Die Hard Three

I’ve recently become a huge follower of municipal politics. I used to be into federal and provincial / state-level elections but they’ve gotten so boring lately, it angers me to even have to mention them (even if it’s just to deride them). Local is where it’s at. Witness the rise and downfall and then re-risening of Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto Megacity. Week after week he’s out there, working the streets, providing his constituents with hundreds of hours of top-quality, reality-based entertainment. Contrast that with our federal-level representatives in the Senate. Their latest “ratings-grabber” is that a couple of their members incorrectly filled out their TPS Reports. My God I’m falling asleep just writing about it. 

One of the reasons I’m here in Boston is that the local elections are next week and I want to help out my good friend Bill Linehan in his reelection bid for Boston City Counsellor (District 9).

Go Bill! We believe in you!

Bill is all about progress and he knows what progress is. His opponent in this election has been campaigning on a slogan of

If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards.

Have you ever heard anything more absurd? Simple logic dictates that it’s completely reasonable for a non-forward-moving person to be going sideways or standing still. What about the z-axis? Up and down are both distinct possibilities. What if you started facing the wrong direction? Or what if your train is stopped and the train next to you starts to leave the platform and it only appears like your train is moving and when the other train pulls away that you realize you’re not moving at all? What if the map you were given is from 1965 and all the roads have changed?

None of this matters. What matters is that Bill is going to continue to fight for the things that matter. He doesn’t know what they are right now because *you* haven’t told him yet. So please leave some words in the comments describing some stuff you need done and Bill Linehan or one of his staff will read them.

Bill Linehan for City Counsellor!

(if you guys don’t believe that’s a real live politician with me in the photo, notice how he’s trying to adjust his jacket so that his name is visible in the picture)

I expect nothing less.

.

Boston is an historic city and while the United States of America was not born here per se, this is definitely the place where she was conceived. Like a horny teenager discovering how great freedom is, it was in Boston where she moved out of her parent’s house against their wishes saying, “You don’t control me! Whatever! I do what I want! I do what I want!”

Contrast that with the birth of Canada which followed a more traditional path where permission was sought in advance and the parents granted independence to their offspring (at the age of thirty) and even helped him move out of the house into the one-bedroom apartment a few minutes drive away from the family home.

The most famous tourist attraction and historical thing here in Boston is the Freedom Trail. It’s a walking path through the city that passes sixteen landmarks commemorating events that led to the creation of the greatest nation on Earth. In my research I was shocked to discover that while thousands of books, articles, and pamphlets have been written about the Freedom Trail no one has ever written anything about the actual Freedom Trail. Which of course leaves me once again to pick up the slack that should have been picked up by someone a lot more qualified.

Let’s begin.

The Freedom trail is 2.5 miles (4.02 kilometres) in length and is comprised of inclines in both directions (up and down).

It starts with this marker.

I’m not sure why they chose an image of a squid being stabbed as their logo. Must be a maritime thing.

And then you follow these red bricks.

Sometimes because of limitations in the surfacing it’s not possible to use bricks the whole way so they use paint.

Crossing a terrifying bridge made of metal.

Sometimes there’s a cover for some utility infrastructure in the way

but nothing can stop freedom!

Sometimes the bricks are camouflaged.

So pay attention!

If there’s someone stopped on the trail you have to wait patiently until they move.

I had to wait was about fifteen minutes for Gandalf and his friend but in the end,
I
did
pass!!!

We almost got lost when the trail ran into some sort of freedom fruit and vegetable market.

I’m not sure if this is what the farmers of the constitution had in mind.

The trail branches off in two directions a couple of different times.

Be careful. At stake is your freedom
trail experience.

And the trail ends with this marker. Watch for it.

You can tell cause the trail goes in but it does not go out.

So there’s your Freedom Trail. Next time you’re in Boston, be sure to check it out.

I still think Americans are the friendliest people in the world even though on Friday the bartender made me cry. And by “the” bartender I mean the guy that was tending the bar where I was having a beer two days ago. The United States is a nation with over 300 million inhabitants – there’s no way a single individual could serve drinks to all those people. Even Superman with all his speed would still have to wait for the mortals to place their orders.

Um, yeah. I think I’ll have something with lemon in it?

Anyway, here’s what happened. The GF and I are in Boston for the weekend and on Friday after the long drive from Ottawa, all I wanted to do was talk to some random stranger about baseball. I’d been growing my playoff beard for about eight weeks now and was eager to try it out (the baseball finals are on right now and the local team is playing). So we’re sitting at the bar of some random watering hole in Boston’s South End (sound’s dirty I know, but it’s not) and I casually ask the dude behind the bar, “So, other than the Red Sox, which baseball team is closest to here?” to which he immediately replied, “the Montreal Expos.”

I had expected this to be a happy trip and without warning this complete stranger brought back some of the saddest memories of my life. As a single tear rolled over my cheekbone and got lost in my beard, I explained to him that the Montreal Expos moved to Washington a few years ago. And he was all like, “Oh, yeah, I used to go up there all the time but I don’t follow baseball that much any more.”

In 1994, about six weeks before the playoffs were to begin, the Expos with one of the lowest payrolls of any team had the best record in Major League Baseball. Never having won a World Series title, this was to be their year. And then there was a strike, they cancelled the playoffs, and the following season they lost all their players to free agency or trades or whatever happens in baseball after all your players have career seasons and you can’t afford to pay them and then the team moved to Washington.

Ugh.

Think Moneyball but with five players being selected for the 1994 All Star game. And I’m still sad.

Most times bribes are illegal but this one isn’t. The trick is, before you offer the gift, publish the plot’s details in an open forum (like this blog). Once it becomes publicly known, it cannot be used against you because for bribes to be effective they need to be kept secret. The police officers conducting the interview are going to look pretty stupid demanding answers to questions that can be found with the simplest Google search.

https://www.google.ca/search?q=die+hard+three+blog+bribe

On that note, tomorrow my parents are driving to Southern Ontario to visit with my brother and as I previously mentioned, two of the pies I made last week will be used as bribes to get him to watch the movie Avatar with me.

These pies are rolling and there’s no stopping them.

Thanks mom and dad for taking them down. I’m publishing all this in order to prevent any possible prosecution. If I don’t post this, you could both be arraigned on charges of assisted bribery, conspiracy to commit bribery, and conspiracy to commit conspiracy. I know that last one sounds redundant but it’s an actual law. You should really go read some of the criminal code changes the government enacted during the Vancouver Olympics (or as I like to call them “the Great and Expensive Taxpayer Distraction”).

Dad, remember to email me and let me know when the “package is delivered” (if you can’t remember what that means refer to the card I gave you this morning – the green one with all the codewords).

On Tuesday I took a break from my daily practice of waking up without an alarm clock so I could get an early start on my plans for the day – baking apple pies. The previous Saturday the GF and I invested almost sixty Canadian dollars and two hours of our morning acquiring eighteen kilograms of fresh apples from a local fruit farm. My favourite autumn food is apple pie and I was *not* going to let this year pass with only token handouts of leftovers from Christmas / Thanksgiving / Easter supper.

So with the apples all purchased I ventured out to Orleans to learn from my mom the secrets of building delicious apple pies.

Now most people would keep secret something as important as the instructions for the perfect apple pie. Information is power and power is money and money is happiness and all that. But me, I get happy from eating pies (apple and rhubarb, not meat pies – these make me the opposite of happy – whatever that is) – so if more people are building apples pies *properly* it increases opportunities for me personally as I am more likely to benefit from the increased supply.

“What of the existing supply?” Well, right now Big Apple is focussed on quantity not quality. All the commercial suppliers construct their pies using robots and to save money they use every part of the apple (cores and all).

Everyone knows the best pies are made by highly-trained humans in a kitchen – not by some minimum-wage-earning robot in a factory somewhere. But the media has distracted all the voters (like they do every fall) with made-up scandals involving the end of the world. Last year it was the Mayans and this year the Republicans. I wonder what they’ve got planned for 2014? I bet you ten dollars it involves Toronto mayor and real-life walking-Onion-news-article Rob Ford getting his hands on some sort of bio weapon. “I think he just has gas.” That only proves my point – no one is going to click through to read a news story about a boring trip to the doctor. And all these print media outlets have to pay their bankruptcy lawyers somehow. So yeah.

Anyway. Here’s the step-by-step for making world-class apple pies. Call me if you need any help with quality control.

1. Sort your apples in a 6×10 grid on your kitchen table.

Remember to put your laundry out before you start baking.

2. Make sure you have all your ingredients – bleached white flour, bleached white cane sugar, sixty Courtland apples,

and a cocaine-sized baggie of cinnamon.

3. Peal and cut the apples into cubes about the size of my thumb. Take a pie tin and pour the cut apples into the tin to measure out the correct volume.

4. Take one half cup of white sugar and add three lines of cinnamon.

like this.

5. Then take two tables spoons of white flour and add it to the cinnamon sugar mixture.

Like this.

6. The final product should look something like

this.

7. Next mix the sugar-flour-cinnamon in with the measured-apples.

Like this.

8. Once the apples are mixed, you need to make the crust. Get your mom to prepare the pastry and roll it out into a circle.

Like this.

9. Take the circle and fold it in half.

Like this.

10. Cut some air vents in the lid to prevent the pie from exploding when it’s baking.

like this.

11. Pour the apples into the crusted pie tin.

Like this

12.  Next add as much butter as you can. The more butter, the more delicious the pie.

Like yummy!

13. Add the lid and bond the top and bottom crusts by pinching them with your fingers all they way around. Remove the excess dough with a table knife.

Remember to laugh at your foreign roommates when they try to pronounce the word “dough”.

14. You now have a finished pie. It just has to be cooked.

or launched at someone.

15. Put it in the oven.

like this.

16. Set the oven for 15 minutes at 430 degrees F (to cook the crust)

like this.

17. Then 35 minutes at 350 (to cook the filling).

Like this.

18. At the end you should have about nine pies.

Thats’s six short of the stated objective for the day.

“What are you going to do with all these pies?” Well, that’s obvious. I’m going to bribe my brother to get him to watch Avatar with me. He’s got a sweet tooth and I know he’s powerless against delicious apple pies. Most people are.