Life In Scarborough: The Fried Pork Rinds of Scarborough

Was inside the Jian Hing market at Markham and Lawrence on Family Day, looking for Filipino  Pork Rinds.  They have about 40 different varieties at Jian Hing.  I'm not kidding, there's a whole aisle devoted to nothing but.  Filipino  Pork Rinds are basically deep-fried pig-skin; you can get them either  "fat on" or "fat off", which means there's chunks of deep-fried pork-fat still stuck to them, or not.  I usually buy the "fat off" kind.  I prefer  the "fat on" version, but if I eat too much my sodium level spikes and the water in my inner ear backs up and I get the bed-spins for a week.

So I'm in the cash-line behind this old Filipino guy.  He looks at my 2 big bags of Chicharron Old Fashioned Fat Off Flavor and asks.  "You like those?"

I say: "Yes.  They're good, not good for you.  I know that."

And he laughs and tells me how they eat them back home.  Apparently, they dip them in vinegar, which seems redundant to me, like stuffing an H-Bomb full of gunpowder.  And  they also dip them in some kind of red or black pepper sauce.

When we have both gone through the line  I say "take care" and he says "stay healthy" the way Stanley Tucchi says "be careful" to Zach Quinto in that scene from Margin Call.

Wind At Our Back?

...or meaningless twitches in the numbers?

A survey by Angus Reid Strategies for the Toronto Star shows the federal Liberals with 34 per cent support and the Conservatives with 33 per cent – a statistical dead heat. The result is a warning for any party thinking of plunging into a fall election: No wind of change is blowing across Canada.

The CPoC vote share hasn't changed since the last go round, but the Libs are up four points. Stephen Harper seems to be defying the conventional wisdom that a government's polling numbers improve during summer when they can traipse about handing out money. And I don't know when the polling period for this latest survey ended--is it possible that the return of wafer-gate has actually damaged the Tory numbers?

Meanwhile, my secret sources tell me that this latest Tory scandal is about to get even deeper--its no longer just about crackers! Now there's pork rinds involved!!!