parenting

WHISTLER BREWING COMPANY PARADISE VALLEY GRAPEFRUIT ALE—Pony up for something different

They’re under 40 inches tall and they’re running the show. By the smaller-is-more-powerful logic I, at 7”, should be Supreme Dictator at LBHQ, able to demand tequila, crème de bananes, Everclear, Bacardi 151, limitless vodka and whatever else takes my fancy.

Instead the budget is being blown on Goldfish crackers, apple sauce, shoes that get outgrown every two months, and—OMG! ponies.

When I last reported on the pony situation there were 21 My Filly ponies available, each with its own vapid biography.

Hidden in one of the “blind bags” that package these 21 available ponies is the ultra-rare Princess Crystal, whose crown contains “CRYSTALLIZED™ Swarovski Elements”—which is to say this one coveted pony may actually be worth its $2.99 price. The other ones we just have to call “priceless” for the joy they bring they bring the kids.

But seriously, pursuing Princess Crystal and all the other not-yet-obtained ponies in the pony family tree (they’re inbred like characters in a Russian novel) could take a million years and bankrupt us. If the girls remain obsessive about acquiring the precious Swarovski jewel, they’ll be returning weekly to Toy Traders years from now when their peers are spending their allowances on crystal meth. To date the equivalent of two cases of beer has been invested in ponies.

For a while we thought the pony preoccupation was ending. The kids have at least 15 now, which means—since they come in an opaque foil bag and you can’t tell what you’re buying—they’re starting to get doubles. What started out as a feel-good Saturday activity has become potentially disappointing; the kids feel burned when a bag contains a duplicate. Enough doubles and we could be out of this pony business and on to something else.

But the My Filly outfit is way ahead of us. Not wanting to let go of their captive little obsessive-compulsives, they made the sort of marketing move that makes any parent in thrall to kid-targeted marketing bullshit say, “Oh, fuck.” They multiplied the pony selection, creating four color schemes for each of the 21 characters, reinvigorating every little girl’s impossible quest to complete the set—without bothering to design new characters, create new molds, or otherwise incur any investment aside from a bit of dye. Now we have 85 to collect (Princess Crystal still being one-of-a-kind). Our finances will be ransomed to these bloody ponies.

I was quite upset at this exponential pony growth. But after fretting about the beer money involved in buying 85 ponies ($284.75 with tax if you’re lucky enough never to get a double), I realized what a common marketing move My Filly had made. In fact, it’s no different from the strategies employed by companies such as Absolut with its 13 vodka varieties.

As I keep telling my dad, having a complete bar matters. If we stock our bar with every vodka we can think of, and then Smirnoff introduces marshmallow-flavored vodka, we have to get it. Likewise, Bacardi…I have no idea how many flavors they’re marketing but we need them all so we can feel part of this great…alcoholic wonderland. And if another wacky spirit comes out—Bakon vodka, for example—we need that too.

The cynical cookie-cutter marketing of flavored spirits is a model for companies such as My Filly who seek to enlarge market share without really creating anything new. Whereas wine tends to be marketed with the opposite philosophy (individuality being the hallmark of higher-end wine), spirit manufacturers keep yours truly on the hook for every trendy new permutation while barely moving a muscle. Or at least they would if my parents indulged me and stocked our bar.

And what about beer? Brewers have probably done the most marketplace maneuvering of any liquor-manufacturing group, especially over the last three decades. When my parents sneaked their first sips from their parents’ beer bottles back in the ‘70s, those bottles were stubbies containing one of probably four lagers (think Black Label or Carling Pilsner). And when they tasted these entry-level beers, they said aaaahhhh! because there wasn’t anything else. Nobody was making their own. The microbrewing explosion hadn’t happened yet. There weren’t any dickhead neighbors brandishing a craft beer to envy. Options to macro brews didn’t exist. Back then, you drank your Black Label and loved it.

Enter the 1980s. With the proliferation of microbreweries came a disdain among beer drinkers for the metallic blandness of macro brews. As small-time competition ramped up, macro breweries thrashed about for new marketing gimmicks, introducing ice beer (ingeniously frozen to skim off extra water and thereby increase the alcohol concentration) and extra-strong beer—tweaks to ABV without much attention to taste. Meanwhile brew pubs (which are still illegal in some Canadian provinces) upped the ante, crafting beers with character and inserting their market presence into bars and restaurants—creating the demand that would finally enable them to carve out substantial territory on liquor-store beer shelves. Macro beer fought back with unbeatable pricing, half-naked swimsuit models, and massive bulk packaging. But the genie was out of the bottle—people wanted micro beer. They wanted distinctive flavors and characteristics. Just the way Malcolm Gladwell describes consumers wanting dozens of varieties of spaghetti sauce, people wanted variety in beer.

And yet…

People want variety, but not too much variety. Gladwell notably points out a study in which people were asked what characteristics they like in coffee. Interviewees said they appreciate a full, rich, dark roast. But the reality is that most people enjoy a thin, watery, light roast purchased at a place like Tim Horton’s. They like the idea of all those rich qualities, but their actual tastes are on a different page.

And beer companies have realized this is true of their market too. People say they want rich, malty, hoppy craft beers with lots of flavor going on, but in reality they often prefer a bland, fizzy, metallic macro lager. They identify with the former product but in the final analysis prefer the latter.

This isn’t everybody of course, but if you were marketing beer and you realized this schizophrenic aspect to the market, you’d want to cast as wide a net as possible. The result is a multiplicity of product in what used to be the beer aisle and is now a full third of the liquor store.

The safest way to promote a less-than-mainstream beer seems to be to package it with three other beers in a sampler pack. We’ve purchased a few of these variety packs lately—mostly so I’ll have something to review and you won’t have to read me going off about ponies or hemorrhoids versus asteroids.

Invariably a sampler pack represents a compromise. My dad doesn’t really go for IPAs and my mum isn’t crazy about fruity flavors. Neither of them gravitates to a standard lager—and yet one is always included in a sampler pack for the sake of wide appeal. Typically a sampler pack contains an ale, a couple of lagers, and something weird. How freaking weird that fourth item is depends on the bravery or marketplace complacency of the brewer. With an established popular base you can presumably do anything.

Which was my first thought when my Nana and Papa brought us a Whistler Brewing Company Travel Pack containing two lagers, and ale, and PARADISE VALLEY GRAPEFRUIT ALE. Holy shit! I thought—who would combine grapefruit and beer? WTF? How well-established and complacent must the Whistler Brewing Company be that it can marry such bizarrely different flavors?

There was nothing for it but to crack one of the damn things.

Billed as a summer ale, PARADISE VALLEY GRAPEFRUIT ALE has a malty blonde base with grapefruit zest and coriander. This sounded really gross but intriguing nonetheless. We poured it into a tumbler where it sat orangely and opaquely with about 1/3 of a paw of head. It was leering at us, daring us to try it in its grapefruity way.

The citrus aroma is unmistakable, but whereas a lemon beer hits you with sourness and a candy tartness, PARADISE VALLEY GRAPEFRUIT ALE is all about zesty bitterness. Whistler Brewing has incorporated the dry depth of grapefruit zest without the tanginess—amazing! The grapefruit notes play nicely with the other malty, bready aromas.

On the palate grapefruit comes through clearly but doesn’t upstage the beer. Yes, this is a beer first and foremost—and although it has some serious bitter fruit to it, it doesn’t let you forget it’s a beer. The bitterness of the zest and the hops have a sophisticated interplay that wisely takes a backseat to the wheat backbone.

With moderate carbonation and a reasonable 5% alcohol, PARADISE VALLEY GRAPEFRUIT ALE is both refreshing and unusual. It’s definitely worth seeking out either in the bottle or on tap.

A six-pack is worth about four ponies, so you might have to wrestle a little girl for the money. Again, well worth it.

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.

We have to open that mescal bottle sometime

My Fellow Inebriates,

For the third time a head-lice notice has come home from the school. As always it says “A CASE OF HEAD-LICE HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED IN YOUR CHILD’S CLASSROOM”—although, if you bother to ask the teacher, this is a form letter, and “the case,” in this case, occurred in another classroom.

Nits!!!

The thing that scares my parents most about head lice is cleaning the house. If the bugs nest on your kid’s head, you have to tear the house up, vacuum and bleach, seal things in bags—never mind comb out the critters and do the chemical hair treatment, all the while undoubtedly listening to some misguided neighbor ranting that the special shampoo is carcinogenic.

For filthy people like my mother the idea of vacuuming the whole house—i.e., every room in one go—is completely novel. Vacuuming the upholstery would be unthinkable. So there’s a big temptation to stay home and wait out a lice scare. But of course we can’t do that. For one thing, yours truly would get a lot of additional playtime and possibly need some parts sewn up.

The other solution would be to shave the kids’ heads—something my mother would be all over if it wouldn’t attract the wrong kind of concern. One of P’s little friends recently took the scissors to her own head, and her parents—hard-core Langley homeschoolers unable to conceive of a punked-out hairstyling solution, buzz-cut the girl’s hair, little knowing that from then on well-meaning neighbors would inquire relentlessly about “the chemo” and even bring casseroles over. Since my mother is afraid of attracting weird neighbors, shaving the kids’ heads is out.

Luckily the school already instructs the kids about personal boundaries, discouraging hat and jacket sharing as well as hugs (there’s an actual policy against hugging for grades one to seven), all of which is defeated by the dress-up gear in the preschool room consisting of every kind of hat and helmet imaginable, and obviously available for heavy sharing. Which means head lice invariably originate in preschool (where kids trade hats) and kindergarten (where the ban on hugging isn’t enforced).

Of course lice don’t stay confined to those lower grades because, when the recess bell goes, all the kids run out onto the same playground where they forget the regulations and swap hats, jackets, and hugs.

So there’s not much you can do to prevent lice, I guess, although I did pose one suggestion to my parents: soak the kids’ heads in mescal. If it’s enough to kill that big caterpillar larva in my tantalizing blue bottle, surely it can scare off any roving head lice.

For someone who doesn’t like the word “retarded,” my mother sure throws it at me a lot. She said her world was interesting enough without Child Services being involved, thank you very much, you brain-damaged bear.

I thought it was pretty generous to offer my bottle of mescal. But let’s face it, I can’t get it open anyway by myself. We need a reason to open it. Would it be so weird to sniff it from the kids’ hair?