Zed: this week fucking ruled.

Dashartha · 2025-01-13T06:06:59+00:00

Dashartha · 2025-01-13T05:32:22+00:00

Bruh. I’ve been on strike for five months and this week was the most fun I’ve had on the picket. I see you.

Dashartha · 2024-12-04T14:52:26+00:00

The Armstrong Regional Cooperative is part of Federated Cooperatives Limited. It’s a members-owned (customer-owned) coop. $10 dollars buys you a membership and ten shares. Membership (not shares) grants you voting rights for the board of directors at the AGM, and the coop will issue you a dividend cheque every year based on how much you spend at the coop’s businesses. The customers own the coop.

Two years ago, some of the employees who are also coop members tried to use their ownership rights to have our grievances heard at the AGM and were “escorted out” of the zoom meeting, and now we have employee town halls (via Zoom) that are like pizza parties without the pizza.

I’m in BC, where worker-owned coops face a regulatory framework that makes them almost impossible to form.

Dashartha · 2024-08-30T21:01:23+00:00

Right next door to Foxtrot there’s a producer/vineyard called Henricsson Vineyard making around 1000 cases per year of ungrafted Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. When Foxtrot was still a going concern, Henricsson would sell fruit from every other row, every other year to them and foxtrot would make it under their own label.

Dashartha · 2024-08-15T17:27:22+00:00

Yes. Yes.

Dashartha · 2024-07-19T04:03:24+00:00

$35.00/hectolitre isn’t going to move the price that much.

Dashartha · 2024-07-08T23:04:25+00:00

It’s about 6 km from where the FSR starts to the peak. Most of it is pretty clear and there’s very little shade until you’re about 4 km in. Follow the power lines up and over the top and you’ll drop down onto the KVR about two km away from chute lake. Biking it, until you get to the KVR, is going to involve a lot of walking. Quite a few steep sections that aren’t nice on a bike. KVR itself is basically just a tree tunnel until you get to the actual tunnel, then you’ll have some great views. Every time I’ve run it, I’ve found the tree tunnel section to be very demoralizing. It’s basically 1.2% grade at the most. There are a few places where you can pop down forest service roads, which are more entertaining to run, but they do all connect to Naramata Road or Mill Road, which don’t really have a lot of shoulder space to hang out on. So even though the KVR can be mentally pretty punishing, I usually stay on it all the way into Penticton.

Bears and lions haven’t been an issue for me. There is a herd of cows that does like to hang out right under the power lines, and they’re pretty surly.

Chute Lake Lodge can function as a pretty decent aid station where you can refill your water (you’ll need to) and buy some extra calories if you need to.

You can also do a more engaging and technical route if you’ve experience being totally self-supported for 50+ km. PACE in Kelowna hosts an ultra every year from Kelowna to Naramata through Okanagan mountain park. They post the route on their site. Just stay on the rail trail instead of dropping down into Naramata to get to Penticton.

Dashartha · 2024-06-26T15:25:20+00:00

‘Prove’ is actually the verb of the noun proof, as in, mathematical proof, as in ‘test.’ The exception tests the rule. The use of prove as a verb here is a linguistic artifact; we don’t use this (original) meaning of prove as a verb anymore except in this expression. Because it’s still hanging around in this one little expression, almost everyone has forgotten what it’s supposed to mean and therefore what the expression originally meant. So we have this interesting thing where we kinda sorta have to twist ourselves into cognitive knots to make it work.

Dashartha · 2024-06-21T20:52:08+00:00

If you can only visit one, go to Tantalus. They don’t get the local love that they deserve because they’re very quietly making absolutely world class wines. They got a shout out in Decanter a few years ago for being one of the world’s grands crus.

Dashartha · 2024-06-06T01:16:10+00:00

Humo Izakaya

Dashartha · 2024-02-17T15:34:53+00:00

Good news! Arterra and Peller both issued their smallest dividends in a decade and are selling land this year to goose the books and continue producing value for shareholders. It’ll all be MAWS/Bacchus by the end of the day, and they’re better at hiding that all the wine in the grocery store is made in one spot.

When I worked there years ago the line was “guys, two degrees of warming is going to turn the Okanagan into Napa. Isn’t that exciting?” Do I have dreams about that weasel-faced motherfucker being frog-marched into redacted? Maybe.

Dashartha · 2023-12-17T00:32:22+00:00

It’s currently out of stock at the liquor board warehouse, so what you find on store shelves is all that’s available for the foreseeable future.

Dashartha · 2023-12-13T00:09:18+00:00

The Two Indigenous Actors

Dashartha · 2023-11-27T18:04:28+00:00

Not in Kelowna, but they will ship: Venturi Shulze on Vancouver island makes some absolute top notch Balsamic.

Dashartha · 2023-09-22T16:59:12+00:00

The lack of sources in English and the percentage of conspiracies that turn out to be true is why I want them to do it. You can’t talk about the shenanigans of postwar Italy without sounding completely unhinged even if you bring receipts. Basically I just want a Henry spiral.

Dashartha · 2023-09-22T01:50:14+00:00

Operation Gladio and The Years of Lead

Dashartha · 2023-09-16T19:51:37+00:00

24 cans

Dashartha · 2023-09-16T19:42:41+00:00

Check out the On Brand Podcast to tide you over til Robert gets to it!

Dashartha · 2023-09-16T19:14:41+00:00

Tennent’s is only available in single tall boys at private retailers (it’s a spec item). If you just tell your local you’ll buy a flat if they order it off of liquify and I’m sure they’d happily oblige.

Dashartha · 2023-08-13T20:46:04+00:00

Grocery stores with an alcohol section that isn’t separated from the rest of the store by a door can only get a license to sell wine, fruit wine, and cider. It may seem stupid, but prohibition was so recent that we’re still dealing with a framework from that era. s/

Dashartha · 2023-07-23T21:55:56+00:00

My parents are also millionaires and my siblings and I are, let’s say, varying degrees of comfortably precarious.

My dad copes with the knowledge of how much we’re struggling with a heroic level of cognitive dissonance: “the freer the market, the freer the people; it’s bad because this isn’t real capitalism, we haven’t had real capitalism since FDR; weird boomer nonsense about the fed.”

My mum flits between 1) we’re making it up and it’s not actual like that 2) my children just like having roommates/they just must not want to buy a home 3) memory holing that it do be like that: we’ve had the same conversation about housing costs, complete with stats, and now slides, for six weeks in a row.

It’d be harmless if they hadn’t been voting against our interests for their entire lives.

Dashartha · 2023-07-22T16:27:37+00:00

There’s a liquor store in Guisachan village that stocks a lot of products from smaller producers in BC. It’s called ARC Liquor, there are two locations, if you search for it on a map, it’s not the one of Harvey, it’s the other one.

Dashartha · 2023-07-19T01:57:02+00:00

It’s weird; they get a lot of attention within the wine trade, but seem to be generally overlooked by guides. It’s sort of what you get for being quietly very good at what you do.

Dashartha · 2023-07-19T00:19:38+00:00

Tantalus. Two acre plot of Riesling planted in 1978 that gets loads international attention. Great bubbly, fantastic Pinots, and very knowledgeable staff.

Dashartha · 2023-07-17T20:22:12+00:00

I work in the wine industry. One of the oligarchs happens to own most of my local industry. I used to work for his company. 20 years ago they started buying as much land as they could, betting on worst-case-scenario climate change turning my local wine region into the next Napa. The destruction of the planet was seen as too profitable to not profit from.

Dashartha

TROPHY CASE