Just when you thought it was safe to skip Pottermania…

Along comes a phone call from your offspring who has one more day left at her UofT camp and so asks if you would PLEEEEAAAASSSSSEEEEE!!! mind joining the midnight madness to grab a hot-off-the-press copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (or as the dimbulb “Have you read any media at all in the past month???” Loblaws sign-writer wrote on a carefully-lettered sign atop a huge pyramid of the books the next day, “Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows”. As an aside, I know whenever I think “bestselling books”, my feet beat an immediate path to my neighbourhood gargantuan grocery store.)

Where was I?

Oh yes.

On the previous go-round of the new Harry Potter book release, one of the few remaining independent bookstores in Ottawa, Shirley Leishman Books, got royally toasted in that chapter of the ongoing Pottermania. Late in the pre-release hype period, a huge Shoppers Drug Mart right beside them in the west-end mall where they are located advertised that they, too, would be rolling out as many copies as people might want for $10 less than the price for which Leishman’s had already announced they would sell it. In consequence, Leishman’s, a bookseller for whom customer service appears very high on their Mission Statement – and they live it – saw a great many potential sales turn away and traipse through the adjacent Shoppers door. That story came immediately to mind when offspring made her request, so I figured why the hell not?

If Leishman’s were going to do it again this time, that is. So earlier in the week, I had phoned the store and was told that not only were they doing it again, they were bringing in a “Mad Science” show to fill the last hour before they flung open their doors at midnight.

Mad Science bills itself as a “provider of science enrichment for children” and from the very name of their representative at the mall this night, “Kaboom”, they seemed to promise a good time would be had by all. The energetic young performer turned up in an apropos lab coat, along with a brace of cases filled with laboratory paraphernalia, various multi-coloured solutions and a vast cauldron that could comfortably have held four basketballs. Distracting – for almost an hour – a growing number of young, sleep-deprived, chocolate-wired Potterphiles was a formidable challenge. (Leishman’s management had thoughtfully laid out a couple hundred chocolate cupcakes as well, to the teeth-grinding appreciation of the parents of those same children who no doubt foresaw the difficulty of getting their charges to sleep even after they got back home in the wee-wee hours.) “Kaboom”, however, for the most part carried it off, although I noticed that she did cast the occasional nervous glance at the mall’s overhead sprinkler system heads as she ignited several small squares of flash paper.

It was her finale, however, that drew a well-deserved chorus of ooooohs and aaaahs when she dumped her entire remaining supply of dry ice into the cauldron. Instantly, great billowing clouds of cold mist burbled up from inside the huge pot, spilling over the side and roiling outwards along the floor to swirl thickly around the delighted audience. Even Hogwarts’ Potions Master would have applauded that!

Then suddenly, it was the duly appointed hour. (The store manager had actually linked her computer to an international time clock and so was able to initiate a final ten-second countdown.)

The move to the doors was exceptionally well-managed, too, with several pre-opening announcements having made it abundantly clear that (1) pre-paid buyers would obtain their copies by flowing down the left side of the store to the pre-order table; (2) cash buyers were to proceed to the cash register halfway down the right side of the store; and (3) most important of all, there were more than enough copies of the book for everyone. Tonight, she said, would pose no threat of “sold out”, even if people wanted multiple copies.

It was actually a lot of fun… except for that moment when an older gentleman, probably a well-intentioned grandfather in search of a copy for a grandchild, collapsed at the door. From among our excited little community, however, there swiftly emerged not one, but two physicians. An immediate loosening of a shirt collar and a “Please give him a little space” request later, by the time the paramedics arrived just minutes afterwards, it already looked as if an ambulance trip was not going be required.

For my part, my loud offer to crack open my just-purchased copy and read the last five pages to those still in line behind me was met with a chorus of what I would characterize as “something less than enthusiasm”.

But I discovered that far and away the greatest sacrifice to come on this evening – this morning, I guess that would be, midnight being the launch time – would be from one of the store staff, who told me during a brief conversation before the doors opened that she would be departing after the last customer had been served for a kids’ camp, Camp Opemikon, on Christie Lake outside Perth (about a 90-minute drive from this mall). And at what she guessed would be about 4 am, she was going to tiptoe into one particular cabin to carefully slide some eight copies of the book under eight pillows cushioning eight sleeping heads, where each of those lucky despite-being-far-removed-from-any-retail-venue campers, her daughter among them, would discover the hefty read upon waking later that same morning.

Now THAT’s a heck of a Mom!

Oh… and as a further PS (Potter-Script), the latest film go-round, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is wonderful. It seems apparent to me that the crafters of the cinema franchise recognize that the audience upon whose original fandom their entire foundation is built is aging, because the storyline honestly bears no resemblance at all to anything that you might call a “children’s story”. Evil is rendered as really evil and in this film is terrifying. (Never mind “May be too intense for younger children”; this one oughta warn off anyone with a faint heart regardless of your age!)

And anyone who toils in a bureaucracy will revel in the portrayal of the meddling of the We-know-what’s-best-for-you “Ministry of Magic” in the administration of Hogwarts Academy.

The only nitpick I have is that a couple of formerly prominent other characters have been reduced to mere cameos in this movie. The young Draco Malfoy, Harry’s peer and previously a significant foil, barely registers despite a prominent appearance by his even more sinister father, Lucius. Meanwhile, Harry’s “muggle” (ordinary people) family, the Dursleys, who previously have been played for laughs and probably elicited considerable audience sympathy at being saddled with an adopted wizard-in-training, in their short appearance here are so repulsive that, sadly, you can’t wait for them to vacate the screen.

= = =

Your tax dollars at work.

With one minor alteration, the message text reproduced below is word-for-word just one and half paragraphs of a six-paragraph memo that landed recently in our entire department’s e-mail inboxes. The only change is the omission of specific people’s names. Lord knows I don’t want to run afoul of any Official Secrets Act.

The test is to see how far you can get before you reach that state of bureaucratic catatonia known as MEGO (for “My Eyes Glaze Over”). For me, it was much earlier on… at the appearance of the third consecutive passive-voiced verb near the end of the first paragraph. No one in government, you see, ever actively “does” things. No one ever actively “agrees” to anything. Things are passively “done” or “undertaken”, while other things are “agreed”. Even at the end, you will notice, no one commends the workers. They simply (and passively) “are commended for their work”.

It goes a long way towards helping us all dodge any follow-up blame. Sure, it was done, but I didn’t “done” it. Nope, not me.

I’d say, “Enjoy”, but it is just too painful.

- - -

“Good morning,..

…

Furthermore, it has been agreed that the regional TSO and other NTM personnel currently responsible for ED, OP/SWYL and BP functions within their region will continue to perform these duties until CSA establishes a new administrator network to relieve regional TSO/NTM personnel of these functions. The transfer should be completed by fall 2007 (but can be up to 6 months from July 9, 2007). This should give ample time to transfer these functions to their new business owner given the upcoming summer holidays and the size of the administrative network.

Finally, we want to take this opportunity to thank [Names 1, 2 and 3 omitted] for the tremendous amount of work and efforts they have devoted in support of these projects and in ensuring we maintain an excellent service delivery standard throughout these years. They have done an excellent job adapting to the ever increasing evolution of the projects and are commended for their work...

Thank you
[Name 4 omitted] / Head of National Voice Initiatives

Pour / for
[Name 5 omitted] / Manager, National Telecommunications Management”

= = =

I keep turning up tunes of inspiration among the many musical interludes that originated on Sesame Street. In this case, it’s the song that introduces the show’s classification skills segment, “One of these things is not like the other”.

Or to put it another way, “We blew the budget on Spellcheck but maybe next year we’ll be able to afford an editor.” Ironically, it’s from an online media site called Media Circus, where an article appeared on July 14 about newspapers who “spike”, rather than publish, stories that might reflect negatively on the people who own the newspapers. It included this sentence in a paragraph about other past examples, in this case William Randolph Hearst:

“At the height of his power in the 1930s he owned 46 publications, and when he was implemented in the murder of film producer Thomas Ince, most of them chose not to report it.”

Implemented, implicated… tomAYto, tomAHto… What’s the big deal? Well ordinarily not much, especially in an online environment, but in this case it appeared in a site by and about media people, Media Circus (http://www.jointhemediacircus.com/mediacircus/), a branch of The First Post, whose producers describe their mission this way: ”The First Post is a free and independent daily online news magazine – a place to find out what the news means, a place to read about the issues of the day in short, sharp, informative articles.”

See? Doesn’t say anything about “edited”.

Now all of that being said, it is a damned interesting little corner of the internet and I do commend it to anyone with a curiosity about any of the ancillary topics that surround the process of reporting the news. Which is why I included the link.

= = =

And on the positive “10 points for style” side, an Associated Press story that appeared in the July 23 online edition of the Globe and Mail was about wine lovers who are scouring the Macedonian countryside around Gradesnica, where a French troops’ trench system was known to have existed when there was a World War I battlefield on the site. Apparently shellfire from the 1916 battles that occurred there buried many cases of vintage wine and cognac that had been distributed to French officers. Those bottles, which have begun to turn up in lots of 12 and 24 at a time, have been described as “the nectar of the gods” by the villagers who first unearthed and then tasted the cognac. Collectors have apparently agreed, and now the finds are fetching prices as high as $7,000 a bottle when they are sold.

The Globe headlined the story:

“Soldiers gone but their spirits live on”

I love that.

= = =

There was an episode of the TV show X-Files several years ago that was built around a small group of chameleon-like beings who had the power to blend so effectively into their backgrounds that they became pretty well invisible in natural surroundings. In the forest, for example, the only way viewers saw them was when what looked like a section of ordinary trunk suddenly “blinked its eyes”, scaring the bejeezuz out of you the first time it happened.

Well imagine my surprise! It turns out that one of the cunning camouflagers apparently has made his way to my father-in-law’s yard in Ancaster, Ontario, where apparently I managed to snap him just in mid-blink while masking himself as a birch tree.

Until la prochaine.

Starting with a couple of follow-ups to recent posts…

My earlier post about discovering – to my joy and, frankly, amazement – that “Beer Can Chicken” is a fantastic way to grill an entire bird, prompted not one but two replies from a couple of Ducklings.

With the first one came a photo (and if you thought the mental image of one gracelessly posed chicken thus prepared was rude, just get a load of these two. It reminds me of the last dance on “Pep Rally” Night from my long-ago days at the Perth Collegiate. All that’s missing is the background music… I’m thinking maybe “Stairway to Heaven”.)

The sender said in an accompanying e-mail that it was taken a couple years ago, which surely places the chef in the photo among the vanguard of Canadian chicken-butt-cannery-grilling pioneers. That being said, given the tiny amount of scotch remaining in his glass, he probably needed very little convincing to try it out. (It’s a guy thing. It’s the same kind of inspiration that puts a man aloft in a lawn chair supported only by a few dozen large helium balloons yet flying high enough to attract a radio warning from the pilot of a passing commercial airliner. And no, I am not making this up.)

- - -

With the second message came another photo, prompted by the one I had included of a grilling frame designed to give the bird more support than just the tall-boy beer can. The message was a note asking, “Guess what I got for Father’s Day this year?” and the photo, as you’ll note, raises “Beer Can Chicken” to the domain of high art when it is cooked on a “Stainless Steel Vertical Roaster With Infuser”.

And a final footnote: The rack in the photo I included in my Beer Can Chicken post came from the website of one of world’s leading barbecue manufacturers. A few days ago, I happened on a special mid-season sale at our neighbourhood Loblaws where all of their barbecue accessories were priced at least 50% off, and the very same grill rack was tagged at a price that was almost, to the penny, one-tenth (!!) of the barbecue website’s price. So I bought two. (Because whenever we have space on our grill, given that the cooking gas’s consumption is the same we will often cook twice the meat we need for a meal so as to produce a second meal’s worth of leftovers.)

So cue up “Stairway to Heaven”. (Either that, or “Chicken Dance”.)

= = =

Recently I was clearing up some old receipts and found the one for my pro shop purchases when we visited the Pebble Beach Golf Club during our California sojourn earlier this year. I know I purchased a sleeve (three) of Pebble Beach logo-marked golf balls and a really nice hooded sweatshirt for the coming Fall walking part of my daily commute to and from work.

But the receipt, I’ve just noticed, says only that I purchased “BALLS; SWEAT”.

Pebble Beach: for manly men only!

= = =

And continuing with our recurring theme of “How did this get by the editors?”, here’s one that will happily clear spellcheckers everywhere, but really needed a human eye. It’s one for the ages, and comes from a story in the July 17th Victoria Times-Colonist about the growing number of shutdowns being experienced by seniors advocacy centres:

“Recognizing that seniors wee falling through the cracks, roundtable discussions were held…”

= = =

Knowing the almost entirely Canadian content of this little blog’s readership (sorry David, you’re definitely in a minority here… eh?) I’m thinking that a full-blown travelogue account of our most recent trip – to Toronto – would garner the same enthusiastic response as the thought of watching a YouTube video of a new coat of Benjamin Moore semi-gloss latex drying on our ceiling.

But here are a couple highlights:

If you’re a sushi fan, you will find a happy place among the menu items of an upscale little restaurant called Doku 15, in the Cosmopolitan Hotel on Colborne Street, just off Yonge. If you’re a grown-up, however, you likely will be less than thrilled to find that the rather Spartan décor does not exactly lend itself to quiet conversation.

The tables and the floor are both fashioned of equally sound-reflective surfaces and the walls are bare concrete. And while the dining area is fairly small, it is also a two-storey tall space. There is therefore absolutely no sound absorption or muting anywhere. Quite the opposite, in fact; there are echoes and one is forced to spend one’s entire meal sitting amid a clatter of noise that would be appropriate to maybe ten times the number of tables actually housed inside.

The problem would be easily mitigated through the placement of a few panels of something – tapestry or shoji screens – on the bare walls, or even some banners of primary-coloured fabric hung on the ceiling far above. But heaven forbid that anything should disrupt the ice-cold industrial chic the designers seem to be reaching for. Unfortunately, a nook of discreet conversation this place ain’t.

That being said, the food was excellent. But with a few caveats.

Caveat number 1: My wife Leslie and I each ordered soup as an appetizer. She also ordered a main course and I chose four platters from the appetizer menu to make up my main course – a traditional rolled sushi; a lightly battered tempura sushi and a serving each of a flash-grilled but cold tuna, and hot cod. Within minutes, our effervescent waiter was back to inform me the kitchen had exhausted its cod for the day. Would I like an order of “white curry wild sea bass” in lieu? No problem, I replied, having previously eaten and greatly enjoyed the light, flaky white fish.

(Caution: if you ever decide to cook sea bass at home, forget about doing it on an open grille like a barbecue. This fish is fall-apart flaky and needs the gentle manipulation of a full spatula and the solid surface of a pan underneath it.)

Our respective appetizers were seafood soup (Leslie) and miso soup (me). The seafood soup, she said, was unbelievable – and that’d be the positive use of the word. My allergy to anything water-born whose biology includes a shell leaves me to rely solely on other people’s opinions when it comes to describing the quality of such a dish. But I can certainly vouch for its appearance. It was a large bowl with a light broth overflowing with an array of all sorts of seafood, so much in fact that it was less a “soup” than a “stew”, and Leslie was exceedingly happy at finding huge chunks of several tasty sea creatures in her bowl.

By way of contrast, in Ottawa our experience has all too often been that many of our local restaurants sadly interpret “seafood” to mean “made with brine”, and they will present you with a treasure hunt in your search for some actual seafood – the “find-the-vermouth-in-the-martini” school of content.

But Leslie’s bowl received the full four stars! As for me, I was delighted with my miso soup. I’m not enough of a connoisseur to be able to identify its preparation method, but there was plainly much about it that was fresh. But just a couple of spoonfuls in, as I was about to sing its praises across the table, the first of the above-noted “excellent, but…” caveats occurred.

I was barely four minutes into the soup when a waitress showed up with four platters carefully balanced along her arms. As she rhymed off the name of the item on each, I said, in turn, “That’s mine… Um… that’d be for me. That too, yep. And I guess that’s mine, too.”

All of the post-soup items that I’d ordered had just arrived, each on its own platter, bare minutes after we’d both begun our appetizers. And at the same time, there was no sign of Leslie’s entrée. As I started pushing things aside on the small table to accommodate four separate plates, the waitress seemed uncomfortably aware that something had gone wrong. Seconds later, the cheery waiter who had taken our initial order re-appeared and announced. “Oh we’re sorry… for some reason the kitchen mixed up your table’s order and delivered all this at once. Here’ I’ll take back the sea bass and we’ll just keep it warm for you.”

Baby Duck’s readers will be all too familiar with my reaction to bad service. But I’m not unreasonable, and it’s relative. Were I standing at, say, Harvey’s, separated from my server by an arborite countertop and a sneeze guard, I would not only be satisfied with the simultaneous arrival of everything I’d ordered, I would expect it and call it great service.

Sure, I had ordered entirely from the appetizers list by way of making up my meal. But the waiter (a likeable chap named Roland, who was especially proud that he and his girlfriend had together created several of the exotically-named cocktails on the drinks menu) understood that, yet this information had not made the short trip from the dining room to the kitchen. And in a high-end dining room just loaded with cachet (No kidding!: “At Doku15, Chef G.Q Pan puts a dash of harmony and a gram of balance into his entrees.”), that’s not even good service.

On to dessert. Both Leslie and I are big fans of tiramisu and, at meal’s end, she opted to order the menu’s “green tea tiramisu”. I asked for a bread pudding dessert topped with dark chocolate on one half and a crème fraiche on the other, two complimentary toppings that gave it its name, “Mongolian black-and-white”. (Although when bread pudding became Mongolian is unknown to me. Googling “mongolian bread pudding” at this writing turns up zero hits. Oh well, I’m sure it was probably by way of the Khyber Pass and the Darjeeling Railway. With a 6400 km detour, of course, to get around the Great Wall of China. But that sure seems like a lot of trouble to go to in order to mongolianize bread pudding… Whoops, my apologies; the voices are telling me I digress.)

We shared bites of each other’s desserts as well as our own.

Let me go on the record right now as saying I have never actually eaten grass clippings. And neither has Leslie. But I have pushed a mower around back – and front – yards for several decades now, and on many such occasions, she has sat yardside on our porch. So based on the aroma of fresh-cut grass, we can both feel quite safe in stating that Doku 15’s green tea tiramisu is pretty close to what grass clippings probably taste like.

Despite the rave review that “Hype1” (above) gives it: “Spongy light-as-air cake with green tea tangled in with the smoothest mascarpone and showered with golden flakes. Indeed, it is flavour fusion!”, I’m afraid both of us, after our respective bites, sort of looked at each other and reached the same conclusion: lawn clippings.

= = =

A Toronto experience that was nothing BUT positive for us (including offspring who actually shared it 24 hours later as part of her University of Toronto “summer camp” experience) – eardrum assault notwithstanding – was a stage show called “We Will Rock You” that, all by itself, has probably sent sales of this album into the stratosphere.

Anyone with even nothing more than an occasional interest in rock music knows that the premature death of Queen’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, placed him immediately and prominently on the list of rockers who died way before their time, the victim of AIDS in his case. (For a signature example of why, if you can find it, watch a clip of Queen’s performance during the 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium. It’s a half hour tour-de-force that might just as well have been playbilled, “Freddie Mercury and some back-up musicians”.)

The stage show, “We Will Rock You” (WWRY), takes a solid couple dozen of Queen’s biggest and best known hits and slings them together to advance a storyline that, sure, has been done many times before, but in this case it just saturates the stage with colourful costuming, humour and noise. Omilord, is there ever noise!

Start with yer corporate behemoth that seeks to control music and crush originality in the process; add yer basic misunderstood, socially ostracized youth and Bob’s your uncle! And will creative youth triumph over all? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Without spoiling it for you, here’s a brief summary of the plot. The musical opens on a high school graduation day some 300 years in the future when the bulk of the class are brightly dressed, preppy, lacquer-haired and plastic-smiled, cookie-cutter “Ga-ga boys” and “Ga-ga girls” (who look like an “Up With People” gang that went way over the top experimenting with psychedelic drugs). The show opens with a thundering ensemble dance done to Queen’s – no surprise here – “Radio Ga-ga”.

But in the same class are a young man, Galileo Figaro, and a young woman, Scaramouche, both of whom refuse to fit the mould. Figaro keeps hearing bits and pieces of “something” in his head (which launches the show’s humour when he reviews what’s been plaguing his dreams for months). And Scaramouche is simply the square peg in the round hole. (Geez, do you think maybe they’ll find each other?)

Enter the forces of darkness, represented by the “Killer Queen” and her lead henchman, Kashoggi, who is a combination of Max Headroom, and Colonel Carl Jenkins, the “Starship Troopers” Intelligence Officer played by Neil Patrick Harris. (Incidentally, a somewhat inspired bit of naming one's forces-of-evil character.)

Their goal, of course, is to crush dissent and creativity, and the stage show’s plot runs from there, via nothing more complicated than a simple good guy vs bad guy chase, with some truly jaw-dropping renditions of Queen’s tunes. You’ll find yourself hearing / seeing echoes (Wait… can you “see” an echo? Oh hell, never mind) of "Peter Pan"’s Lost Boys, "Star Wars"’ Yoda and even Walt Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone”.

By the time you reach the last half hour or so, it becomes apparent that the writers, two of whom – Brian May and Roger Taylor – were members of Queen, have simply abandoned any pretext of even vague credibility in their story and turned the show over pretty much entirely to the music. But also by this point, you’re having such a good time at the party, you don’t care.

One thing both Leslie and I came away with was a whole new appreciation for the complexity and the range of Queen’s music. Musically, we already knew that Queen was no three-chord wonder band (“Bohemian Rhapsody” – the defence rests); but the show also showcases, occasionally in quite touching ways, their lyrics.

It helps that the show has some wonderful singing voices in its cast. Googling information about Toronto’s “We Will Rock You” will turn up many accolades for Erica Peck, the young woman who plays Scaramouche, and she is deserving of all of them. Early on, her rendition of “Somebody to Love” simply soars.

“I work hard every day of my life
I work till I ache my bones
At the end I take home my hard earned pay all on my own –
I get down on my knees
And I start to pray
Till the tears run down from my eyes
Lord - somebody – somebody
Can anybody find me - somebody to love?”

(And Erica is a Canadian Cinderella story. Two years ago, she was one among the sea of Canadian Idol hopefuls. “We Will Rock You” is her first professional theatrical gig.)

Certainly, it was among the best times we’ve had in a theatre. (Possibly the best live theatre ever for me. But Leslie’s experiences include seeing Richard Burton in “Camelot”, Katherine Hepburn in “Coco”, Lauren Bacall in “Woman of the Year” and Sir John Gielgud, so I’m not going to presume to rank WWRY’s “fun” with “best times” on her chart of live theatre faves.)

But in WWRY, as a member of the audience, you’re not asked to think a lot about the show’s message. It is, after all, delivered like the proverbial two-by-four right between your eyes – but oh my heavens is it ever entertainment!

Its staging doesn’t require vastly complex sets either, so my hope is that it might pay a visit to our local main stage theatre – the National Arts Centre – after it’s done its Toronto run later this year. But if it comes your way wherever you are, and even if your Queen awareness is so far limited to this:

“[Clap-clap-WHONK!
Clap-clap-WHONK!
Clap-clap-WHONK!]

Buddy you’re a boy make a big noise
Playin’ in the street
Gonna be a big man some day.

You got mud on yo’ face
You big disgrace
Kickin’ your can all over the place

We will… we will ROCK YOU!
We will… we will ROCK YOU!”

give yourself a break and go. Just try to come out of that show without a huge grin on your face. Just try.

Until la prochaine. À la next time.

Here’s a nice quote. Management 101? The First Law of the Internet? A Commandment for the New Millennium? Perhaps all of these?

To me, its present-day applicability is all the more surprising when you consider it was penned (literally) in the mid-19th century. Or maybe it’s just that good advice is timeless:

“The forbearing use of power does not only form a touchstone, but the manner in which an individual enjoys certain advantages over others is a test of a true gentleman. The power which the strong have over the weak, the magistrate over the citizen, the employer over the employed, the educated over the unlettered, the experienced over the confiding, even the clever over the silly – the forbearing or inoffensive use of all this power or authority, or a total abstinence from it when the case admits it, will show the gentleman in a plain light. The gentleman does not needlessly and unnecessarily remind an offender of a wrong he may have committed against him. He cannot only forgive, he can forget; and he strives for the nobleness of self and mildness of character which impart sufficient strength to let the past be the past. A true gentleman of honor feels humbled himself when he cannot help humbling others.”

-- Robert E Lee, in “Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of Robert E Lee”, by J William Jones – “found scribbled on a note in his briefcase after his death”.

= = =

What the hell, it’s summer and most days these days are slow news days, so how about a recipe?

Somewhere in our planet’s distant past there lived a person who cracked open an oyster shell one day, looked at the revolting pool of slime that was exposed and was the very first to conclude not only that it might be good to eat, but also that it would be just dandy to eat raw.

In the same spirit of adventure, but much more recently, some unnamed guy (because you just know it had to be a guy) was sitting on his deck one lazy afternoon, trying to think of a new way to enhance the “barbecue” experience. Summer was probably well along and having already inflicted his entire repertoire of beef, pork, fish and veggie variations on his nervous family, he likely was on the verge of exhausting the very last section of his grilling notes – “chicken” – and possibly was even beginning to panic at the thought of actually having to repeat something.

He was also probably well into his fifth or sixth can of beer when, with the most recent can about halfway drained, he looked thoughtfully at it and, when he was able to bring some vague sense of focus to his eyes, asked himself, “What if I stuck this half can of beer up a chicken’s butt?”

Thus was born “Beer Can Chicken” and the rest, as they say, is history.

When I first heard about the recipe, I just assumed it was some kind of guy joke. After all… it not only requires the above-mentioned insertion of the can, it also means giving up half a can of perfectly good beer. Had to be a joke, right?

But it works, and my first foray into Beer Can Chicken was such an immediate hit with the family that it has swiftly found a high place on our fave list of grilling recipes for chicken.

(I’m obviously a bit late to this party. Some quick Googling turns up not only several different variations on “Beer Can Chicken”, but also this device. It’s definitely a product aimed at those nervous grillers who might not be fully convinced that a tall-boy beer can, by itself, will provide sufficient stability for the slowly-cooking chicken, which sits in an admittedly – well, rude – position on the grill for the better part of one to two hours, depending on the size of the bird.)

For this to work, there are a couple of capabilities your barbecue absolutely has to have. For starters, a dome lid that will fully enclose your grill’s cooking surface. At the same time it has to be a grill that can be regulated in terms of both temperature (low / medium / high) and the position of the heat (gas flame or glowing charcoal) so that it’s not right under whatever you’re cooking (“indirect”, in the language of the world’s grilling guides, vs the “direct” method where the flame is right underneath what you’re cooking).

This recipe requires “indirect medium” heat, which means there is no flame directly under the chicken. My gas grill has three separate burner pipes that are positioned left to right across the full width of the barbecue. By lighting only the front and back burners, I get no flame in the centre, which is where I planted the chicken for this recipe.

Depending on the size of the chicken, it will stand a good 8 – 10 inches in height once it’s propped up on the beer can, so your dome lid has to be capable of fully closing while still accommodating something that tall.

So – assuming you’re “go” on all those fronts, here’s the recipe that was such a huge hit in our house. The end product was a beautifully moist roast bird with a crisp, golden skin. It’s from the Weber homepage with the minor variation of the lemon pepper, which I added to the rub.

At its end, I’ll throw in a couple more notes about our experience.

= = =

The Recipe

Beer Can Chicken

From: Weber's Big Book of Grilling

Here’s a technique that delivers great-tasting chicken and makes a lively conversation starter as well. We’ve used one of our special rubs, but you can sub in 2 to 3 tablespoons of your favourite one. Bottoms up!

For the rub:
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon granulated onion
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon lemon pepper
½ teaspoon granulated garlic
½ teaspoon ground coriander
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 whole chicken – 4-5 pounds
2 teaspoons olive or vegetable oil
1 16oz can (“tallboy”) beer

In a small bowl combine the rub ingredients.

From the chicken, remove and discard the neck, giblets, and any excess fat. Rinse the chicken, inside and out, under cold water and pat dry with paper towels. Lightly spray or brush all over with the oil and season, inside and out, with the rub.

Open the beer can and pour off half of the beer. Set the half-full can on a flat surface and slide the chicken over the top so the can fits inside the cavity. Transfer the bird to the grill, keeping the can upright. Carefully balance the bird on its two legs and the can. Grill over Indirect Medium heat until the juices run clear and the internal temperature reaches 170°F in the breast and 180°F in the thickest part of the thigh, 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 hours. Wearing barbecue mitts, carefully remove the chicken and the can from the grill, being careful not to spill the beer – it will be hot. Let the chicken rest for about 10 minutes before lifting it from the can. Discard the beer. Cut the chicken into serving pieces. Serve warm.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

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Here are a couple add-on notes the recipe didn’t include:

Be prepared to get a bit messy when it comes to hand rubbing the oil on the bird and then patting the spice rub all over. The oiled bird will also be incredibly slippery so an extra pair of hands to steady the beer can while you… well… uh… “position” the chicken makes that job a whole lot easier.

Even with the dome lid, I still had to remove one of my barbecue’s two grills and turn the other sideways so as to position it a couple inches lower – resting it right on the lines of “flavourizer” bars that also act to keep drippings directly off the gas jets. Still worked like a charm.

Our chicken was a 6-and-a-half-pound monster roaster; it was on the grill for about an hour and 45 minutes.

And to hell with wine’s “white with poultry” rule. A Shiraz is a fantastic grape product with which to accompany this dish.

Finally under this topic, and no I’m not making this up…
this was the beer I used (albeit in a Singapore Tiger can, because the OSH I had on hand was in a bottle).

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Here's another footnote from the “Where was the Editor?” file:

If this one weren’t wrapped around a tragedy, it would be hilarious. But it is wrapped around a tragedy, so let’s agree it deserves a head-shake instead of a hearty belly laugh. If you’ve been following the story of the young woman who was featured on the cover of the Maclean’s annual University Student issue (April 2 this year), you will also know that the woman in question, Kinga Ilyes, was warmly viewed by many Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, prompting one, Sergeant Chris Karigiannis, to write the magazine and tell the editors that the “girl next door” warmth projected by Ms Ilyes had resulted in her having been rated “the best pin-up in our collection”. Maclean’s made much of the story, including extensive follow-up profiles of both Ms Ilyes and their correspondent from the front. Sadly, Sgt Karigiannis died with two of his comrades in an explosion of a roadside bomb – what is known in the local military jargon as an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) – on June 20.

That’s the background. What the Maclean’s editors missed was a single wrong vowel in a letter that appeared in their July 9th issue, specifically in this sentence: “I’m always a few weeks behind in reading my Maclean’s, and was startled to realize that the same Sgt. Chris Karigiannis I was reading about late last night in your June 18 issue is the Chris Karigiannis who was killed by an IUD yesterday in Afghanistan.”

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And finally, credit where credit’s due.

I’ve frequently railed long and loud in this little cyber-nook about bad, even stupid, levels of consumer “service” that I’ve encountered in my travels along life’s great commercial highways and bi-ways. So it’s a treat to pass along news of a recent exercise in customer satisfaction that I would place on the rarefied “outstanding” plateau.

You might remember that, not too long ago, I went on a bit about the Nintendo Wii videogaming system. In fact, it’s proving to be so much fun for both offspring and myself that it has induced an occasional grumble by one of us when we find the machine in use by the other. (At present, I’m flying a Douglas Devastator low over the waves trying to torpedo a Japanese aircraft carrier under heavy destroyer protection en route to the Battle of the Coral Sea. She’s walking on the ceiling wearing magnetized boots and trying to swordfight her way past flaming scorpions in a Zelda fantasy game – no mean feat when your onscreen character is upside down!)

A couple months ago, offspring invested a sizeable chunk of her own money in a recent game that, in what I called a shameless example of “bait-and-switch”, turned out to be precisely the same game she had already played and beaten on a different game system – the Sony Playstation (PS) 2. The PS2 version of the game is entitled “Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones”. In its Wii incarnation, the game is called “Prince of Persia: Rival Swords”. And even though the Wii disk box includes a minuscule rectangle that notes, in very tiny type, “Based on Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones”, nowhere on the box is there a message to indicate it is exactly the same game, simply reconfigured for the Wii’s different controller.

Our first visit, after we discovered this, was to Future Shop, where we purchased the game. A junior manager, while vaguely sympathetic, was adamant about upholding chain wide store policy that they will not accept, in any way, shape or form, a return or exchange of opened software. They will happily exchange a defective version of anything for a working version of same, but they will not exchange a game for an entirely different one. My bleat that its being sold under a different title is misleading to customers cut no soap with them. I left Future Shop with the business card of a more senior manager and the name and address of the game’s manufacturer – Ubisoft.

Not hoping for too much, I then spun our case out in a letter to Ubisoft and mailed it off, in an envelope with a stamp, along with a cc in a different envelope to the more senior local Future Shop manager.

There followed the passage of about six weeks.

One recent afternoon, I returned home at the end of the work day to find a brown envelope which turned out to contain a brief letter from a Ubisoft "World Wide Hotlines Coordinator" and a second copy of the game in question, fully enclosed in its original manufacturer’s shrink-wrapped packaging. In other words, an UN-opened copy of the game!

I asked offspring what her preferences might be for a new Wii game and, armed with her list of three titles, back I went to Future Shop. (Offspring would have accompanied me – skilled fatherly engagement with a retail giant* is, after all, a life lesson that should be shared – but she had earlier embarked on a three-week out-of-town trip and I didn’t want to let the Ubisoft letter fester for a further 21 days.)

* The “heavy sarcasm” mode was on there. My “skilled fatherly engagement with a retail giant” typically is anything but.

Once again, I found myself dealing with a junior level customer service employee who listened patiently while I related in considerable detail the whole story to this point. When I was (finally!) done, he looked at the unopened version of the game I presented him, along with our receipt from the original purchase. “Ubisoft did that?” he asked incredulously. “Wow… great customer service.” Then he shrugged, placed the unopened game under the counter, ran the replacement game I had selected across the price scanner and, since it was exactly the same price as the returned game, asked me simply, “Do you want a bag?”

And that was that. Offspring now has her first-choice replacement awaiting her return and, as for me, all that remains is to reinforce my public applause for how GREAT(!) the customer service philosophy appears to be from this French videogame manufacturer.

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Until la prochaine…