Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Cluck, Grunt and Low

Neon sign from the Toronto barbecue restaurant “Cluck, Grunt and Low”, featuring a pig, cow and chicken in suits.
Click the photo to see its Flickr page.

A couple of weeks back, the Ginger Ninja and I went to Cluck, Grunt and Low to see if Toronto finally got a barbecue place worth mentioning. I felt that the food could use a little work: the sauce — which comes courtesy of the highly-regarded Thuet — is quite good, but the pork ribs I had that night were a little thin and dry; I’ve had juicier and meatier at Montana’s Cookhouse (which is surprisingly good, considering that it’s a chain). Wendy, who’s used to some of the better barbecue place in the Boston area, said that it wasn’t authentic enough to bill itself as “barbecue”. I think the true test will be to bring my coworkers from Tucows’ Starkville, Mississippi office there. We’ve had a couple of serious discussions of what real barbecue is, and I think it would be interesting to see what they think.

Opinion seems to be divided between the professional reviewers and the word-of-mouthers. The people on the Chowhound discussion board have by and large been disappointed, while Toronto Life food reviewer James Chatto, Eye Weekly’s Kathryn Borel and the National Post review have generally been favourable.

I think part of Cluck, Grunt and Low’s problem is that the food isn’t barbecued or smoked on the premises. The place isn’t large enough — I remember when it was Shakespeare’s Cafe, a student coffeehouse — and there just isn’t enough of the smell that a real barbecue pit and smokehouse has. The barbecuing and smoking apparently takes place offsite and the food is trucked in, where it’s warmed. Those of you who old enough to remember the CN Tower restaurant in the late 70’s and early 80’s may recall hearing that the kitchens were in the basement and the food had to be taken up in the elevator, which was one of the reasons why the Tower’s Revolving Restaurant was also known locally as the “Revolting Restaurant”.

I might give Cluck, Grunt and Low another shot if I start hearing better reviews from friends or the Chowhound crowd, but in the meantime, I think I’m going to get my barbecue during my trips to the States.

Categories
Uncategorized

Karl Rove: In Touch with the Kids (in 1972)

Back in July, I pointed to a YouTube video of an NBC Nightly News broadcast from July 4, 1972. Here’s another one, found via Boing Boing, featuring a young Karl Rove in his role in the Young Republicans as the “GOP College Director”. Then-reporter “Gunga Dan” Rather describes Rove’s group in a voice-over as “an operation aimed at embarrassing pundits who say that Nixon doesn’t appeal to youth.”

The voice is the same, but this is a skinnier Rove, sporting a look that might have been considered a little “square” among some of his college peers in 1972, but would give him indie rocker cred today:

karl_rove_in_1972_1.jpg

Rove interviews quite well, and you can see the future Republican strategist in the young fella in the video, talking about how to reach a younger audience.

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Here’s an interesting still from the piece: those are Karl Rove’s hands holding the “Generation Of Peace” bumper sticker, which highlights the first letters in each word. For those of you not familiar with American politics, “GOP” — short for “Grand Old Party” — is a nickname for the Republican Party, in the same way that word “Tory” is often used to refer to the Conservative Party in Canada and the UK.

Karl Rove’s hands holding a “Generation Of Peace” bumper sticker

It’s interesting, because only a few years prior to this newscast, the use of the word “peace” was considered to be controversial. I remember reading in The Pop Sixties: A Personal and Irreverent Guide that the “goodbye” segment of an episode of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was cut because Tommy Smothers said “Please talk peace”. I get the feeling that these bumper stickers must’ve raised a few eyebrows in the upper echelons of the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

karl_rove_in_1972_3.jpg

As for Rove today, does he still know how to reach the kids through their culture? Watch this video of Washington’s latest hip-hop sensation: “MC Rove” at this year’s Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner:

Categories
Geek

Facebook Development: Groups, Part 2

(This was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)

“Rand Corporation” fake computer image, doctored to include some Facebook logos.

Over at the Tucows Developer Blog, I have yet another installment in my series of articles on developing Facebook Applications using their PHP 5 client library. In this article, I look at the FacebookRestClient class’ groups_getMembers method.

Categories
funny

T-Shirt Design of the Moment

Right now, my favourite T-shirt design over at Busted Tees is “Canada: America’s Hat”…

“Canada: America’s Hat” T-shirt
Click the photo to see the web page for the shirt.

Categories
Uncategorized

Welcome to the Herd, Bill!

(This was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)

Bill Sweetman and the squishy cowsI’ve known Bill Sweetman since the mid-nineties, back when I worked at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, so I was very pleased to find out that Tucows — the company where I hold the title of Technical Evangelist — has hired him as General Manager of our domain name portfolio.

Bill writes:

I’m going to be leading the charge to further monetize that portfolio as well as develop new products and services related to the portfolio. Translation: I’m going to be performing Domain Name Karate as a full-time job!

When presented with the opportunity to turn my long-held passion for domain names into a full-time gig, I leaped at the chance. This was truly one of those ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunities’ and I knew I’d regret turning it down. Plus, I get to work again with Ken Schafer and a great team of people who are equally passionate about the domain name space.

It’s good to have you on the team, Bill. Welcome to the herd!

Categories
funny It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

“Think of it, Ellen — a world full of WEIRDOS!”

While hanging out on Queen Street West back in the summer of 1985, I saw a T-shirt with the image below and bought it immediately. I wore it all summer that year:

Old comic panel: “Think of it, Ellen — a world full of WEIRDOS!” “That would be wonderful…”
Click the image to see the source.

Yesterday’s entry, “Thank You, Mask Man!”, got me thinking about that time and what was then my favourite t-shirt. A little Googling led to me to this entry in the blog We Saw a Chicken, whose author had scanned the image from the magazine Strange Things are Happening.

I’m going to invert the image and make it the desktop background on my computers.

Categories
It Happened to Me Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

“Thank You, Mask Man!”

Way, way back — I’m talking about twenty years ago — my friend Yann and I decided to go catch one of Reg Hartt’s Sex and Violence Cartoon Festival shows. For those of you who aren’t from around Accordion City, Reg is one of the city’s better-known eccentrics — he’s a film and cartoon buff who likes to show his collection of rare films. If you walk around some of the city’s hipper streets, you’re likely to see a poster for one of his screenings.

Yann and I had decided that after years of seeing these posters plastered all over town, we should actually attend one of these events. Reg now hosts his film screenings at his house, but back in the late eighties, he held his movie nights at the Cabana Room, which was the upstairs bar of the Spadina Hotel, which was located at the corner of King and Spadina. Today, that corner is both a nightclub and dining destination as well as home to a number of fancy offices and condos, and the Spadina Hotel has since closed and turned into a backpacker’s hostel. The corner is a yuppie haven now, but back then, it was considerably more seedy.

That upstairs bar was the sort of place you’d expect to see Charles Bukowski challenging Mickey Rourke, Harry Dean Stanton and Tom Waits to a shooter-drinking contest. It was delightfully divey, and populated with an assortment of interesting characters, from hard-drinkin’ old men to the not-quite-legal-to-drink (the legal age here being 19) spiky-haired punk and alternative rock crowd who’d spilled over from Queen Street, which was then a little edgier than it is today. The place looked like it hadn’t changed since the early 1960s. My favourite creature comforts there were the air conditioning — possibly the best in town, next to the bone-chiller at Sneaky Dee’s, then located in The Annex — and the Jiffy-Pop cooker on the bar, which was a hot plate rigged with Jiffy-Pop branding and a mechanical arm that shook the Jiffy-Pop package side-to-side as it cooked.

The Sex and Violence Cartoon Festival featured all sorts of old cartoons dating from the 1940s through the 1970s that you could no longer show in most places for their racy (and sometimes racist) content. One of Yann’s and my favourites was Thank You Mask Man, a cartoon based on a routine by Lenny Bruce, in which Lenny himself does the voices. It’s about what happens when the Lone Ranger decides to accept the thanks of the townspeople he saves, with hilarious — and very profane (especially considering the time) — results.

Thanks to this entry on MetaFilter, I know that someone put Thank You Mask Man on YouTube. Watching it makes me feel like I’m drunk and 19 again. Watch and enjoy, but be forewarned that this is a Lenny Bruce routine: