Remember the days before Red Bull

When Toronto-based lawyer and punk rock pundit Warren Kinsella, below, stopped by a local Shopsy’s delicatessen yesterday, he ordered a Cherry Coke to accompany his smoked meat sandwich. “ No big deal, right?” the Chretienera Liberal strategist wrote on his blog, describing the experience. “ But the serving person looked at me as if I had asked her to recite the Ten Commandments in a clown suit in the middle of Yonge Street.” The drink the waitress returned with sent Kinsella and his lunch companions into hysterics: a glass of coke accompanied by a little container filled with mushed-up cherries. Kinsella immediately took a picture for his blog ( see Page B1). “We all thought it was sad,” Kinsella elaborated over the phone on his way to MuchMusic to promote his new book Fury’s Hour: A ( sort-of) Punk Manifesto. “ This is a deli, they’re supposed to know what a Cherry Coke is.” After the nature of the popular carbonated beverage was explained to her, the Shopsy’s waitress took the cherries away and brought Kinsella a glass of grenadine so he could mix his own approximation. With CBC workers

locked out, Canadian history popularity contests have gone to the blogs. For the past four weeks, blogger Bart Ramson has been running an online poll to determine who The Greatest Canadian Prime Minister is on his Calgary Grit blog. Billed as “March Madness meets The Greatest Canadian,” the poll has seen sixteen Prime Ministers go head to head, two at a time, with the winners of each round progressing to the next. ( All 19th-century PMs save John A. Macdonald were excluded from the voting.) The two finalists are Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier. Both Macdonald and Laurier easily defeated Kim Campbell and Arthur Meighen respectively in the first round, before moving on to face more illustrious colleagues. Macdonald worked his way through Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau before facing Laurier, who had himself gone toe-to-toe with fellow Liberals Jean Chretien and Mackenzie King. Voting will continue at Calgary Grit (calgarygrit. blogspot. com) until today at noon Mountain time, whereupon The Greatest Canadian Prime Minister will be revealed. At deadline, the man on the $ 5 bill led the man on the $10 bill by a slim 49

votes.