I ask you-is there a better retail slogan in the world than From Wine To Twine?

This would be Honest Ed's which had one window display of only bras, bras stacked and stacked by color, dozens, grosses of bras like so many solo beverage cups next to a keg. Other windows were less mono-product...Back To School! or Visit Our Cafe! But Honest Ed's is a bonafide throwback, an Old Navy, a Costco, a Wal-Mart from back in the day. Ed was (is! is!) a helluva merchant with his three story blinking lightbulbed testament to low prices and high volume but his real love is theater. The store is full of autographed glossies, of pieces of old sets (a pair of volkswagon-sized cuckoo clocks are labeled as being from a production of Into The Woods in a downtown Toronto production Honest Ed had a hand in underwriting, for instance). Honest Ed's was my second favorite retail experience of Toronto.

Number one was The Beer Store. The Beer Store is a real thing, a store that just sells beer. They are owned and operated by the government, much like the liquor stores in Washington State. In Washington State, distilled spirits are sold only from stores operated by the state and while this is a pain in the ass, you can see the state's point of view...not only the taxes but all of the retail markup go to the state's coffers so why in the world shouldn't vice pay for itself in this way? Ontario goes all the way on this one, you can't buy beer or wine in groceries or convenience stores. Gotta go to the beer store. (note to aspiring journalist self...so did Honest Ed's sell any wine or was that just a cute slogan? Shoulda checked that out, dude).

A beer store sells only beer, no wine or spirits, no sodas or chips or lottery tickets or mylar balloons. Just beer (in all fairness I visited a goverment-run store selling the full range of fermented beverages in the Eaton Centre which had blond wood and chambray-shirted clerks and the patrons all had plastic cards giving them bonus air miles with their purchases which was pretty classy) and is as orange on the outside as a Hardees.

Inside there are wooden shelves holding one empty can or bottle of each of the beers sold in the store. The guy in front of me wanted a case of Labatt's. The clerk took his money, gave him a receipt and went into the back.

I don't know the name for this sort of belt...it's not a conveyor belt, I don't thnk, but a series of wheels on a series of axles arrayed along a track. They are in factories and used to slide heavy, unwheeled things. I'm not describing it very elegantly, perhaps I'll revisit this later, but a track you slide boxes along. There is one on either side of The Beer Store, along the side walls, next to each cash register. The clerk is going in back and putting a case of brew onto the track and sliding it out, through those hanging flaps that keep coolers cold to the waiting customer.

That's a beer store and they have a new magazine, distributed for free in beer stores called CHILL. Which is cute...not just maintain a state monopoly but have a slick magazine to extort some advertising dollars. There's a recipe for roasting a chicken over a can of beer, an appreciation of Bob and Doug McKenzie and yoga for couch potatoes.

Other cool beer store experience to share...so I'm waiting for my malt-liquors-of-many-nations (Ontario thoughtfully labels each beer with its alcohol content to ensure maximum fucked-up-edness for your buck. Your loonie. Whatever) and a skinny kid barges in with a pair of empty bottles and an Irish accent...he just got a fuckin' $135 fine! For drinking! And then the clerk comes from the back, having slid another case down the conveyor belt and the skinny kid says, "sorry for the swearing just then, I didn't realize you were here." The best part? The skinny, drunk, cussing, Irish kid was wearing a Tennessee Titans jersey.

Toronto was great, huge, big fun and I want to take back all of my snide, Americanist comments about how Canada is a sorry, also-ran of North America. More soon but back in front of my computer...just 36 minutes left of being 33 years old. "What do you like to do after sex?" asks a jokey quiz in the new GQ, trying to determine if you are a nerd (nerds are good according to the premise of the article; damn, who knew GQ was gonna rescue my ass?) and one question asks what you like to do after sex...Cuddling? Smoking? or the winner Blogging.

Indeed.