads Proverbs (although perhaps not Deuteronomy’s more choice bits)—i.e., spare the rod, spoil the child. While you don’t see parents whacking their kids at the playground too often, you frequently hear earnest conversations in which one parent defends to another the place of spanking in the God-fearing dad or mum’s parental toolkit. And even more often you hear these parents threatening their kids with a spanking.

At LBHQ there are no “spanking offenses” on the books. The kids do not live in fear of a hiding. They don’t quake fearfully in remembrance of past spankings. They only even know the word “spank” because it gets used teasingly (and they may have overheard the term “spank the monkey”).

Determined to be nekkid

This is not to say they’ve never received a swat on the bum. My mum recalls (guiltily) the day P refused to have her crappy diaper changed, kicking and screaming her resistance even as excrement leaked from her pants to the floor. She escaped the change mat while still covered in crap and darted across the room, flinging the feces off her body on the way to her clean bedsheets—at which point Mum seized her and gave her bum a smack. She hadn’t managed to persuade P to cooperate, and her frustration got the better of her. This happens to plenty of parents. But parents like mine don’t feel good about it. They rehash the scene for days after, wondering how they could have defused the situation without resorting to physical means.

It’s one thing to lose your cool and feel terrible afterwards. It’s another thing to make a calculated choice to hit your child because you believe a higher authority endorses the action as a disciplinary method.

Checking the stereo out: not a spanking offense but, rather, the early days of supervised audiophilia

Unhappy Mommy does a much better job than I can do outlining the arguments against spanking, going so far as to provide citations to support her position. She writes a balanced, nonjudgmental, and thoughtful piece on the subject. Is it ever a hot-button topic! The comments rolled in, and one commenter particularly caught my attention; she was so inanely self-righteous that I decided to rebut each of her points one by one. I know, I come across as a total asshole, but it bothered me so much that someone could mindlessly take a verse from Proverbs as license to hit a child. Whether you’re an atheist, an agnostic, or a believer, it should be obvious that much of the bible shouldn’t be taken literally (child sacrifice in Judges 11:30-39 for example, or God-sent bears mauling children in 2 Kings 2:23-24). And if some of it shouldn’t be taken literally, why should any of it be taken literally—especially as it applies to modern-day parenting?

I don’t think it’s disrespectful to anyone’s faith to say that as a society we should be able to devise good guidelines about child rearing that consider the optimal well-being of children and utilize any and all science at hand to steer us in the right direction. We are all learning and making mistakes every day—but the biggest mistake is to turn our brains off and dumbly accept one cherry-picked piece of scripture as an edifice on which to base our parental discipline.

Thump! That was me falling off the soapbox. Tomorrow we’ll be back to the usual drunkenness and debauchery. Promise.