Legs, Eggs, and TheBesty.com

Once upon a time this blog was devoted entirely to restaurant reviews and so, every now and again, I would opine at great length on the subject of eateries in the Victoria and Vancouver areas.  One such establishment was Paul’s Place Omelettery, a Vancouver breakfast spot I wrote about on June 21, 2010 seven short months after Largely the Truth went online.  In the four years since then, thoughts of the review had drifted completely away from the waking part of my mind into the unreachable ultraviolet range of consciousness where hides such apocrypha as “where I left my keys” and “every book I have ever read.”

Then, in May, nearing the end of a road trip spanning some 2800 miles and fifteen states, I awoke in my Hyannis, Massachusetts hotel to find I’d received an e-mail from TheBesty.com.  The Besty is a new site which encourages bloggers to create and share lists of the best restaurants in their cities and elsewhere.  In February I had contributed a list of Waikiki hotspots culled from a recent visit and something about my hodgepodge of pizza joints and ice cream parlors must have caught their eye, because the email I received on that Cape Cod morning advised me a video using material drawn from my review of Paul’s Place had gone online.

That video is embedded below.  Though it may not contain every Julianne Moore metaphor I have used, it certainly has my favorite.

Thanks to everyone at TheBesty.com for reading and supporting Largely the Truth! 

P.S – Though things have slowed down for me on the blogging front you can still find me on Twitter and, my newest obsession, Instagram:

The Thing About the Desert...Part 2

On September 24, 2013 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  

Along the way, my friend and I decided to look into local ghost stories and ended up with one of our own.  This is part 2 of that story.

Click here to read part 1 first
Click here for part 3

A look at Google Earth shows the area to be dotted here and there with houses but on the ground, in the dark, the turnoff to Angel Canyon Road from Highway 89, some six miles into the desert north of Kanab, felt so remote it may as well have been the far side of the moon.  After leaving the highway we followed the road down a small rise, past low shrubs and patches of scrub grass, to the start of the 350-acre Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.

Best Friends is noted as being America’s largest sanctuary for companion animals, recognized for their commitment to their “no-kill mission”; they believe that 90% of shelter animals are adoptable, or could be with the proper care and treatment.  It seemed a bit grim, then, that the sole reason we were in the neighborhood was on the off chance of seeing someone wearing a fur pelt and firing pellets of ground-up human body at their enemies, but that didn’t stop us. 

Aw, that's cute.  Now make with the evil witches

Midnight at the Waffle House

On September 24 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  Over the next couple weeks I'll be posting a handful of stories and photos from the trip.

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones

From finding out that my beer at Denver International was going to cost more than the sandwich it accompanied to taking off in a thunderstorm and seeing the clouds outside my window light up from within, God's name got a lot of play during my journey from Seattle to Austin. It's not that I'm religious - far from it - but if you're going to lodge a complaint you may as well take it to the very top. 

Dr. Broseph, DDS doesn't go in for $9 beers.  Too many carbs, brah.
And yes, he did have his name and "D.D.S" sewed into the front of his shirt.

Consequently, when Southwest Airlines flight 409 safely touched down in Austin just before midnight and I stepped out of the terminal into 86 degree heat I decided to give God a break and cursed Texas Governor Rick Perry instead; the back of my shirt was darkening with sweat regardless of whether or not that reptilian bastard believes in global warming.

You're a bad man, Rick Perry

My last visit to Austin had been in the summer of 2008; I'd arrived around the same time, but on a Greyhound bus from New Orleans rather than a plane from Denver. That time, instead of a lightning storm we had a group of teens harassing other passengers to the point where our driver called Houston PD. The teens, who were black, called the driver a racist before fleeing the bus and hiding in a nearby gas station. Demonstrating a level of restraint one step removed from sainthood, the Hispanic man they had most recently been hassling for, well, being Hispanic, remained silent through their pulling of the race card. 

Thinking back to that, a plane ride through a thunderstorm didn't seem all that bad if for no other reason than it didn't last 12 hours. Also improving on last time was my choice of attire - my first visit to the South, all I had packed was jeans and black T-shirts, and I spent a month on the brink of heat stroke - this time I had exclusively brought shorts. Also black t-shirts, but that's because anything brighter makes me look like Gumby gone to seed. 

Still, even with shorts I was grateful that Mike, the friend who was picking me up, had the air conditioning in his new car set to "Fortress of Solitude." Mike and I have been friends for around six years now, having first met through the Couchsurfing network in 2007.

"Can you turn it down another degree or so?"

Earlier that year he had left his New York City home and begun hitchhiking across the USA, stopping to catch the odd NBA game and, memorably, a sermon by none other than the Reverend Al Green. After a spell in Olympic National Park he journeyed north to Victoria where I met up with him on the steps of the library; I wanted to vet him before letting him into my house. He looked much the same way then as he does now: bearded, six-foot-four, about the same across the shoulders and possessing of an enviably booming voice which, under the right conditions, can change the course of rivers and tropical storms. 

"I'll have a Coke, please"

I liked him then and still do, which was invaluable considering we were about to spend the night 12 days in each others constant company. 

After saying our hellos and stowing my bags we were faced with the question of what to do next: the plan had been to drive to the Grand Canyon, which Mike had never seen, but his work schedule meant we had to leave within a couple days of arriving in Austin. Prior to my arrival I had half-joked that we could leave right from the airport as long as I got some pancakes and coffee along the way and as we pulled away from the curb he said, "

"Were you serious about leaving now? Because my stuff is in the back."

Questions like that are the stuff of which friendships are made.

"Do you know a place I can get pancakes?"

"I do."

"Then yes."

That partially explains how, 30 minutes later, we ended up at the Waffle House on Ben White Boulevard eating grits we hadn't ordered, pining after the hashbrowns we had and looking at a grainy cellphone video of what the waitress claimed were the ghosts haunting her apartment. 

To be continued in Part 2: Meth, Grits and Life After Death

North on 19: Traffic and the Savage Sky

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:

This weekend my wife and I drove up island to Campbell River to visit my mother.  We used to visit once every few months but since my stepfather’s passing in March we've made the trip - some 260km - more frequently.

We had planned to leave Friday afternoon at 2, which we thought would allow us to beat the inevitable after-work traffic jam that clogs up the westbound road out of Victoria and in no way indicates a need for commuter rail.  As it turned out, we were almost right – we had made it as far as the beginning of the Malahat highway, where traffic bottlenecks on a good day, to discover a construction crew busily increasing to three the number of lanes which have to frantically merge into one thirty feet later.  Traffic slowed to a standstill and we had plenty of time to reflect on how peaceful our up-island trips used to be when Via Rail was still running.

In my more optimistic moments I imagine a day when some kind of light rail service gives commuters in the GVRD a way to work that doesn’t involve sweltering on asphalt while a chopped Harley Davidson four feet away plays you the song of its people but such a utopia is unlikely.

Victoria would like to be thought of as a forward-thinking city and with all the tattooed yogis wandering around you’d almost fall for it – until, that is, someone makes a suggestion towards improving infrastructure in any meaningful way.  

So You Want to Go to England: Surviving Heathrow Airport

You made it

Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport, widely considered to be the safest in the world, uses a sophisticated passenger screening system headed by college graduates who coolly screen travelers for “micro-expressions” which may hint at nefarious intent – by contrast, the U.K. Border Agency (and the TSA in America, for that matter) employs a network of po-faced ungulates still seething over not being invited to prom.  So don’t take it personally when, upon your arrival in England, the U.K. Border Agency treats you like you’ve just arrived from Malawi with several sticks of T.N.T., a pound of cocaine and eight undocumented immigrants concealed somewhere on your person.  Or like you're Madonna.

"You guys still believe I'm English, right?"

So You Want to Go to England: Getting There - Freighter Cruises

Why fly when can you take 20 times longer for three times the price?
Photo by Mike Baird, licensed through Creative Commons

Part 1:  Getting Started

Part 2:  Before You Go 

Part 3:  Getting There - Air Canada

Part 4:  Getting There - Air Transat

Part 5:  Getting There - British Airways

Part 6:  Getting There - Freighter Cruises
Part 7:  Surviving Heathrow Airport

Once upon time, if a young man suffered from wanderlust or a failure to fully comprehend the rhythm method, fleeing his quaint coastal hometown was a simple matter.   All he had to do was run, preferably under cover of darkness, to the dockyard and beg for a job on the first freighter bound for Sheik Yarbouti.  Once onboard he was free to enjoy a lifetime on the open sea, never again to worry about personal responsibility or any kind of basic human comfort.

Over time, the slow encroachment of unions and maritime laws has made it tougher to escape your mistakes by sea.   Now the experience of traveling on a seagoing freighter is limited to those who thoughtfully joined the Seafarers International Union before “forgetting” their prophylactics and independent-minded tourists who have time and money to burn.  

And so, having covered some options for flying the friendly skies, in this installment of "So You Want to Go to England" we takes a look at this considerably less popular alternative to air travel.

So You Want to Go to England: Getting There - British Airways

Photo by Florian, licensed through Creative Commons

The first time I flew with to London via British Airways it was out of spite; on a previous trip Air Canada had switched my booking from a flight that had seat-back televisions to a flight that did not.  That may sound childish to you but since I enjoy flying about as much as I do being punched in the groin, taking away my only distraction from the fact I’m sitting in a chair in the sky was tantamount to a declaration of war.  

So You Want to Go to England: Getting There - Air Transat

Photo by Martin Hartland, licensed through Creative Commons

Are you so cheap that paperboys & waiters spit at the mention of your name?  So poor you spend your evenings huddled around a burning barrel beneath a bridge?  Have you recently been released from prison and found yourself wanting to relive the experience, with the added dimension of possibly plummeting thousands of feet to certain death?  If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then the next time you plan a vacation you’ll want to give Air Transat a call.

"The in-flight movie is what?"

Passenger reviews for the budget airline are mixed, with one passenger describing it as "You either swear by or at Air Transat.”  Most speak highly of the carrier’s customer service and denounce everything else with the kind of fury I haven’t seen since Kevin Bacon’s “angry dance” in Footloose.  There are no seatback televisions, the seats are narrow and legroom is nonexistent, but with economy class fares up to $500 less than those offered by Air Canada there is something to be said for flying the thrifty skies.

So You Want to Go to England: Getting There - Air Canada

- Photo by Patrick Cardinal, licensed through Creative Commons

You know your no-account brother?  The one who passes bad cheques and storms out of the intervention when your father says “You’re killing your mother – just killing her!”?  If he ran an airline it would be Air Canada.  Something of a running joke here in the Great White North, Air Canada has, in the span of a single decade, been bailed out by the Canadian government twice (once in 2001, again in 2009) and shows no sign of improvement.  

"On second thought, miss, I don't
need a blanket.  But thank you."

Check-in agents are grumpy, flight attendants could frighten Rampage Jackson and should a delayed flight cause you to miss a connection in the evening there is no guarantee AC will issue you a hotel voucher.

My distaste for Air Canada is such that I wouldn’t mention the airline at all if not for my fellow Canadian readers, who are not exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing a Transatlantic carrier*.  Given their limited options, Air Canada represents the middle ground between the higher prices and superior service of British Airways and the bargain basement airborne buses operated by Air Transat.

* Update: As of May 24th, Virgin Atlantic will be operating four flights a week from Vancouver to London Heathrow, meaning you west coasters will have even less reason to fly with Air Canada.

So You Want to Go to England: Before You Go

Before booking your flight (or boat - more on both of these in the coming weeks) you'll want to know a little more about the people and what's important to them.  In this week's instalment of "So You Want to Go to England" we help you get to know the people of the British Isles and give you some talking points should you trap one of them in a conversation:

Go to Hell

Here in North America the popular vision of an Englishmen is a slender, foppish man with very bad teeth, dressed in tweed and seducing your wife with his ironed handkerchiefs.  While in some parts of England that may still be true – Knightsbridge, Colin Firth’s house – the Englishman you’re more likely to encounter on your grand adventure is the one approaching you at the bus stop of a night, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and demanding your wallet.  

So You Want to Go to England: Getting Started

In my life I have met people who are natural travelers - the sort who can live for 6 months on whatever they pack into a rucksack the size of a grasshopper's scrotum - but I am not one of them.  While most people come back from a vacation talking about their amazing adventure, the kindness of the locals and how their journey expanded their horizons, making them better people on a spiritual level, I complain about intestinal parasites, sunburn and being mugged by whatever passes for highwaymen in the place I have just visited.  This travel guide is for people like me.

I also take pictures like this while giggling to myself

More Oral Magic: The 2012 Victoria Spoken Word Festival

No?  How about some poetry then?

After a successful inaugural run last year the Victoria Spoken Word Festival is back for more in 2012 and so, apparently, am I.  For the second year running I will be on-hand to comment on the festivities, bringing the magic of the Spoken Word Festival to the frail, housebound and triple-booked.  


Just like last year, tickets are cheap ($5-$10) so try to make it out to one of the events at either Cafe Solstice or the Intrepid Theatre, from Thursday to Friday night.  Click the first link below for scheduling information.


Post 1:  The 2012 Victoria Spoken Word Festival Begins!  - The philosophical barber, Fish Jesus & Floyd Jones
Post 2:  Tongues of Fire Instant Slam - Meltdowns, turkey love and a bearded snake
Post 3:  The Awesome Shit Showcase - Nostalgia, glitter & heartbreak.  Also bodily fluids
Post 4:  On the Edge, Into the Sunset - Saying goodbye with class (and a golden penis statue)

In Pictures: The 2011 Mr. Olympia Expo

"I can't remember which makes you bigger.  I'll go ask Alice."

Visiting the floor of the Mr. Olympia Expo was like being part of an organized tour to another planet; one where all food comes in powder or pill form, the water is electric blue and actually makes you thirsty, and all the natives have bodies straight out of comic books or the magazines I hide under my mattress.

Click "Read On" to see my full photo set from the expo

Largely the Truth @ the 2011 Mr. Olympia Competition

You read that right.  Less than three weeks from now, on September 9, I will be firing up Etta, my sleek, silver Corolla S, and driving 2100km down the Veteran's Memorial Highway to Las Vegas for the 2011 Mr. Olympia Bodybuilding Competition.

The culture of bodybuilding has fascinated me since I started lifting weights six years ago.  The behavior I've seen in the gym, from simple preening to grunting that would make a rutting bull in the next room say, "There must be something serious going on over there", is as strange as it is hard to ignore.  Documentaries like Pumping Iron & books like Harrison Pope's The Adonis Complex - presenting as they do a world teeming with insecurity, neurosis and human bodies pushed to extreme - have only cemented that fascination.

Now I've decided to take in that world's biggest event - the Joe Weider Olympia Weekend 2011 at the Orleans Hotel & Las Vegas Convention Center.  My Silver VIP Package (keep your remarks to yourself) secures me access & reserved seating as follows:

• Early Entry to Meet The Olympians - Thursday, Sept. 15, 7 PM
• Olympia Weekend Expo - Early Entry - Friday, Sept. 16, 9:30 AM - 5 PM
• Olympia Weekend Expo - Early Entry - Saturday, Sept. 17, 9:30 AM - 5 PM
• Fitness / Figure / Bikini/ Ms. Olympia Judging - Friday, Sept. 16, 10:30 AM
• Fitness Olympia Finals/Ms. Olympia Finals/Mr. Olympia Judging - Friday, Sept. 16, 7 PM
• Olympia 202 Showdown - Reserved Seating - Saturday, Sept. 17, 10:30 AM
• 202 Showdown / Figure Olympia Finals / Mr. Olympia Finals - Saturday, Sept. 17, 7 PM
• Olympia Victory Gala, Saturday, Sept. 17, 11 PM

From my base of operations at the Circus, Circus Hotel & Casino I will be blogging events, uploading photos and generally trying to make sense of it all at largelythetruthmrolympia.wordpress.com.  You can also keep up with events via my twitter account @largelythetruth.

Meet Your Olympians:

Jay Cutler
Kai Greene
Phil Heath

I Gave Up My Bus Pass For This? - Driving in Victoria

Until this August it had been seven years since I’d driven an automobile.  In some circles this declaration would be cause for games of celebratory hacky-sack and lengthy speeches about how everything cruel and savage in this world is powered by the internal combustion engine.

I’d like to say that my reasons were ideological.  That I abstained because of some objection to the way Mother Earth has been viciously subjugated by the demoniac heralds of that brutal warlord Henry Ford.  This would be a craven lie.  In actual fact, for years I have simply been too lazy to take a driver’s test. 

Bobtoberfest! | Heater Allen Brewing | 907 NE 10th Avenue | McMinnville, OR

Heater Allen brewmaster
Rick Allen

The original Oktoberfest was planned by the German government as a celebration of their decisive victory in the Second World War.  By the time they saw which way the wind was blowing it was too late to get their deposit back from the caterer so they went ahead and the celebration, unlike a lot of Germanic practices at the time, caught on around the world.  The old-timers at your local Edelweiss club would probably give a different answer.  Maybe something more to do with the horse-race organized to celebrate the 1810 marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig to Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen.  The Germans prefer that story and since they throw a good party in the latter half of September I see no reason not to humour them.

Heater Allen Brewing, at 907 NE 10^th Ave in McMinnville, Oregon, celebrate every Oktoberfest with their signature Bobtoberfest brew: a smooth, malty, beer named in honour of brewmaster Rick Allen’s late brother Bob.  This year I happened to be in Portland visiting friends on the weekend of September 10^th and 11^th, the same weekend Heater-Allen hosted Bobtoberfest at their McMinnville brewery. 

Every Man a King, Part III - Back Home, If Someone Kills You They Have a Reason

This is the third part in an ongoing series that covers my visit to New Orleans in summer 2008:

My room at the Dupre wasn’t noteworthy in any way except for the vast beige curtains.  Normally neutral colors are able to mask the most fantastic things; put Godzilla in a beige pantsuit and he could destroy all of Japan without anyone so much as stopping to ask him for the time.  In the case of these curtains, even beige couldn’t conceal their being the size of several football pitches.  There was enough fabric on display to reupholster the sofas of every grandmother in Florida, with enough left over to make Gojira that pantsuit.  Whichever humanitarian had last cleaned the room left the air conditioning on so that the pleasing glacial air I had enjoyed in the lobby was to be found here as well.  I dropped my bag, magically four-hundred and seventy-two pounds lighter, on the king-size bed and changed out of clothes that were sweat-stained into clothes that soon would be.  My nod to futility finished I turned my attention to the rest of the afternoon, and my checklist.  

The Quarter

I have an informal checklist that I generally adhere to when I arrive in a new city.  The items are in no particular order and while it’s not vital that I get to all of them I do try.  So far today I had already accomplished two: “Find the hotel without getting mugged” and “humiliate myself in front of a woman”.  Since I’d started dating Nicky I had been able to retire a few items from the list, like: “Strike out at the bar and come home alone, but not before buying some Jim Beam on the way” and “wake up in the tub”.  Not all of the items are related to alcohol, at least not specifically, but it was late afternoon and so logically the next item to be checked off had to be “find a bar”.  I don’t make the rules.

Every Man a King, Part II - On Getting Shot in the Face During Breakfast

The taxi driver was an elderly black man with a closely-cropped head of gray hair and whose deeply-lined face betrayed very little expression aside from boredom. I gave him the name of my hotel, the Chateau Dupre, and he nodded his head slowly: “Mmmmhmmm. Da Dupre. Mmmmhmmm.” He signalled and slowly pulled into traffic. “I had planned on walking”, I said for no reason in particular, and after just enough time to think I was being ignored he said back, “Hmmmmmmm.....why you wanna do a thing like that. Too hot to be walkin’ ‘round. Mmmhmmmm.” Thrilled to have my laziness validated, I settled back into a seat that smelled of Old Spice and older cigarettes and watched the Crescent City roll by.

Helser's on Alberta | 1538 Northeast Alberta Street | Portland, OR

Flying is idiotic.  Not all flying of course, I'm well aware that without the power of flight bumblebees, herons and the like would have a hard time getting around.  Human beings however were not born with the benefit of wings and are not particularly aerodynamic so we've spent the better part of our history tottering about on two legs, trying not to fall from high places and doing just fine.  A pack of maniacs who women tend to avoid decided that their free time would be best spent trying to defy nature and eventually, after much tribulation, we had the aeroplane.  The start of the airline industry meant that ordinary folks like you and me got to experience the immediacy of mortality courtesy of a flimsy metal tube hurtling across the sky at 500 miles an hour.  Because government bodies thrive on misery the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 was passed, which gave airlines & passengers carte blanche to stop caring about anything. 

From then on ordinary folks like you and me still got to experience the glory of the Skycoffin but now with two hundred other people dressed in sweat-pants, all with whooping plague, enjoying the same level of comfort offered in a cattleyard.  Add in turbulence and the looming possibility that some resentful virgin who spends too much time on the internet has hidden explosives in his underpants and air travel for fun makes as much sense as trying to kick a bear in the testicles.  The only time I will consent to air travel is when time is short, such as this weekend past when Nicky & I visited our friends Rose & Scott in Portland. 

Flying in the Dash 8 aircraft used by Air Canada for short hops like Victoria-Vancouver & Vancouver-Portland is to feel like you've been packed into a Port-a-John and launched by catapult.  I'm not normally a religious man but but if the almighty has an answering machine then by the time I got to PDX I'd filled the tape.   It was all worth it though, to see good friends, have good times and eat good food.  Portland eateries have almost never disappointed me and Helser's comes in at the top of what was already an esteemed list.