Another one drinks a moose

You couldn't get Moosehead Beer in Manitoba when I was a kid. Interprovincial trade barriers stopped retailers from selling a beer that wasn't brewed in the province. And so this SCTV sketch always seemed a bit ironic: it would be easier for a Canadian brewer to sell in some US states than to ship and sell interprovincially. The Economist highlights some of the problems with Canada's liquor boards.

EVERY day thousands of Canadians buy beer and spirits in one province and consume them in another. They are all breaking the law. Under the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, a Prohibition-era statute, this is a federal offence subject to a fine of C$200 ($190) the first two times you are caught. Any more and you risk a jail term up of to six months. ...
Canada’s 13 liquor boards (one for each province and the three territories) have become cash cows for their respective governments. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, deposited profits of C$1.7 billion into the government’s coffers last year. Almost all alcohol sold in the province passes through the board before being sold to commercial users and consumers. There are slight differences in the point of sale—you can buy beer and wine in convenience stores in Quebec and from private liquor stores in Alberta—but the common theme is that it all passes through a government body first, which makes money from mark-ups, permit fees and sales taxes (which they receive even if alcohol is sold directly to consumers). With so much money at stake, most of the provinces strongly opposed the move in 2012 to remove wine from the federal law and are likely to do the same when removing beer and spirits from the act is debated. A spokesman for the Canadian Association of Liquor Jurisdictions, the body that represents the combined provincial and territorial boards, defended the status quo last year, saying that the mark-ups on alcohol imposed by the boards helped pay for government services such as health care and education. If individuals wanted to buy wine from another province, they could always order it through a government outlet, he said.

Wine won exemption from the federal law mostly because of pressure from Canada’s 450 artisanal winemakers, who pointed out the absurdity of the current situation. “It is easier for our winery to ship 20 cases of wine to Beijing, Germany, Dubai, or Switzerland than to ship one case to our neighbour, New Brunswick,” Hanspeter Stutz, a vintner from Nova Scotia told a parliamentary committee at the time. Tourism officials and grape growers also backed the move. It is unclear whether Canada’s 200 or so craft brewers and about 20 distilleries carry the same clout.

200 craft brewers in a country of about 30 million: one for every 150,000 people. New Zealand's Brewer's Guild has about 45 small craft brewers (and a few larger ones) for a country of about 4 million people: one for every 89,000 people. And those are just the ones who joined the Guild. Beer Tourist lists 22 breweries in the mid South Island alone.

Cryonics: Poland 1984 edition

SCTV was wrong. Horribly wrong. For better or worse, my expectations of Soviet-bloc television were set by SCTV's caricature. Like What Fits Into Russia:

and Don't feed or give matches to the Uzbecs (which may now seem less funny but more prescient)


But, I was wrong. SCTV led me astray. Via Lubos Motl, a Polish movie, all up on YouTube, from 1984.



Here's the playlist with the movie split into 14 parts. Says Motl:

Spoilers follow below...

In 1991, two men are hibernated in the context of a scientific experiment. The plan was that they would be waken up in 3 years, in 1994. However, a war begins and leads to the elimination of all males.

The Gentlemen are waken up in 2044 when the world is controlled by a female-only, feminist, politically correct, totalitarian society that was partly designed as a parody of the communist system that existed in Poland when the movie was shot.

The female apparatchiks teach all the girls how the women used to be discriminated against by the males before the males were justly removed from the world. Einstein was a woman, too.

Everyone has to live under the ground as well. That's because of the high radioactivity in the atmosphere. At least that's what everyone is told.

The life of is difficult for the two men - one of them is more formal, the other one is very informal. ;-) Their main ally turns out to be Ms Lamia Reno (of Archeo), a sensitive and reasonable blonde woman whose lust is stronger than the anti-sex-drive hormonal pills. ;-)

It turns out that there's something unexpectedly wrong - or right - with Ms Excellency, too. You can guess whether the wisdom about the toxicity of the atmosphere is right or not: the propaganda in the 2044 society is so similar to the man-made global warming! The men choose freedom - a short life in the radioactive atmosphere - over the crippled life in the feminist society. Lamia helps them to get out of the Hell.

But a few nice surprises await them above the ground and the men ultimately manage to fix the world at the very end and boys start to be born in the test-tubes again.

I'll second Lubos's recommendation, though I've only watched the first three parts so far. This isn't what I was expecting from Soviet-bloc television. I knew that the reforms started early in Poland, but there's a sense of real freedom in these clips. One of the cryonauts objects strenuously to their captors' eavesdropping on private conversations; there are objections to official re-writing of history. One cryonaut laments that he, put to sleep in 1991, had been due to receive an apartment in 1998. And the production value isn't far from most American stuff of similar age. I'm impressed.

There are passing shots of female nudity. Consequently, American television censors would probably not allow to be broadcast a film that was available under Communism in Poland. Think about that.