That last one got a bit heavy as we used to say in, dare I say it, more sensible times. Normal programming will now resume.

After bidding the Amish of Lancaster County farewell and completing a whirlwind circuit of Washington’s monuments and historical pageantry it was on to the spiritual home of American democracy – Philadelphia. In matters of spirituality, symbols are quite important and Philadelphia has one that ranks as high as, alright, not quite with Magna Carta but certainly with…..others – the Liberty Bell. It is up there with the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo as one of the world’s most unimposing symbols as in it’s much smaller than you would expect and it’s got rather a large crack in it. So whereas Big Ben is still dinging and donging across London, the best you could get out of the Liberty Bell now would be a less than resounding clank.

It’s playoff time in major league baseball at the moment. I was here at this time of the year  in 1984 to visit some mines in the US and Canada and got to sit in various bars across both countries watching games culminating in the rather pretentiously named World Series between the Detroit Tigers and the San Diego Padres. I returned in 1988 to participate in some due diligence work in Cleveland and on the flight from Los Angeles to Cleveland the in-flight movie (there was only one back then) was Major League and on the return flight to Los Angeles the movie was Field of Dreams. Last time the CB and I were here in 2006, we went to see the New York Yankees play the Atlanta Braves at Yankee Stadium. So baseball on my trips to the US is as ubiquitous as red wine is on my pallete. Actually, that’s not quite the case of late. Our issues with wine and bars in North America have been well documented here. I’ll spare you the Philadephia story (involving the difference between reisling and moscatto). But I now choose my bars very carefully if red wine is to be actually consumed. The reason is that red wine is not as popular in most places (especially sports bars) as it is in our household so a glass of red wine in your average Irish pub will likely come out of a bottle first opened on St Patrick’s Day. That might be okay on March 18th but not so much in October. So it might look like red wine but that’s where the comparison ends.

As is our want, the child bride and I sought out a bar after the day’s sightseeing, the duration of which wasn’t significantly compromised by the Liberty Bell. In this particular bar we were introduced to a room full of fickle, fair weather, full-throated Phillies fans (I just broke my alliteration record). The Philadelphia Phillies were playing the New York Mets in a 5 game play-off series and at the top of the 8th inning of game 2 were one behind (and one game behind) so half the bar went home. Apparently their excellent record in the regular season and the experts’ expectation that they would flog the Mets, was not enough and that one run was insurmountable until it wasn’t and they won in the 9th. Those remaining in the bar lifted the roof off. It sounded like those who had left had returned with all of their mates.

Advance two days and the scene is repeated in New York. The CB and I are seated in an almost identical bar surrounded by Mets fans watching game 3. The Mets lead almost from the start and win easily and apart from the occasional half-hearted cheer, no one seems to care. And this is a perennially under-achieving team, over-achieving. Why the disinterest? Well we are one block from Madison Square Garden and about seven from Broadway’s theatre district. There is so much to choose from – baseball, basketball, ice hockey, football, the worlds best bands and plays – you can understand why there might be a team parochialism deficit, apart from for the city itself.

Something we did notice about New York this time is that it resembles a building site. On our recent cruise round Japan I remarked that there was enough bamboo in an extensive thicket in Kyoto to scaffold Manhattan. I think they took me at my word because there is scaffolding everywhere as countless buildings are refurbished. Either that or the Democratic Party which has almost North Korea like control of the city and state is giving lots of construction jobs to unions in return for donations, like they do in Victoria. Other infrastructure doesn’t appear to be faring quite as well though.

The only concession to the state of the rapidly deteriorating roads appears to be more bike lanes because I guess bikes don’t wear them out as fast as cabs. Further on the subject of transport, we caught the train from Penn Station to Newark Airport and sooner or later they’ll have to replace those trains’ six sided wheels.

That brings us to the close of this series. We are now on our way to San Francisco and I have a death-grip on my first red wine in an age. We lashed out as this has been rather a special trip so we’re travelling at the  front of the plane so this wine is rather good. I expect I’ll have a few more before we next talk. The sub-continent is under serious consideration so get ready for Curry Capers or something similar – that was the first thing that sprung to mind and I don’t have much time as I have to get back to this red.

Get ready for some political ranting. My opinions.This one’s a bit of a thematic mess and doesn’t flow but we’re getting to the end of the trip so I’m putting up random stuff.

We’re in the US again and the perennial issue which Americans face numerous times a day and about which we blow-ins stress over, is back at the forefront of considerations – tipping. It used to be that if a service was provided efficiently, cost-effectively or pleasantly, or a combination of all three, the provider would be rewarded via a tip. Then we were told that tips were necessary because the minimum wage was too minimum and providers needed tips to survive. So we’re moving from voluntary towards guilt-trip. Now the credit card machine comes with various percentage tipping options built in, one of which you are expected to choose and one of which isn’t necessarily zero. So now the customer isn’t just expected to reward good service but to also subsidise the waiter’s wage. Lucky business owner. If we’re contributing to the business do we get a share of the profits? That sort of socialism always falls over when it’s extended to sharing the losses also, so we live with it.

We’ve just been in Amish country in backblocks Pennsylvania. It’s the sort of place that brings out the voyeur in us all – there’s one, someone shouts and there’s another and that house has green blinds and washing on the line and no electricity connection. We’re all experts in finding Amish now. It’s a bit like whale watching or train-spotting except the Amish don’t move as fast (they travel in horse drawn buggies) and don’t have numbers riveted to their sides (they wear quaint clothes instead). Whilst they make the occasional concession to the modern world these days, like using batteries or communal phones, I can’t help thinking the world is technologically accelerating away from them and their Mennonite brothers and sisters. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing for them.

There are two things that stand the US apart from just about every other country in the world (apart from the Amish community). One regards the attitude to their veterans. Washington does monuments to their history, their wars and their veterans better than anywhere I’ve ever been. And the respect shown is heart-felt and admirable, for the most part. Attitude doesn’t always translate into action however so there’s work to be done in this regard. Government funding for illegal economic immigrants while veterans live on the streets is an over-simplification of a complex problem but the underlying premise has some legitimacy.

The other is the utterly unhinged (to those better endowed with common sense) love affair with abortion. Millions of mainly (this is 2024) women will never have an abortion or contemplate having one but will die in a ditch defending their god-given right to have one. Is that related to the “pursuit of happiness” outlined in the Declaration of Independence? And to justify this commitment  to “women’s reproductive health care” they’ll quote the 1% of tragic examples where compromises and compassion are absolutely necessary and ignore the 90+% of cases which are simply contraception after the fact because people (men and women) are too stupid, too lazy or too ignorant to take advantage of one of the many ways to prevent pregnancy.

So much for the deep and meaningfuls. Back to the quirky and irreverent (and irrelevant) with #12

Toronto is Sydney big and the hotel we stayed in was the biggest in Toronto so it was like staying in a railway station. But it did have one redeeming feature. In keeping with the dominant theme of this blog, it had a functioning bar – not a very big one considering the size of the hotel but we found a table and two comfortable chairs and they had what we wanted off the drinks menu so considering progress to date, that was a massive win. And ad nauseum, the following happened at the restaurant on the waterfront we lunched in earlier that day. I asked for a Peroni draft. Didn’t have any. Okay, a bottle of Stella. Didn’t have any. Okay a Peroni in a bottle – success. This is a BYO continent.

I haven’t been able to determine whether the following quote was originally said by Custer’s nemesis, Crazy Horse or by conservative commentator Lt Col Allen West. Incidentally, with every bit of global knowledge back to the beginning of time at our fingertips, you’d think it easy to find this out. Life’s too short. Back to the quote which has been used in the context of historical philistines destroying statues – not the Taliban or Islamic State but the rent-a-scum anarcho-terrorists funded by people like George Soros and their useful idiot middle class marxist apprentices who have to borrow mummy’s car to get to the protest. It goes as follows:
“History is not there for you to like or dislike. It is there for you to learn from it. And if it offends you, even better. Because then you are less likely to repeat it. It’s not yours for you to erase or destroy.”

So it was refreshing to see statues of both Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Victoria outside the Ontario parliament building in Toronto. And they weren’t graffitied either. Being in the fenced grounds of the parliament would help, especially as said grounds are patrolled by both protective services officers and peace officers. What’s the difference, I hear you ask? Well I asked a young lady peace officer and she referred to her powers of arrest and rather ironically, pointed to the gun on her hip to illustrate the difference. Fair enough, thought I. Those statues are in good hands. I can’t help but think that our state and federal governments would allow similar statues to be sacrificed on the alter of political correctness or historical atonement or imperialist apology or something. The rabid mobs would have had their way with them. But not in Toronto.

As if the Niagara Falls region needed anything else, it’s also a big wine growing region – who knew? This is still Canada and most of the time it’s freezing. Next thing, we’ll be seeing palm trees. Considering the almost continuous rant in this blog about the difficulty in securing alcoholic refreshment in this part of the world, this is rather ironic. For a part of the world that supposedly doesn’t get irony, there’s a lot of it. Unconscious irony anyone?

There are officially three Niagara Falls. The biggest and most spectacular is the horse-shoe on the Canadian side of the border. On the US side there are two but one, the bridal veil as it’s called hardly counts as it’s a thin ribbon of water compared with the bigger curtain right next to it. I guess because Canada has the spectacular one, as a sop to big brother they get to say they have two.

We’ve stayed in three hotels on this trip, where the bar was not functioning – San Francisco, Boston and Ottawa. WTF. That’s 3 on one continent – not good enough North Ameriica. We saw a ubiquitous Palestinian protest in Ottawa but non-functioning bars is something really worth protesting about. San Francisco was a diversion, you know about Boston and Ottawa was washing its hair or something. The Palestinian protest was on the corner of the block where our hotel is located. We are sitting in a bar (obviously but not in the hotel, also obviously) watching the aftermath as protesters fashionably decked out in their black and white scarves, worn just so across the shoulders wander aimlessly about. What does one do when the protest doth finish? Ironically a short time later, a bunch of Hare Krishnas occupied the same protest spot, banging their drums and chanting their mantras or whatever they’re called. Strangely they attracted zero interest from the Royal Canadian Mounted rozzers, unlike those ignorant shitbags lamenting the death of the world’s worse terrorist, who were surrounded by flashing lights and aggressively wielded batons.

While we’re in Ottawa it’s worth pointing out that like Canberra, when this place was chosen as the capital, the ever so polite Canadians had a chance to build a monument to democracy and its various various institutions. So why did they seemingly choose a Disney animator, so intent on taking the piss, to design the place? I’m looking at Parliament hill with its turrets and spires and towers and battlements and half expecting to see Shrek running down the road with Lord Farquaad in hot pursuit.

Since we started off discussing booze related topics, let’s continue. We were sitting in a bar in Montreal and I remarked on how similar modern western cities are. We could have been anywhere. In the western world. This distinction between the west and the rest has to be made because let’s face it, Boston and Cairo are somewhat dissimilar. What’s nice about some cities like Quebec City and Montreal is that they have preserved their old towns almost in their entirety or at least so they very much resemble what it was like around the dock areas 2 or 3 hundred years ago, minus much of the filth, crime and debauchery, or at least the obvious bits. Similarities in the new bits occur down to the smallest detail. The CB had a champagne cocktail (happy hour – but I’m not a cheapskate) and it was made exactly the same way as one of my secret recipes – sugar cube, dash of brandy and spray of bitters. Oh, and some champagne. I must have stolen that “secret” recipe at some point in the foggy depths of time but can’t remember when or from whom.

Incidentally, while the CB is drinking her champagne cocktail, I’m drinking a Polish beer called Zywiec (of course it had a “zyw” in it). It was that or a German grog. Poor form, I thought. O Canada, very unpatriotic. Here’s me hanging out for a Molson and I get Polish or German. Not even a Kronenbourg.

One other observation regarding Canada. It’s population on average appears considerably thinner than their equivalents to the south. The French influence could explain the absence of the twerking cohort amongst the female populace as they strive for that green salad shape. Not so the men and I put that down to French fres (ironically) being served by the cup in Canada but by the wheelbarrow in the US.