Anywhere Doug and I go is guaranteed to be interesting.  We seem to attract odd people and events like magnets of blood and bone.  Last late summer around this time was certainly no exception.

Spurred on by a need to imbibe vast quantities of alcohol, as usual, we decided to take a Sunday drive one day and stop by Peller Estates.  Peller Estates is one of the premier producers of wine in the Niagara region, even though last year they had to buy a shiteload of their grapes from South America because the crops were so horrid for 2006 and 2007.  This hardly affected the quality of the wine, merely its carbon footprint.

We signed up for a wine tour and tasting, with a wine and food pairing class to follow with one of the employees of the winery.  As it has been a while I can’t remember the poor man’s title, but it was something equivalent to brewmaster.  We went on the tour and it was quite informative; we learned how to “chuff” wine.  I almost lost my cookies when the tour guide started chuffing, until I realized that it was “OK” - amazing what socialization will do.  Chuffing involves essentially gargling the wine at the back of your throat to get the full flavour.  Wine enthusiasts are probably passing out from the simplicity of that explanation; to pacify them I will say that there is probably more to it than that.

The lady from the front desk came striding down the stairs on a mission.  That mission was to get us away from the tour group and send us up to our classroom, pronto.  We asked her if it was starting early, as we had thought that it was timed to start with the end of the tour.  She smiled blankly and just begged us to come upstairs.  We deduced later that the instructor must have hit the panic button under the boardroom table and this was her answer to it.

We walked into the room and there were wineglasses set up for us, each for a different type of wine.  There were also little plates of appetizers, each containing different combination of meats and cheeses.  There was a very scared looking instructor, and only one other couple.  The couple, of course, is why I am writing this for you, my eager readers.

The woman was stunning.  I don’t mean that kind of airbrushed stunning that you see in a magazine, but that real life, flesh and blood stunning that makes women like her extremely rare jewels.  She was casually dressed in an informal outfit - not jeans and a t-shirt but not over the top either.  Her hair and makeup were perfectly done.

The guy was a different story.  Tall and lanky, this guy got more than a few wedgies in high school.  Heck, we wanted to give him one about ten minutes after meeting him.  Outspoken and strident, to look at them you would think that there was no way the guy could have netted this lady unless he was a porn star.

We reserved judgment, made small talk, and I noticed that the lady had an accent.  I asked her what her background was and she said that she had recently immigrated from Russia, with a furtive glance at her husband.  That’s when the sun dawned on both of our little mental beaches - she was a mail order bride.

What ensued could have been a Mad TV or SNL skit, only I don’t think that they could have made this shit up.  The instructor, who was very low key and unpretentious, found himself having to deal with multiple outbursts from the lanky weirdo, who claimed to know one of the Peller kids.  The instructor asked him which one and he gave a name that the instructor had never heard of.  The instructor wrote it off to “Peller” being a common name, but you could tell he was trying to put the smackdown on this pretentious git.  He then went on about making his own wine on the balcony of his condo in Toronto, and essentially took over the conversation from there.  All the while he was twirling his Masonic ring, which we had been informed belonged to his father, who was “quite high up” in the organization.  I have never in my life met someone so keen to impress people.

When his lovely wife upstaged him with a rare remark, he essentially told her to be quiet.  This wasn’t one of those “be quiet honey, you shouldn’t really be telling anyone about that mole on my nutsack” sort of quiet, it was more the “be quiet or I’ll ship you back to Russia, you good for nothing whore” kind of be quiet.

The instructor rushed through the session as quickly as possible to just get them out of the room.  I’m sure we learned many wondrous things that day, such as the fact that wine goes with whatever you want it to go with and the traditional pairings of white with chicken and fish and red with steak had been tossed out aeons ago.    Mr. Wannabe Mason didn’t like that piece of advice at all - he had brought his mail order wife to that class so that they would look very educated and cool at the dinner parties that they probably held for his loud, obnoxious friends and he wanted to know what went with what, goddamit.  He actually resorted to picking up each wine and asking the instructor to tell him what he would serve with it - I believe the wife was writing it down.  It was a pity because the whole point of the class was how to enjoy wine with food, not how to classify wine with food.  We got it, and have since applied the lesson generously.

When we left we waited until they left the room, then the instructor left, then us.  I tapped the instructor on the shoulder and said “were you thinking what we were thinking” and he looked at me and said “hell, yes.”  We had a good laugh and he talked to us for a further 10-15 minutes about his job and the estate, and we shook hands and parted ways in bemusement over our shared experience.

The moral here?  Guys, if you have to do the mail order bride thing, don’t treat her like one in public.  It’s extremely creepy and not to mention disrespectful to her.  I wanted to grab the poor thing and enroll her in a Woman’s Studies course at the University of Toronto just so she could get more of a sense that she didn’t have to sit there and take that, regardless of how she got over here.  I guess that the message for mail order brides is that if the guy you married is an asshole in general when you get here, you don’t owe him jack.  Nothing.  Leave, and go to a halfway house where he can’t find you.  The way most of you look you will have no trouble getting a job anywhere, in this lady’s case she could have been a supermodel.  I may not have been able to help her, but I’m hoping someone reads this who is in a similar situation and it gives them the gumption to get out.  It may have been funny, but it was also very sad.

I’m sure she’s not allowed to chuff.

Posted: September 4th, 2008 under Anarchy, Food & Drink.
Comments: none

This is a fun little meme, as well as being a bit accurate in my case.

Go to Google and type in quotation marks your name and then “likes to” (ex. “Tom likes to”). Type in the first ten things that come up and repost in your own note.

Angela likes to wear bandanas while playing

Angela likes to read various pieces on liturgy

Angela likes to write, watch movies and hang out with friends and family

Angela likes to dance

Angela likes to say to people ‘If I can do this, I believe anyone can.

Angela likes to accept challenges both professionally and personally.

Angela likes to sing the sweet role of Michaela

Angela likes to use a label maker like the Brother P-touch 1000

Angela likes to play video games

Angela likes to discover new things

Posted: August 24th, 2008 under Anarchy.
Comments: 1

There are a lot of people who are going to be upset with me for this but… I didn’t particularly enjoy the Dark Knight.  Before you start pelting your monitor with rotten fruit and veg, let me explain a little.

First and foremost, I am a writer.  I have a writer’s mind and this means that the movies that I like have good stories.  The first Batman in Nolan’s series (for I seriously hope this isn’t his last) was immensely story-driven, to a point that was almost orgasmic in quality to people like me who live for the story.  I believe it is what made the movie so completely mind-blowing.

Dark Knight had very little in the way of story.  It had lots of shoot-bang-drop dead awesome stunts, but mostly it had promising lines that alluded to simply awesome things to come and it never quite cashed in on the promises.

You are really not going to like this, but I wasn’t overly impressed with Heath Ledger’s Joker.  I thought that Nolan was going for something Arkham Asylum-y for the character interpretation, which had me holding my breath in anticipation.  The Joker was going to be the darker shadow of an already dark Batman.  Oh huzzah.  In the end, the Joker just ended up being the facilitator for a string of chaotic events that were marked in their deliberateness rather than chaos, which for me was a serious departure from the madman of the comics, who was basically just doing it for the lols.  While Ledger had a hint of this (the money burning scene was a choice e.g.) he just never followed it through, or rather the story didn’t.  That being said, I believe the fault was that of the scriptwriters choosing big bad booms over subtle nuances, rather than Ledger, who beat the shit out of Nicholson’s Joker and did a far better job than the Prince-loving cartoon of the first Batman movie series.  He did awesome work with what he had, which was not that much.  Oscar-worthy?  Um, no.  Brokeback Mountain was Oscar-worthy - this was most definitely not Oscar material.

I was also sad to see Rachel Dawes character make an exit, although I was much sadder to see her go with Maggie G. cutting her fine acting chops on the character as opposed to Katie Holmes, in which case I probably would have given her death a standing ovation.  If I could have cut her out of every single scene in Batman Begins and replaced her with a stick figure, it would have done the same job of acting.

I may need another go round for the movie to grow on me, but what I loved about Begins was that I needed another viewing to get all the layers in the story.  Usually that is something you only find in books.  I have a feeling that I am not going to “get” anything further in the movie, except maybe WTF happened to Scarecrow and what exactly was going on in the close to opening scene.

I comforted myself with the fact that this movie was probably necessary, in the same way that the Two Towers was necessary in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  They had to introduce the Joker, whom I believe they can replace (sorry Heath, RIP) with another actor, and actually must if they want to continue the storyline properly.  I am holding out for more script in the next movie as opposed to explosions - given all of Nolan’s efforts up until now, I’m sure it won’t disappoint.

Oh and Christian Bale in the new Terminator movie?  Choice.  Can’t wait!

Posted: August 4th, 2008 under Anarchy.
Comments: none

Let me start off by saying that I am a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, and former pagan.  Some would say that I am the least qualified person in the world to comment on Christianity.  They may even be right.

I have run into a number of Christians over my short life.  I even worked with some when we were on an Interfaith council together in University, most notably the Roman Catholic priest at my former alma mater, York University.  Unfortunately I forget his name, but he was probably the coolest priest I have ever met.

Being an atheist does not mean that I don’t respect people who have a belief system of any kind.  In fact, I’m a bit jealous of those who do have a concrete faith in something, and I wish I could have that sort of faith as well.  However, my exposure to religion, as can be read in the Wicca and Paganism section of this blog, left a bad taste in my mouth for organized religion of any kind.  Once you get burned, you don’t tend to get too close to the fire again.

I have recently met a person with a family that profess themselves to be “true Christians” to the nth degree; they donate tons of money to their church, they donate tons of money to their church, and they donate tons of money to their church.  Did I mention that they donate tons of money to their church?  Will Google derank my blog after they see this paragraph?  I hope not – I am trying to make a point after all.

Not only do they (get ready for it) donate tons of money to their church, they have the added righteousness of disowning their family who do not toe the line religiously.  Guess they missed this little verse in Luke 15:11.  But hey, the Bible’s a big book, right?  Maybe they missed it?

All sarcasm aside, last time I checked Christianity was supposed to be about forgiveness, not self-righteousness.  Another example I recently learned of “Christian behavior” was a friend’s aunt who had refused to show up at her grandmother’s funeral because she was Catholic – a sect that her Christian aunt didn’t subscribe too.

The truest Christians I have ever met don’t talk about their beliefs, unless asked to.  If asked to, you’d better be prepared, because they open up like a fountain being turned on.  This is how people of all faiths who are polite tend to act.

This brings me to wonder how Christians can police their own errant members.  Maybe it’s up to members of each congregation or parish to “call bullshit” when they see it happening.  More importantly, I think more priests should be preaching about how self-righteousness in one’s beliefs isn’t tantamount to godliness; in fact it runs counter to the whole belief system.

Everyone has a story about a Christian friend or relative who has done something decidedly un-Christian in the name of the religion.  What’s yours?  Feel free to leave a comment.

Posted: July 14th, 2008 under Anarchy.
Comments: none