Random Idea for a BlackBerry App.

One of the free ‘we are so sorry we screwed up and really hope we don’t go bankrupt soon because our owner is more interested in getting an NHL team than paying attention to us’ applications offered by RIM to blackberry users is shazam.  Evidently, shazam is one of those apps which identify song titles after listening to a few bars.  Kind of like the ‘Name That Tune’ of applications…

If RIM wanted to give me a truly useful application, they would make one that would do the same with voices, so that when I walked into a bar, and the barmaid said ‘Hi Paul.  Do you want a Guinness?’ the app would tell me the barmaid’s name and I wouldn’t have to ask her for a sixth time.

Now that would be a useful app.

Where Did I Eat : Hy’s Steakhouse in Ottawa

Last Tuesday, I had dinner for the first time at Hy’s Steakhouse in Ottawa.  It was not planned and came about after I met friends in the lounge for drinks and found out they had recently gotten engaged.  Even for an embittered, sour old fuck like me, that seemed to be an occasion that called for some sort of celebration.  So that was pretty much the logic behind choosing to eat there:  ‘Well, as we’re already here…’

I will be upfront:  I have never pined to eat at Hy’s.  I have had drinks in the lounge a few times and figured the restaurant to be an old-fashioned, upper end, wood-panelled steakhouse, with a menu that harkened back to an earlier era.  My expectations were met.  The menu reads like a testament to what my parents would have considered a once-in-five-years, special evening out in an upper crust, patrician restaurant:  ‘Look, oysters Rockefeller!’  ‘Ooh, escargot!’  ‘I think I’ll have the shrimp cocktail.’  ‘Oh my, they have lobster on the menu…’ 

And, if you park your foodie sensibilities at the door, there is really nothing wrong with that.  Our meals were solid, if unspectacular, mostly meat and potatoes fare.  I had the beef Carpaccio as an appetizer, which was quite nice and the ‘filet à la Hy’s’, beef medallions drowned in a standard mushroom gravy.  They have an extensive wine list with a wide range of prices.  I was looking to order a British Columbia wine and there was a fair splattering on the list.  We ended up with a bottle of Okanagan Springs Méritage which, once it opened up, was a lovely accompaniment to our various beef entrées.

We had a good time, in great part because of the company.  I was ready to accept that the food, while not overwhelming, corresponded exactly to my expectations, from a restaurant that sells itself above all on creating a particular ambiance, the perfect restaurant where one can have a power lunch or be carried ‘far above the noise and haste of business and political life’… until we ordered the cheese plate.  And that’s when my foodie outrage set in.  I should start with giving them credit, they included both types of cheddar:  white and orange.  Also, some generic blue cheese (possibly Gorgonzola), a brie and, I think, some provolone.  I kid you not.  If a restaurant expects patrons to drop $125 for a three-course meal with wine, then it needs to feature a well-stocked cheese cart.  An assemblage of grocery-store quality cheese slices is just not acceptable.  Heck, I can throw together a much better cheese plate from what’s in my fridge right now.  (And because you are wondering:  Dragon’s Breath from Halifax; Triple Crème du Village from Warwick, Québec; Le Baluchon, an organic raw cow’s milk from Québec; and, one of my favourites, Maroilles from France.)

And that tells you what you need to know about Hy’s.  It is not about the culinary experience; it is about experiencing a throwback era (take your pick: 50’s, 60’s, 70’s?), where going out for a fancy meal would involve a shrimp cocktail, and 1000-island dressing.  If you are looking to get a glance at a politician or a member of the press gallery, pretend for an evening you are an Ottawa power broker or, better yet, have a Mad Men-themed evening, then by all means, Hy’s is the perfect place.

Where I Was : Toronto, Hamilton and Brantford (!), October 21-23.

I just spent three days (October 21-23) in Southern Ontario, to spend some time with some friends and attend two CFL games.  A few thoughts: 

• We attended the Eskimo-Argo game at the Skydome (Rogers Centre) in Toronto on Friday night, and the Lions-TiCat clash at the historic Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton on Saturday night.  This means that we watched half the CFL’s schedule for the week-end.  Now, granted the CFL is a small league, but anytime one can attend 50 per cent of a league’s game over two days, it is kind of cool.

• I had a great time sitting in Box J at Ivor Wynne Stadium.  Ivor Wynne is a pillbox of a stadium, sitting essentially in a working class residential neighbourhood.  One walks past houses to get to the front gate.  The stadium itself, while ancient, is the definition of cozyness, with fans bundled together and overhanging the field.  I was sitting in Row 17 in Box J, on the 35-yard-line and that was the closest I have ever been to the action.  The crowd is loud and raucous, with Pigskin Pete doing the rounds of the stadium leading rounds of ‘Oska Wee Wee’   One of my better CFL experiences.  My Argo fan friends even behaved…

• After seeing Saturday’s night game at Ivor Wynne, I have now attended CFL games at 10 different venues.  The list:  Université de Moncton Stadium; Stade Percival Molson and the Big Owe in Montréal; Frank Clair Stadium/Lansdowne Park in Ottawa; Skydome/Rogers Centre in Toronto; Ivor Wynne in Hamilton; CanadArms Stadium in Winnipeg; Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton; McMahon Stadium in Calgary and BC Place in Vancouver.  So if you’re scoring at home, the only one I am missing is Taylor Field in Regina.  And Grey Cup 2013 should take care of that.

• As for the football, both games were essentially blow-outs, with the difference being that the Eskimos let the Argos back into Friday’s game by allowing three touchdowns in the fourth quarter.  It makes me wonder if they have developed enough of a killer instinct to make it through the West this year.  That being said, with two weeks to go in the regular season, the CFL playoff picture seems wide open right now.  The Lions just rattled off 8 straight wins, but did not look dominant in a win against the Green Riders last week and got manhandled by the Ti-Cat defence.  Calgary just made a QB change with three games to go in the regular season.  While Drew Tate has looked dominant in the past two weeks, he was playing against the league’s two also-rans.  His first real test as a starter will come this upcoming week-end in Montréal.  The situation is not much clearer in the East.  For the first time in years, the Alouettes do not look like a lock to represent the East in the Grey Cup; however, all three playoff teams can look dominant one week and pedestrian the next.  The next few weeks should be fun for CFL fans.
• Accommodation.  On Friday night in Toronto, I stayed at the Hyatt Regency, on King Street W, a few blocks East of Spadina.  The room was large and comfortable, with king size bed.  The room was great, and the hotel is upper-scale and in a great location, next to restaurants, theatres and the Skydome/CN Tower.  I had pre-booked on their website and prepaid $135 for the night, tax included.  This is a good deal, which is evidently not always available.  However, I had to deal with the front desk three times while I was there and twice the attendants were quite haughty and not entirely pleasant.  In addition, their software system appears to be overly-complicated, as both checking in and out took longer than it should have.

Where I was: Boston, MA, October 6-9, 2011.

Highlights of the Trip

1. - Boston Bruins Opening night, October 6^th, TD Gardens

The Bruins raised the Banner.  What else do I need to say?  Fans were on their feet for over an hour, from the moment the Bruins stepped on the ice for their pre-game warm-up, through highlights of the 2011 playoff run, the Cup getting carried around the ice, the official ceremonies, the raising of the banner to the opening face-off.  The joint was loud, but the loudest ovation was probably reserved for the President of the team, former Bruin great Cam Neely, clearly still beloved in Beantown.  A great touch for a fan-boy like me, and a recognition of the history of the franchise was bringing out veterans from the 1971-72 Cup winning squad (Don Marcotte, Derek Sanderson, Pie McKenzie, Ken Hodge, Johnny Bucyk and of course Bobby) along with Milt Schmidt to assist the 2011 team with the raising of the banner.

2. - The Stata Center, MIT

When I travel, I like walking around cities, exploring neighbourhoods.  Sometimes I have a plan and seek out points of interest, other times, I just walk around and hope to run into something worthwhile.  Suddenly rounding a corner on the MIT campus and being hit by a wave of utter joy at discovering the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center was one of those times.  Between the chrome, the brick, the rounded corners, the off-angled towers and the adjacent receding and protruding walls, the building looks like it was designed by MC Escher in an imaginative fit of drunkenness.  The accompanying pictures will not do it justice;  this has to be seen to be believed.

3. - The Bukowski Tavern, Back Bay

It is a hole in the wall, more precisely, in the wall of a multi-storey parking structure.  In addition to an extensive selection of bottled beers, the it features 20 or so beers on tap, most of which are local or regional micro-breweries, including their own extremely drinkable house brew, an IPA-style beer, with a bit more of a kick to it due to using Canadian rye as one of the grains.  The list of daily specials is entitled ‘The Fucking Specials’.  Whilst I was in there on Saturday (twice), they played the Talking Heads, Etta James, the best of Ike and Tina Turner, and, wait for it… the CD version of The Last Waltz…

So, yeah, now that you ask, one of the best bars I have ever been in.

Accommodation

The Colonnade Hotel, on Harrington Ave in Back Bay. Large room, with king sized bed.  Well located, right on the Green Line (E) and near Mass Ave.  The staff was extremely pleasant and helpful.  Paid roughly $845 for three nights through hotels.com, although I could have cut about $100 off that had I booked a bit earlier.  A good choice.

Food

Dinner on Saturday night at Troquet, a lovely, upscale restaurant on Boylston Street, overlooking the Common.  For connoisseurs, they feature a very extensive wine list.  For those of us who generally dine alone, they have almost 60 wines by the glass.  Every dish on the menu comes with a number of proposed pairings from that list, and the waiter serving me was quite helpful with his suggestions.  The menu is quite diverse, ranging from seafood to suckling pig.  For my entrée, I had the assiette of Vermont lamb, essentially, lamb cooked three different ways and served with fava beans, faro and black mission fig caponata.  It was amazing; I could have had seconds...  The high point of the meal for me was the cheese cart, which had been tantalizingly parked across from my table all night, and included a selection of over 10 types of cheeses.  I settled on a Tomme de Savoie, a fairly standard soft goat’s cheese, I think from Italy, and a lovely ewe’s milk cheese, again from Italy, which was quite strong, but not overwhelmingly so.  (Unfortunately, I forgot to enquire as to the specific name…)  I was a bit surprised at the lack of local cheeses; I do not know what the state of the dairy industry is in New England, but would have thought that there would have been at least a few local selections, rather than it being completely European.  Overall bill for three courses, wine and tip: $145 US, which for that type of restaurant is good value for the cost.

Friday lunch at Neptune Oyster Bar, on Salem Street in the North End.  I was a bit surprised at how small the place was; I think there may be in total roughly 60 seats, including the bar.  Be prepared to wait, but the hostess was taking down cell phone numbers in order for customers to walk around the North End as they waited for the table, a nice, modern touch which has the added advantage of not clogging up their front door with waiting patrons.  The Neptune features an extensive selection of fresh oysters, and a predominantly seafood-based menu.  After looking around at what other patrons were having, I ordered the very popular lobster roll, served warm with melted garlic butter.  I am not a huge lobster fan, but this was extremely tasty, and a quite generous portion to boot.  With a beer (the local Harpoon IPA, on tap), bill came to $40.  I will definitely go back.

I checked out a couple of places for brunch. The Woodward, in the Ames Hotel, downtown near the Old State House, serves a great hash; I had the chorizo and roasted pepper, but they serve 5 other flavours. The Beehive is on Tremont Street in the South End.  I had their signature dish, the Eggs Shakshuka, ‘a real Bohemian breakfast’ i.e., two sunnyside eggs with spicy tomato sauce and polenta.  For week-end brunch, there is a three-piece jazz band, which sounds pretty much like any other three-piece jazz bands.  Both brunches were quite good and a good start to both days of walking around.  (Both these restaurants had been featured in a recent article in the NY Times, ’36 Hours in Boston’.  Incidentally, I have found the ’36 Hours in…’ series invaluable in planning short stays in major US cities.)

Theo Epstein

I am a bit ambivalent about Theo Epstein leaving the Red Sox.

First off, Theo is the architect of the 2011 Red Sox.  The lingering after-taste of watching this team sleep-walk through its September swoon may be somewhat colouring my assessment.  With most players either seemingly not caring or appearing to be physically spent as the schedule entered September, this team ended up being so much less than the sum of its parts.  It’s unfortunate that this becomes his coup de grâce, but Theo has got to wear some of that.

It is also surprising at how little success he had in recent years on the free agent market.  Since 2004, Theo’s signings include the likes of John Lackey, Carl Crawford, Edgar Renteria, Matt Clement, Julio Lugo, Mike Cameron and, oh, did I mention Carl Crawford…  According to Baseball-reference.com, for the cumulative 11 seasons these 6 players spent with the Sox their overall salary dollars were $124.7 million and their cumulative WAR 3.1.  That’s a cool $40 million per win…

So who are Theo’s free agent successes since 2004?  While he never met expectations that came with his $100 million price tag, the Dice-K signing was not an unmitigated disaster either.  He had a couple of decent years in 2007 and 2008, but in the past three years, Dice-K has thrown a total of 250 innings (250.1 to be exact; gotta love those round numbers), and has had below average ERAs.  (His best ERA+ was 93 in 2010).

I also hemmed and hawed about including JD Drew in the above lists of bust, but Drew pretty much delivered what should have been expected five years ago: an overall WAR of 13.0, no smiles, countless 8-pitch ABs which started off 0-2 and ended up with a pop-up to right on a 3-2 count and a grand slam in Game 6 of the 2007 ALDS which went a long way to burying the Indians.  He was also far less brittle than expected; his missing half the 2011 season can be attributed to JD being in his age 35 season, rather than some innate Drew brittleness.  So there's a strong argument that, since 2004, running the franchise with the second or third largest player salary budget in MLB, Theo’s best free agent signing was JD Drew.  JD Drew and Marco Scutaro.  And that's a bit sad.

On the plus side of the ledger, well, obviously 2004 and 2007.  Beyond that, since 2003, Theo assembled teams which were legitimately expected to contend for the World Series every year.  By all indications, he put talent evaluation and scouting on solid footing, which lead to consistently solid amateur drafts yielding key franchise building blocks (Lester, Pedroia, Elsbury, Papelbon) and prospects that were used to trade for stars such as Adrian Gonzalez and Curt Schilling and other mid-season acquisitions as needed.

Some of Theo’s early moves in assembling the ‘Idiots’ were inspired.  In a five-week stretch in early 2003, he acquired four key contributors to the 2003 and 2004 teams (and beyond): signing Bill Mueller and Big Papi as free agents, claiming Bronson Arroyo off waivers and purchasing the contract of Kevin Millar from the Marlins.  Getting these four for next to nothing has got to be as brilliant a stretch of generally managing as there is.  After the bullpen-by-committee experiment did not work out in 2003, Theo changed directions signed Keith Foulke as a free agent in 2004.  And then, on the trade deadline in 2004, he pulled the trigger on the Nomah trade, one of the gutsier (and more correct) moves I’ve seen from a GM.

All in all, despite the free agent failings and the 2011 disaster (which just keeps getting compounded), Theo will be missed.  He restored order to the franchise and along with Terry Francona, he was the face of management.  Now they are both gone.  And given what happened this week, with the callous, anonymous attacks on Francona, there has to some concern that this franchise may be heading towards settling for comfortable mediocrity over the next few years.

What I’m Reading… ‘Star Island’ by Carl Hiaasen

To begin, some clarifications:

1. The title for this post is wrong.  I will not actually be reading the book on which I am posting; I will have just finished it.  ‘What I’m reading’ sounds catchier than the more accurate ‘What I’ve just read’ and far less pretentious than ‘Book Review’. So, for now, I am sticking with it.
2. I generally do not buy hardcovers.  If you are expecting random thoughts about just published books, you are at the wrong blog.  What you will get are random thoughts and observations on whatever book I have just finished and about which I have decided to blog.

So on to ‘Star Island’.

Originally published in 2010, and recently issued in paperback, ‘Star Island’ is Hiaasen’s 12^th and most recent novel about Florida.  How can one tell this is a Hiaasen novel:

• it quite funnily rails against the rape of Florida by unscrupulous real estate developers and politicians, ‘greedy suckworms disguised as upright citizens’;
• one of the main characters is a young, strong, intelligent woman, probably to counter-balance the ditzes, bimboes and other random products of plastic surgery peppered throughout the novel;
• it features an ex-con with a physical quirk.  OK, in this case, a myriad of physical quirks;
• Skink; and
• Carl Hiaasen’s name is in big red letters on the front cover.

So ‘Star Island’ is fairly standard Hiaasen fare.  If you’re a fan, then you’ll be pleased.  If you’re new to Hiaasen, it will give you a taste of what his writing is all about.  Essentially, using a mixture of quirky sense of humour and an almost casual approach to near-cartoonish violence, the novel follows the usual formula.  Characters act with a near-pathological self-interest in seeking out and benefitting from, any and all deals, scams, projects or schemes, whether legal or not, with no regards to the immediate or long-term consequences.  It definitively is a formula, one which has started to feel a bit stale in recent Hiaasen’s recent novels.

That being said, there are two definite plusses to ‘Star Island’:

• The main story revolves around the music industry.  By my recollection, not since creating the seminal punk band Jimmy and the Slut Puppies in ‘Sick Puppy’ has Hiaasen written about the industry and excoriated its managers, publicists, star-makers and star-fuckers.
• Some of the characters seem to have more depth than in previous novels.  Chemo, the afore-mentioned ex-con, and even, on some level, Bang Abbott, the paparazzo at the middle of the main story, while acting with an oft-times unhealthy measure of self-interest, have some moral or behavioural lines which they will not cross.  Hopefully, this is a sign that there is some room to freshen up the Hiaasen formula.

All in all, while I started off a bit apprehensive about whether ‘Star Island’ may feel like it was Hiaasen going through the motions, ‘Star Island’ turned out to be worth a read.

Let's give this a shot...

I'm not entirely sure about this, but here it goes.  As the title says, this will contain sundry random pronouncements about trips, sports, various books I'm reading and, most probably, whatever happens to really piss me off at any given moment.  And, friendly (and at this point, probably non-existant) readers, there will most probably be more than a few of those...

I intend to switch between posting in English and French.  If that's an issue, then don't read the posts you don't understand, whether you're fluent in the language or not...