alcohol

Elevenses

My Fellow Inebriates,

You’d think I’d be hard to catch, being very small and usually concealed say, under the toilet for a post-cocktail nap, but the other day I got tagged by Unhappy Mommy. Yes!

Elevenses…Pooh reaches for some honey lager.

For wild bears the word “tagged” conjures up a lot more than blogging conviviality. My friend Scary, who claims to have been caught in a leghold trap prior to his Toys R Us sojourn and purchase, would get very ornery at being tagged, but I kind of like it.

Unhappy Mommy gave me the following rules: I have to answer one of her 11 questions and then pose 11 of my own to 11 other bloggers.

Of all the times-table problems, 11×11 has always been a bitch for me. I can remember all of them, people, but for some reason I trip on 11×11. And 11×12. And of course 11×13, etc. I think it’s because the 11 times tables set you up for ease of calculation: 11, 22, 33, blah blah blah. And then, HOLY FREAKING SHIT, what the hell does 11×11 amount to? I guess I have some elevenish baggage.

Unhappy Mommy asked a lot of questions that really demand they be answered by a person of more depth. But you get what you get with LB, so I’m answering this one:

What is your favorite part of your day?

Absolutely, the best part of the day is Happy Hour, although it’s more of a notion in our household than an actual recurring ritual. For the obvious reasons I don’t care much for mornings, although I’ve had some good ones—this one for instance:

And now for my questions:

  1. Did you have a lovable animal when you were little, and was there a point when you decided it was childish? What was the trigger?
  2. Do you believe in astrology? Why or why not?
  3. Do you think there’s a divide between physiological addiction and physical addiction, and where do you think alcoholism falls?
  4. Is there any topic that you consider absolutely out of bounds as far as humor goes?
  5. How much attention do you pay to politics?
  6. Are you hopeful about our planet? Why or why not?
  7. If you are a parent, how is your parenting different from your parents’? Is this deliberate? Why or why not?
  8. What is the most memorable book or movie for you?
  9. How many “presences,” for lack of a better word, do you have on the web? Are they true to who you are in real life, or do you maintain some distance between your web representation and your private reality?
  10. What’s the closest you’ve ever been to death?
  11. Do you prefer your martini with gin or vodka?

And now for my 11 blogging peers. If I could compel you to answer all 11 questions I would, because you’re fascinating writers and I’d love to know your answers. But the 11×11 rules say pick just one. (Feel free to break the rules.)

On My Square 

Snide Reply 

Zen in the City 

Kitchen Slattern 

The Waiting 

Oh God, My Wife Is German 

Ashley Jillian

Damp Squid

The Dogs of Beer

Becoming Cliché 

Rinse and/or Repeat 

INNIS & GUNN OAK AGED BEER—Mass quantities wanted

My Fellow Inebriates,

Our whole family sucks at bookkeeping, so tax time is a real slog. Just recently my dad collapsed his decade-old business to go over to the corporate dark side, which is great for predictability and creating a beer budget, but leaves him with the task of tying off loose ends. We have a jumble of paperwork to organize if we truly want to give all the nuttiness of self-employment the heave-ho. As we go through our business-related assets we’re flipping a bunch of them face-down like Monopoly properties, which is depressing yet liberating.

At least for my parents. For me there’s a bottom line hanging at the end of all this nasty mathematics. What’s our booze budget going to be?

Based on 2008 figures, the average Canadian household spends 1.8% of its income on alcohol (in the U.S.it’s 1% because prices are lower and there’s less excise tax).

THIS DOESN’T SEEM LIKE VERY MUCH!

Consider this breakdown for Canadian and U.S.households:

Source: Statistics Canada

Wow! There must be some areas we can trim and/or reallocate to the alcohol category.

  • I can’t do anything about housing or the car, but maybe we can choose our food more carefully. Arguably Guinness is a food. Let’s commit to having Guinness at every meal and thereby reallocate 4%.
  • What about recreation/entertainment? What do they consider alcohol if not that? We should lump alcohol with recreation/entertainment. It’s not like we do anything entertaining anyway. We don’t even go to the movies. Let’s borrow 5% or so from recreation/entertainment for alcohol. That puts us up to 10.8%.
  • As for clothing, I’m happy to remain naked, but the thought of my parents strolling around the house with their gear showing is…beyond the pale flabbiness…
  • No getting around health care, but what is personal care? Correct me if I’m wrong, but a proper drunk doesn’t go in for personal hygiene and such. Let’s take 2% of that for alcohol. Ahhh, we’re getting somewhere: 12.8%.
  • Too bad about education. While my parents won’t be dipping into this fund again, with their hodgepodge educational attainments just sufficient to make them obnoxious at bookstores, the kids will be hitting the family up for university in a dozen years. Yikes…would it be so wrong to take a tiny bit of that for…sigh.
  • But look! Miscellaneous is my kind of category. The best kind of miscellany occurs at the liquor store. Adding 2.6%, which gives us 15.4%…looking better.
  • And here’s another useful category for our purposes: tobacco. It’s useful because we don’t use it—I’d love to take on another vice but I’m afraid of catching fire. Score another 1.2%, bringing us to 16.6%.
  • Lastly, reading. I mentioned my parents are obnoxious at bookstores. They ask for weird books and special orders. They hate borrowing books; they like to fondle their own for an unlimited time, dog-earing and coffee-ringing the pages. Plus there’s my dad’s Audible account—with a two-hour daily commute it takes him no time to burn through a narrated book.

So that’s that, my fellow inebriates. Budgeting carefully, we should be able to elevate the standard Canadian liquor expenditure of 1.8% to a more reasonable 16.6% at LBHQ.

If you ask me (and nobody has) our first purchase should be INNIS & GUNN OAK AGED BEER. Billed as a smooth Scottish beer with hints of toffee, vanilla, and oak, this fine product leapt off our local booze shop’s shelf when my dad went on his recent onesie spree. Of the miscellany he brought home it was the most delightful brew—the sort of ale we could all have fought to the death for if we had a bit more energy, and a lovely contrast to some of the weird things my dad bought that day.

Brownish amber with a finger (for those of you who have them) of off-white foam and some feisty carbonation, INNIS & GUNN OAK AGED BEER sidles up to your olfactory centre like it’s known you all its life. Psssst, it urges—caramel…toffee…early-morning bakery…oak…Scotch malt—and blammo! It has you by the short fur, caressing your senses with its whisky redolence. This beer has stunning complexity. The notes aren’t unplaceable; instead they conjure up scented memories of highlands, lowlands, peat and damp. INNIS & GUNN has you at smell, but wait until you sip, because that’s when it really grabs you under the kilt.

Yes, those toffee hints pay off in a complicated, balanced, malty, buttery symphony and an achingly beautiful oak-tinged finish. It was a crime that we had only one INNIS & GUNN bottle, people, and that my parents shared it between them. And the alcohol? Damn fine at 6.6%.

Following my new financial plan I’m recommending we earmark funds for at least 10 cases of this fine Scottish ale and I suggest all my fellow inebriates do the same—as long as you don’t clean out my liquor store.

Liquidity support? Support these liquids, Harper

My Fellow Inebriates,

CBC reported today that during the recession Canadian banks received $114 billion in bail-out money.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper using a kitten to elicit your empathy—the way I'll get page views by tagging this post "cute pictures of kittens."

Of course we don’t call it “bail-out money” in Canada. We call it “liquidity support,” and it amounted to $3,400 for every man, woman, and child in Canada. Whereas 436 U.S. banks went under during the recession, liquidity support kept all of Canada’s lending institutions out of the shit, supplying—at times—more than 150% of those institutions’ worth.

Getting to the bottom of these numbers will take more than the efforts of a drunken bear.

Despite applications for full disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, the Bank of Canada refuses to release its accounting. Details of today’s report came from the U.S. Federal Reserve, which publicly released data on a U.S. program into which Canadian banks had dipped (in addition to taking their Canadian handout)—Canadian banks that ultimately posted combined profits of $27 billion when all was said and done.

Gimme that beer.

Meanwhile, little knowing how far underwater Canadian banks had sunk, we all continued to pay usurious credit card interest, got bilked on monthly “service” charges at institutions where the so-called services had long since been fully automated, saw the removal of services in return for said service charges, endured who knows how many dinner-time insurance sales calls, and—for the privilege of taking out a mortgage with one of these stable lenders—ponied up $20K in insurance money to insure not our risk but the bank’s. Oh yeah.

If the kids asked what a “bank” was we’d say it was a place to save money—a place where your money is safer than it would be under the mattress. Canadians often crow about the safety of their banking, but as it turns out, we pay dearly for that security.

So to you, Stephen Harper, with your selectively socialist impulse, bite me. I want my $3,400 back. I have a bar to stock, and you’ll be getting my shopping list.

Lucky me, I have a conservative MP to whom I can address my concerns.