My day yesterday: Sammy Hagar, buxom bisexuals, Skippy Stalin and Adolf Hitler

The bright sunshine of a hot, cloudless afternoon seemed like the right conditions to go check out Sammy Hagar's launch of his Beach Bar Rum at the Summerhill liquor store yesterday. I'd been in that store a week earlier and noticed the poster up for Hagar's visit. There isn't a single Sammy Hagar song I could name if you held a gun to my head, but I had some vague recollection of his being with Van Halen for a while, so I snapped a photo of the poster and sent it off to my blogger buddies Skippy Stalin and Blazing Cat Fur, thinking they might appreciate the humor of it.

BCF couldn't make it, but Skippy was keen on the irony of seeing Sammy sell rum in person and wanted to check it out, so that's where we were at 1:30 on Tuesday. There was a pretty long line up of Hagar fans waiting more than an hour in advance for a chance to get a photo with the aging Heavy Metallurgist and in traditional rock star fashion, he showed up late. Making it worse was that before Hagar was allowed to speak to the crowd, we had to endure a series of incredibly boring speeches by PR flacks and LCBO executives droning on about how wonderful their organizations are. One of the LCBO bosses boasted how wonderful Ontario's liquor monopoly is for being the only place in Canada you can find a bottle of Sammy Hagar's Beach Bar Rum. I guess that means it's as hard to buy a bottle of Hagar's rum in Alberta as it is to buy a bottle of French wine in your local convenience store in Ontario, differentiating us from every other jurisdiction in the civilized world.

When he finally took the microphone, Hagar spoke for all of about two minutes, saying something to the effect of "God bless purveyors of alcohol," and made a hasty exit from the store, without signing autographs or posing for pictures with his fans.

Nonetheless, Skippy and I each bought bottles of Hagar's overpriced rum out of sheer curiosity, and then adjourned to a bar a bit south on Yonge Street because Skippy had been in there earlier and developed a fondness for a waitress he described as "having a porn star's face." Having worked in Los Angeles for some time, I had a general idea of what he meant, but I still thought that an unusual expression since the face is not usually the first descriptor of a porn star.

The waitress was indeed a comely bar wench and all was proceeding normally, with Skippy and I drinking at the bar, until I spied the back of a young woman sitting on the outdoor patio, on which in very large letters, she had a tattoo of a Latin phrase.

My Latin isn't what it should be, but I did recognize the Latin for "never," and wondered what the rest of it said. I entered the phrase into Google translate, but it didn't produce a coherent result, so I stepped out to the patio to ask the woman the meaning of her tattoo. In my experience, people who go to the trouble of having things permanently inscribed on their bodies after multiple punctures over the course of hours are usually quite happy to discuss them. The woman with the tattoo turned out to be very appealing-looking, buxom, and pleasant, and was no exception to the rule. She informed me her tattoo meant "never grow old, never give in." I suspect she had the Latin wrong, but in any case she was pretty and was accompanied at the table by an attractive brunette whose acquaintance she had only just made half an hour earlier and like her companion, was pleasingly busty and wearing a low-cut top.

Buying us all a round of tequila struck me as being the appropriate thing to do in the circumstances, so I retrieved Skippy from inside the bar, and a round of tequila was enjoyed by the four of us. That was followed by another round of tequila, and then another.  And then I lost count.

After a while, we all adjourned inside the pub to sit at a booth with the two women beside each other, me sitting next to the one with the tattoo, and Skippy, along with the brunette's business partner, who had just arrived at the bar sitting opposite.

In a very sudden development, the two women beside me, who had only just met, decided there and then to experiment with bisexuality. They started making out, passionately kissing and sloppily sliding their tongues in each other's mouths. Then my tattooed friend suggested that the brunette and she should go back to the former's home. The brunette seemed intrigued by the offer, but her business partner was understandably concerned that she was drunk and making a decision she might regret when sober. I made sure the business partner left with the women, who proceeded down Yonge Street with the tattooed woman's arm around the waist of the brunette.

The moral of that story, I suppose, is that just a few drinks with me can turn a heterosexual woman into a lesbian. So if there are any women who want to experiment in that area, just email me through the contact info on my blog, bring along your prospective partner in bi-curiosity, take us out for drinks and see what happens. I love bringing people together.

However, I had other things on my mind at the bar as the two women were exiting it. I'd just received a call from Blazing Cat Fur asking me to contact the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization for which I used to do consulting work, to inform them of a rather serious, and very funny mistake they had made.

As a parody, Blazing Cat Fur had superimposed the image of Adolf Hitler over the poster promoting an "al Quds Day" rally, the annual hate-fest for psychotic local Islamists who want to destroy Israel. Thinking the parody was the genuine Toronto al Quds Day rally poster, FSWC had sent out an email blast condemning the al Quds rally's links to Hitler and genocidal Nazi ideology. While the al Quds Day rallies are regularly punctuated with calls for the murder of Jews, racist invective like organizer Zafar Bangash calling US President Barack Obama, "that black man in the White House," and a general environment of vileness and evil of which Hitler would have undoubtedly approved, the people behind it are not quite so stupid as to put his likeness on the poster. So while Der Fuhrer will most certainly be hovering over al Quds Day rallies in spirit, it probably would not behoove FSWC to decry a parody poster as the real thing and make a fuss over it. Although in fairness to FSWC, the invective from our local Islamists against Israel is so hateful and vicious that it doesn't need a huge leap of imagination to think admiration of Hitler by them could make its way out in to the open. These Islamists are, after all, the same people who approvingly posted anti-Israel YouTube tirades by neo-Nazi leader David Duke on their website.

So I called and emailed my old contacts at FSWC and set them straight, and Skippy and I proceeded down Yonge Street to Cumberland Street and a bar called The Pilot.

On the way down Yonge, just north of Davenport Road, I was accosted by a woman who noticed me carrying my rollerblades and she started hectoring me about not having a helmet. The woman appeared to be somewhere between her late 40's and early 60's (I'm terrible at estimating people's ages) and was nice enough, so I invited her along to have a tequila with Skippy and me. That evoked a mild protest that this woman, whose name I've completely forgotten so I'll call her Midge for convenience, couldn't drink tequila, only beer. I told Midge I was only going to buy tequila, not beer and it was her choice whether she wanted to come with us or not. She did.

So Skippy, Midge and I wound up on The Pilot's rooftop patio, and Midge told us about how not wearing a bicycle helmet led to her getting brain damage in an accident. So I bought her another tequila to make her feel better.

Sitting next to Midge with my back to the rooftop fence, I could not help but notice two very lovely, shapely women, a blond and a dark haired beauty sitting at the table opposite me. Sending a couple of shots of tequila over to them struck me as the appropriate thing to do, and then the sexy dark haired woman called me over.

"You don't remember me, do you?" she said, making a correct inference from my blank, goofy look. Whenever someone says that to me it could lead next to something very good or very bad. My immediate instinct when challenged like that, particularly by an attractive woman, is to... well, not lie exactly, but sputter out something like "how could I possibly forget someone as beautiful as you?" and hope that the memory of whom I speaking with comes back before I get caught out.

In this case, the woman was someone I'd spoken to quite often and quite recently. She is an employee of Moses Znaimer for his Zoomer Media. Znaimer, a septuagenarian, has the wisdom and good sense, plus the money to be able to keep himself surrounded by extremely pretty women at all times. This particular woman I first met at a taping of Conrad Black's show and again spent lots of time speaking with her at Znaimer's 3-day long IdeaCity conference last month. As it was, she didn't appear too offended at my absent-mindedness, and really, how mad can you get at someone who arbitrarily decides to buy you a shot of tequila in a bar? Actually, I take that back. The last time I was out with Skippy, I managed to make a woman I bought a tequila shot at a bar quite angry, and only for innocently discussing the behavior patterns of female lions. I guess i have a talent for that sort of thing.

But in this case, everything was fine and we were happy to get reacquainted. However, the beauties at the adjacent table weren't the only ones drinking and I had downed more shots than I could recall. It was time for me to go. Midge was either in the bathroom, or had wandered off, but it was definitely time for me to get going, so with Skippy, wandered into only one more pub on Prince Arthur Avenue for a final drink, and then we parted ways and I skated off into the night to seek out my comfortable bed at home.