86: Monte Cheval Vranac 2007
Montenegro, $8.35
This is an unapologetically rough red that puts the rust back in rustic. It has flavours of white pepper and orange and an undercurrent of funk. It is a big-boned fellow that will provide the perfect pairing for a rich stew or a barfight.

82: Clos du Pacha Red 2007
Morocco, $11.95
This Cabernet Sauvignon blend has a diluted nose with generic flavours of leather and raspberry. These unmemorable flavours re-echo on the palate. It’s amazing what you can do with water and food colouring.

70: Great Wall Cabernet Sauvignon 1996
China, $13.95
I found little evidence of bottle maturity here, which makes me suspect that there’s been a miscommunication between this wine and its label. In any case, enjoy a horsey and aggressive aroma with notes of diesel, black liquorice and vegetables.

I can’t think of a collection of wine reviews I’ve enjoyed more. Here’s to a long tenure for the writer, Matthew Sullivan.

Ingested foreign bodies and societal wealth: three year observational study of swallowed coins

Objective: To examine the relation between coins ingested by children and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

But sadly, for it would’ve made a fine headline had the results been different,

Conclusion: There was no detectable difference in the total value of coins ingested, or ratio of coins to other objects swallowed, before or after a massive stock market crash

More cocktails for the recession/depression, courtesy of the New Yorker online:

Nasdaiquiri
Add a dozen I.P.O.’s to portfolio, wait until bubble bursts, drink all day every day.

BlackBerry Sling
Discover that your BlackBerry doesn’t work because you haven’t paid the bill. Sling it against the wall, then buy a prepaid phone and make some rum in your toilet.

Bloody Maria Bartiromo
Squeeze four packets of McDonald’s ketchup and one packet of pepper into a glass. Mix with eight ounces homemade hooch. Drink while you watch the Money Honey on a TV in the window of a Circuit City that’s going out of business at the end of the month.

There are more…

HT: Pink Slips Are The New Black

On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.

The entire letter to Virgin’s Richard Branson from a passenger on a recent Mumbai-London flight is well worth a read, especially if you ever had a pet hamster. Make sure to click along with the photos at the top of the article.

Another highlight was your complete rejection of Tuftean convention through the use of colors without meaning, location without purpose, and position without movement. How daring it was to represent the quarterly shortfalls in revenue with the color purple—the color associated not only with kings but also with the skin of slaves, an obvious yet powerful homage to Alice Walker’s seminal novel. By rejecting the fixed ironic conventions of green and black (colors of mold, death, and despair) for profits and red (blood and lust) for losses, you transcended the common criticism that capitalism is animalistic and decadent. The postmodern color scheme instead offered a fascinating contradiction, one that simultaneously said, “I am master of my destiny,” and “I am trapped by the projections required as a condition of my employment, and am but a slave to outcomes that are way beyond my control,” and “Feel free to have more cinnamon buns, for I seem to have ordered too many.”

Perfect, just perfect. We may as well approach these things as art and take what amusement we can from them, for all the sense they make otherwise…

Third is the award for Most Aggravating On Hold Message, which in 2008 was as hotly contested as ever. However, the clear winner was the UK’s Driving Standards Agency for a message that said: “Thank you for your call. The anticipated waiting time for this call is . . . longer than we would expect you to wait. In appreciation of your time, patience and cost implications to yourself, we are terminating this call.” And then it cuts you off.

TSX expected to reopen after stall

Was there any question about that? Gigantic Hound’s recommendation of a year-long prorogation of the market aside, the TSX isn’t really designed to stay shut.

Here, by contrast, is an informative headline on the same topic:

TSX to resume trading Thursday

And for bonus points on the same subject, which of these statements would you recommend a TMX official make to restore confidence in the exchange after a full-day shutdown on one of the last trading days of a volatile year. Would it be:

a. “Obviously, we regret that this occurred. We hope people understand that this is very complex technology, and despite our best efforts you’re not going to be able to maintain 100-per-cent availability.”

or

b. “We understand that our clients rely on us to carry out their business and we deeply regret that today they weren’t able to do that. We have been working hard to find the source of the problem and will review what happened to ensure this situation does not recur.”

Vote in the comments.

BoC chief says economic crisis will ‘end’

Insightful. End, he says –as all crises eventually do. What I really like are the quotation marks around “end”, which introduce doubt where, as far as I can tell from the story, there really shouldn’t be any.

Over to you…

“They were waiting for a translation from the original Australian.”

- Bob Rae, Liberal Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre, jokingly explaining why the governing Conservative Party took so long to release their federal election campaign platform. He was referring to a scandal earlier in the campaign in which it was revealed that a 2003 speech delivered by Conservative Party Leader Stephen Harper (now Canadian Prime Minister) in favour of the Iraq War was largely plagarized from a speech given two days prior by Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

[http://www.torontoobserver.ca/2008/10/08/tories-roasted-at-cbc-debate/]