You would be hard-pressed to find someone in Canada who does not have a direct connection to a Volkswagen. The brand is the vehicular equivalent of Kevin Bacon. Everyone’s either owned one, had parents who owned one, or a friend had one growing up. I learned how to drive on a 1985 standard Jetta with a hopped-up Blaupunkt stereo. Our collective familiarity is a ringing endorsement for a brand that recently celebrated its 60th anniversary in Canada.
Our kids are the first generation to grow up entirely with computers as part of their everyday lives. I recall programming a rocket ship to ascend the monitor of our classroom Apple IIe in grade 5 but that hardly qualifies me to have been plugged-in from the source. My toddler instantly understood the interface of the iPad and iPhone (the Blackberry still confounds him…) and he will never comprehend the simplicity of the single function rotary phone or the tropical bird inspired tones of a dial-up modem attempting to connect. He is digital and he will be wired.
We’re in need of a new vehicle. We’ve been able to pull of being a one-car family to this point using Car2Go but with the arrival of our second child this fall we have come to the heady realization that we need something with a bit more gear space than our trusty Honda Fit. With one quick glance at car marketing and sales tactics on the lot, it is time we take back the test drive and provide a practical perspective to judging vehicles for our parental needs.
The Chicken (with apologies to Gav Martell and Thomas Keller)
At this time of partisan statements and grand political posturing it's important to stand by your own convictions. I am going to stand by one particular tenet: If you can’t roast a whole chicken, you are a complete idiot.
Here’s a quick list of things that are considerably more difficult than cooking a chicken:
There is a current cohort that is striving to a romantic zeitgeist of how our grandparents' generation lived. A seemingly simple life paired with jazz, canning winter vegetables and lining the labels out on paper-lined shelves; repairing what was broken instead of buying the new cheap version and wearing clothes that worked without having to check style blogs for affirmation.
Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel was published in 1953, on the heels of the conclusion of the Korean War and the death of Stalin. It was in these stumbling, toddler steps of the cold war that Casino Royale and its titular character James Bond were released to the world. A James Bond book, or collection of short stories was published each year for the next 14 years and by the time Dr. No was released in theatres in 1962 with Sean Connery in the lead, Bond was well on his way to becoming an international icon.
W, the two-year-old, was effusive in his review of Raffi’s #belugagrads concert at the Centre for Performing Arts in Vancouver over the weekend. Loosely translated, he reported that the show was “a deft combination of Springsteen’s energy, Sinatra’s rapport, and late '80s Guns & Roses ass-kicking.”
I made a reasonable shift from bachelor to husband. Yes, there were fewer hockey pucks around and the house smelled slightly less of leather and steel but, overall, I didn’t feel fundamentally different.
