So what's with this cartoon, anyway, you ask?

While I was in the midst of a family trip to Walt Disney World a battle brewed back home between a Montrealer living in Hamilton who was enraged over the fact that a supermarker chain dared to claim one of the bagels it sold was "Montreal style". Here's the Montreal Gazette column which put words to print on the issue. The Fortino's store owner ignored the potential legal argument over the name and went further to suggest his bagels were better than Montreal's. This inspired the Gazette columnist to challenge Hamilton to a bagel taste test to see whose was better.  (Which was probably unwise, given he'd never even tried a Viateur or Fairmont bakery made Montreal bagel -- silly man.)

A day or so later the Hamilton Spectator accepted a challenge (2) to do a taste test and the plans were put in place for a review.

Meanwhile, comments on a Montreal messageboard filled up in defence of their beloved dough and the usual, tired jabs were made at Hamilton's expense. The Gazette wrote that it was looking forward to the contest. Back here at the Spectator, the best defence to Hamilton's bagel came from an ex-Montrealer, which was basically no defence. A messageboard from the Hamilton Spectator seemed to only attract comments from irate ex-Montrealers, with one rather over-the-top comment from an angry, yet predictable, Hamiltonian who felt the need to lambaste everyone for arguing over bagels when we should be discussing ...oh good grief... everything from Al Qaeda Caledonia to Afghanistan instead.

So came the Hamilton Spectator bagel review, which didn't include the real Montreal bagels (due to shipping issues etc.), but a ranking of the bagels available in the Hamilton area. You can even watch a video of it, which I choose not to watch because I'm in it and I hate seeing myself on tv. In the event they remove the story from the Internet you can read it here:

A panel puts Hamilton bagels to the test

January 24, 2008 -- Mary K. Nolan -- The Hamilton Spectator

Oy vey!

Such a shemozzle over a roll of dough with a hole in the middle.

The City of Montreal is throwing a complete hissy fit at the gall of a Hamilton grocery chain that bills its bagels as "Montreal-style."

At the centre of the kerfuffle, as you may know, is a mild-mannered bagel that was minding its own business in a breadbasket at Fortinos when it attacked a horrified Montreal visitor with its very existence.

The affronted shopper whipped out his camera, zoomed in on a cinnamon-sugar number and posted the pic on the foodie website chowhound.com. "A bastardization," he declared. "An abomination," said one observer. "Sacrilege," huffed another. Next thing you know, it's all over the papers as if there's no other news in La Belle Ville. What's next -- litigation?

Chillez-vous, nos amis! It's just a bagel.

The sign at the store doesn't say "Genuine Montreal bagels." It says "Montreal-style."

That means they're sorta like Montreal bagels. Like Chicago-style pizza. New York-style cheesecake. Buffalo-style wings.

You can buy Belgium cookies in Hamilton, too, New York Fries, Irish coffee, English trifle, Hollywood Bread and blow them all a raspberry with a big Bronx cheer. You don't hear Boston whining about exclusive title to baked beans, or Philly getting all proprietary about steak sandwiches.

Besides, where does Montreal get off claiming to be the grand pooh-bah of bagels? According to various and possibly dubious Internet sites, the first bagel was baked in 1683 by a Jewish baker in an Austrian bakery for a Polish king. Another claims the bagel originated in Poland in 1610 to help women prepare for childbirth. (Yeah, that'd be a big help.) Someone else posits the bagel came from Russia, where it was known as bubliki.

So whither the Vienna bagel? The Krakow bagel? The St. Petersburg bagel?

And another thing: Why did the Montrealer who was grocery shopping with his camera (and you have to wonder about that, eh?) focus on the cinnamon-sugar bagel instead of the pumpernickel and plain and poppyseed and all the rest that were labelled as Montreal-style?

The bottom line is: Who cares?

If you live in the bastion of bageldom, you can hit St-Viateur Bagel or Fairmount Bagel Bakery or Real Bagel and get your genuine, top-of-the-line Montreal bagel any old time. If you live in Hamilton, you can order them in, but really ... is there a reasonable facsimile in Hamilton?

Well, yes, as The Hamilton Spectator's esteemed panel of judges determined this week after an hour of squishing, sniffing, chewing and swallowing. And no, according to one intransigent taster at the table.

"They're not bagels," insisted Spec photographer Sheryl Nadler, a native Montrealer who was weaned on Montreal bagels and loads up at Real Bagel every she goes home to visit. None of them? "No."

Of the eight samples presented ever-so-elegantly on plastic plates and punctuated with a palate cleanser of spring water, most got a dismissive sneer from the purist panellist, one or two were deemed edible, and several actually elicited howls of derisive laughter.

"I had to chew it for 20 minutes before I could even swallow it," she said with some hyperbole. "It's stale."

The panel for the completely unscientific and subjective study also included Marc Albanese, artisanal baker and owner of Burlington's PaneFresco; Spectator new products reviewer Linda Ricciardi; the paper's resident food guru and winophile, Dan Kislenko; and editorial cartoonist Graeme MacKay, who has been fielding taunts from Terry (Aislin) Mosher, his colleague at the Gazette in Montreal.

Mosher's Tuesday cartoon (or, see below) depicted a Hamilton bagel in one of those impossible-to-open plastic packages with the caption: "However, there is some good news regarding those impossible-to-open plastic packages ... ," suggesting that any bagel from Hamilton should be thus entombed forever. Listen buster, we're from Hamilton. It was a bit cerebral. Or maybe just obtuse.

In any event, the results of the taste test were remarkably inconclusive. None of the panellists knew where the bagels came from or which one was which. The judges, with the exception of the dulcet-tempered Ricciardi, were not exactly filled with the milk and cookies of human kindness.

"This one reminds me of a kaiser roll," said Kislenko. "There's not enough crust. You should be able to snap a bagel and hear it crack."

"What?" Nadler snapped. "Bagels don't snap."

"This could be from a mix," Albanese mused. "I guess it's OK."

"They all look like inner tubes," commented MacKay.

The only consensus was on Weston Bakeries' Old Mill brand, which came in a plastic bag of six. In a word: stale. In Kislenko's words: "These have been hanging around a few days."

Still, from the pool of "doughy," "undercooked," "tough" and "crumbly," there emerged a shaky winner: The Great Canadian Bagel bagel. Close on its heels was -- ta dah! -- the plain Montreal-style bagel from Fortinos, followed by the kosher bagel from the Westdale Delicatessen.

So there you have it. Take your pick -- or move to Montreal.

Here's Terry Mosher's take:

So there you have it. The great Bagel war between Montreal and Hamilton has pretty much fizzled out. If anything was proven in this is the fact that Montrealers are pretty passionate about their bagels. But as Dan Kislenko mentioned after the taste test, there are such things as bad bagels available in Montreal and when it really comes down to it, the Fairmont, and St. Viateur bakeries are two of the few places in Montreal that bake up a great bagel. And great they are. Whenever I get them it's when I'm on my way home, and my wife will attest to the fact that before we get home to put the dozen bagels in the deep freeze to preserve their freshness, the dozen has dropped to 8, thanks to our eating them when they're warm out of the oven. After they're gone I'm stuck eating the big old inner tubes they call bagels around here. But as my cartoon suggests at the top, Montreal may have the best bagels, but Hamilton's got the best donuts, born from a bakery that had its start here and became so popular it's now a national sensation. But we Hamiltonians don't need to gloat about it.

Hockey great, lawyer, one-time federal cabinet minister, past Liberal leadership candidate, and now roving anti-poverty advocating MP Ken Dryden came to the Spectator to speak before the ed board.

I've drawn him only once before in an editorial cartoon. I don't know if my sketch will come in handy for future depictions of the man.

I'm just back from a horrible ear infection, followed by a week on vacation. Forgive me if I seem a bit rusty. Here's one of those cartoon progressions:

    

   

It's not too difficult, given the length of time consumed discussing the future of Hamilton's Lister Block, to shrug one's shoulders and wish they'd just tear the damn thing down. End the on going ups and downs we've all be reading and hearing about for the last 8 to 10 years and just get rid of it. Get rid of that decaying purple bricked building you'd see in a city like Detroit sitting in the heart of downtown Hamilton. It can't be doing anything good in terms of attracting business to the downtown. Indeed, many have said it's a symbol of the rotting downtown core and the lack of leadership on the part of city hall to get things moving. Time has run out! It's do or die time!

Or is it?

First thing that comes to my mind is the urgency of all this. Beyond all the politics of lease rate increases and provincial grant money and deadlines for action there sits a rather ramshackle looking building to be sure, but it's still a solid steel framed concrete and brick building of the 1920's that really isn't going to fall over if left alone for many more years.

What's rather maddening, and completely underplayed in the media, are the owners of the building who have left it open to the elements and riff raff and have done nothing to keep it clean and respectable looking since taking ownership 10 or so years ago. For everyone who has been turned off by the site of the Lister Block only its owner, LIUNA, not city hall, carries the blame. If, by leaving it to look so decayed is the impetus to provoke action on the site, well good, the point has been made by LiUNA. Obviously, not even council is going to be duped into forking over loads more money to a landlord that has done a great job of making a gem of building look so awful.

We're looking at several more months or years of talk and debate on the building's future. The people of this city are stakeholders in the future of this building and it is up to the people and the council they elected to demand owners clean and maintain their properties. A few thousand dollars is really all that's needed to properly board and polish up a once proud building in the downtown. It's time to clean it up now if only to show that it cares about the image of downtown Hamilton.

A great Lister Block photo gallery by Lopix. 

It's my first drawing of Barack Obama. Up to the point previous to the results of last week's Iowa primary, I observed the 2008 U.S. Presidential election campaign with only luke warm interest. Despite the fact that the White House administration will be an entirely new one in just over 12 months, I simply couldn't invest much time paying attention to the rather lengthy slate of candidates for each of the 2 political parties without yawning.

All of a sudden, out of the blue, just as the holiday decorations are packed away, we're into Primary season, with the promise of a bunch of pretty exciting duels over the course of the next 8 weeks. A lot of attention has been paid to the come-from-no-where win by Mike Huckabee in the Iowa Republican race. But I doubt his momentum will last and I expect a hodgepodge of wins among John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Guliani between now and several Primaries from now that'll only turn glazing eyes towards a far more interesting race among the candidates vying for the Democratic nomination.  As my cartoon suggests the race so far for Democrats has evolved for the time being as a race between the experience of Hillary Clinton to the promise of change with Barack Obama. It's a choice between dynastic rule by families in the U.S., or change. Change means just one thing, whereas Hillary's experience qualifier has a big negative connotation with reminders of Bubba running the country with pizza boxes strewn about the oval office. This goes beyond the tired old question of whether or not America is ready for a woman President, or even an African American one. If Democrats and voters can get over those outdated hang-ups they'll at least save themselves from electing some boring guy like John Edwards as President.

At this point I see 4 candidates going anywhere once the Primary process is over - Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democrats, and Mitt Romney and Rudy Guliani for the Republicans. If I was a betting man, I'd wager a final race between Obama and Romney. (Why? Hillary is yesterday's man, Edwards is dull, McCain is too old, Guiliani is too liberal, Huckabee is too religious -- Romney is the bridge between evangelical Christians and moderates, and Obama is simply not Jesse Jackson.)