Celebrities and wine are in the news recently, but is it a new thing? Is it even a thing, for that matter? In my first wine review I chat a bit about the non-issue and write a non-review of Brangelina’s new rosé, opting instead to put a Californian red blend on deck for a spin.

We’d been the recipients of a bottle of Grey Goose as well as a bottle of Tito’s Handmade Vodka over the past year (before the latter became available from the LCBO) from generous friends and houseguests, and so together with our own bottle of Russian Standard it seemed criminal not to line them up and see if there really was a clear winner among them.

One thing that the BP and Cooks Source incidents have in common is hubris, though the two cases are separated by several orders of magnitude in scale. It reminds us that the “social” aspect of “social media” doesn’t merely mean that lots of people are logged in to Facebook, but that they are in fact people, with personalities, opinions, and morals.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Downfall YouTube phenomenon, and the recent content ID blocking put in place by YouTube, ostensibly at the behest of the copyright owners, preventing existing parodies from being viewed and new ones being uploaded. You may also be aware that a number of parodies have been uploaded in the past week which offer commentary on these events.

Read part one here. When I was thirteen or so I read the novelization of Close Encounters (because it was lying around the house and I was thirteen and bored,…

My wife and I went to see Kate Rusby at Hugh’s Room in Toronto’s west end two Sundays back. She’s had limited exposure here in Canada, though true anglophiles will know her as the singer of the theme song for the understated comedy Jam and Jerusalem.

I really have to work on my rhetorical style. And by that I mean to say that I don’t think it’s the rhetoric that’s the problem so much as the delivery. I make what I think is – what I know to be a perfect conversation-ender and then turn as if to walk away, and at that instant, someone says “Yeah, it’s like when…”

I talk a lot about music hardware on this site, but the music that I write wouldn’t sound like much without software. Logic is my main audio production app, and…

I have often said, of my day gig in advertising, “If this job is ever difficult, it’s because somebody screwed up.” You might think that’s pretty upbeat coming from me until you realize that only one screw-up has to be signed off on to make an entire campaign, or even a brand, difficult.

The end of the year is a time for lists, and as I am a writer it only seems natural that my list is about words. And because I am cranky, it is equally natural that my list is about words I don’t like.