CBC On Design: And You Thought Watching Cement Dry Was Not Exciting! Think Again After Watching “How to Design With Concrete”

A new digital series CBC ON DESIGN launches on 4July2025 with a new episode weekly. In five 15-minute episodes, the CBC Arts Original Series explores how an industrial designer’s idea evolves to become a product in your home.

The series begins with CONCRETE featuring Montreal designers Matt and Shawna Heide founders of CONCRETE CAT. Matt explains how concrete is perceived as an industrial product mostly rough and grey. Many are caught by surprise by the artistic creations of the Heide’s full of colour and shapes so unconcretish!

Concrete Cat’s Octavia Max Bowl ($1187 CDN)

It is a tactile process working with powdered concrete, mixing vibrant colours into it, placing it a mold, drying and demolding. The colours in the finished objet d’arts are stunning bringing to life concrete and rescuing it from its boring and utilitarian prison.

Excellent laid-back narration by Jordan Bloeman.

You can watch on CBC GEM and YOUTUBE.

RKS 2025 Wine: Back to Toronto and “Fancy” Sicilian Wine: Planeta’s 2020 Controdanza

Having spent two weeks in Sicily in May very little wine was consumed. My agenda was tourism this time and not wine tourism.

The best wine I had in Sicily?  Small batch Primitivo produced in the countryside proximate to the archaeological site of Villa Romana del Casale served with lunch in large jugs sourced from demijohns. As one of the world’s humblest and respected wine writers I was given a 1.5 litre water bottle filled with it with accompanying advice to drink within a few days unless kept chilled which would extend its life. Organic without being labelled organic from a fancy bottle. I have had similar wines from roadside stands in Tuscany and on farms in the Azores.

Excellent wine in a most humble vessel: Photo Robert K. Stephen

Well, no Sicilian wine in water bottles now that I have returned to Toronto. Back to bottled wine. Sigh!

This wine is from Planeta one of Sicily’s most globally respected wineries. The wine is Sicilia Noto DOC. The DOC was established in 1986. 85% Nero d’Avola and 15% Merlot. Lime marl soil with small amounts of light-coloured chalk. Grown at 50-70 meters above sea level. Aged 12 months in 4th and 5th usage Allier oak. Certified sustainable winery.

Aroma: Raspberry, cactus pear, milk chocolate and a touch of prune.

Palate: Raspberry, bright red cherry and ripe strawberry. Oak way in the back of the hall barely perceptible. Mounting tannins yet not a tannic wine. Spicy and moderately long finish with a Mini-ME sweetness. And yes there is Merlot in this wine softening it somewhat!

Personality: Serious and even tempered.

Food Match: Sicilian Caponata, Sicilian farm sausage and fried potatoes.

Cellarbility: Interesting evolution through to 2030.

Price: $25 CDN.

RKS 2025 Wine Rating: 91/100. Wine Spectator 90.

(Planeta 2020 Controdanza, Sicilia Noto DOC, Menfi, Italy, 750 mL,14%).

RKS 2025 Film: “Dogtooth”: 4K Restoration Opens North America 4July2025

The breakout 2009 Yorgos Lanthimos film “Dogtooth” commences a North American theatrical release in a 4K restoration format.

Parents confine their three adult children in a family compound in a state of childlike innocence through manipulation, violence and abuse. Sexual perversion including incest is omnipresent. Outrageous falsehoods and childlike games and contests preoccupy the adult children. The children are nameless. About the only contact with the outside world for the children is watching planes flying overhead and with a security guard employed at their father’s factory who offers sexual services to the children in the family compound.

The film has carried the banner of absurdity for some time and indeed it has a deep streak of that nature throughout. But it is not so absurd that it obfuscates the plot and the messages of the film if your mind is expansive enough to “rationalize” and “intellectualize” what transpires on the screen.

What you may wish to think about as you watch the film. Think of the three children as society as a whole and the film’s message becomes clearer:

  • Reality is what you are conditioned to perceive. A daughter at the dinner table asks for the telephone to be passed to her. She has been taught that a telephone is a saltshaker.
  • Economic systems manipulate workers. Factory owner father hires a plant security guard to provide sexual services for his children. Exploitative.
  • What “normal sexuality” is how it is “taught”. The sexual games and practices in “Dogtooth” are perverse. The children are so conditioned one wonders if they understand the concept of sexuality. Incest and incest like behaviour is encouraged by the parents. A cornerstone of child sexual abuse is having the victim believe the abuse is normal.
  • Psychological and physical violence are a means of control. The parents create a version of the exterior world as dangerous and only when a child’s dogtooth falls out and is regrown (never) will the parents permit their children to participate in the exterior world. Vicious man-eating housecats await you beyond the family compound!
  • Lies, mistruths, lack of intellectual freedom and threats are a means of control.
  • Think of an analogy to Adam and Eve. Will she open the car trunk?
  • Repression and manipulation are not foolproof. Rebellion (or is it curiosity) may raise its head. Curiosity killed that cat.

Intellectual analysis particularly metaphorically gives you excellent MPG on this film.

But..why do the parents raise their children in a sea of ignorance?

The shock value is tremendous but it shouldn’t take you off the scent there are numerous messages that transcend its seemingly bizarre plot.

The trailer can be watched here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Kh7-WIWF0

In Greek with English subtitles.

RKS 2025 Film Rating: 94/100.

RKS Literature: Loving the Helpless Younger Brother (James Baldwin)

“I think it may be easier to love the really helpless younger brother because he cannot enter into competition with one’s own ground, or on any ground at all, and can never question one’s role, or jeopardize one’s authority. In my own case, certainly, it did not occur to me until much later-to compete with Caleb and I could not have questioned his role or authority because I needed both.”

James Baldwin, “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone”, 1968.

RKS Literature: England Needed to Keep the Rioting Muslims and Hindus Under Control! (Andrea Levy)

“Thousands were killed in Calcutta. Men, women, children, even suckling babies. They called it a riot. Those of us who’d been in the thick of things with these bloodthirsty little men knew it was more than that. Muslims butchering Hindus. Hindus butchering Muslims. And who knows whose side the Sikhs were on? Rumour said the wounded were too many to count, the dead too many to be buried. They were fighting for who should have power when a new independent India comes. Made me smile to think of that ragged bunch of illiterates wanting to run their own country. The British out of India? Only British troops could keep those coolies under control.”

Andrea Levy, “Small Island”, 2003.

RKS Health: The Great Hernia Adventure:  What Exactly is the Hernia Club and How I Will Make a Fortune Out of it: Hernia Pay for View Event

Not to exaggerate but hernia surgery is big business so why not cash in!

I am close to finalizing a pay for view event “Hernias the Agony and the Ecstasy” with Fightview International based in Pineville, North Carolina.

There will be three event viewings.

View one: “The Scourge of the Hernia Plague”

View two: “Hernia Surgery’s Deadly Dance”

View three: “Secrets Unlocked to Avoid Continual Pain and Suffering of Hernia Surgery”

$59.99 per view. $120 for the “Three View Package” with a Restorative Hernia Tea sampler package included.

I have lined up the best hernia surgeons from Moldova, Cuba and Punai. Hernia sufferers are a dime and dozen so I look for those with best agonized voices and fear ridden faces. Scientists from the Wuhan Viral Laboratory will elucidate on the plague of hernias far worse than COVID.

Victims of botched hernia surgery will groan and wheeze followed by undertakers explaining jammed packed funeral parlours burying and cremating hernia fatalities.

Secret remedies for post hernia surgery will be explained and sold with an emphasis on the insidious ED consequences rarely understood by those being wheeled into hernia operating theatres in the world.

The Hernia Help Hotline will be pitched to viewers.

Fear drives revenue!

RKS Health: The Great Hernia Adventure:  What Exactly is the Hernia Club and How I Will Make a Fortune Out of it: A Global Hernia Help Hotline?

Given that hernia surgery is one of the most “common surgeries” in the developed world and the citizens in the developed world have massive amounts of cash to squander on consumer goods why not create a global hotline assuaging and profiting from Hernia Fear? Where there is medical fear there is money to be made isn’t that what Tony Bobbins once said?

Imagine a 1-888-666-7777 Hernia Help Hotline accepting all credit cards. Train hotline staffers and as the porn hotlines are struggling help is cheap. Research “fear points” prepare standard answers. Build on a myriad of fears and create further fear and doubt. $99 USD for five minutes. 10-minute minimum chats with “Hernia Victims” and “Hernia Survivors”. $599 for 30-minute chats with Sri Lankan hernia surgeons. The business model is simple all answers must lead to the augmentation of Hernia Fear! An endless source of revenue.

Hernia surgery packages to Bangalore, Mumbai, Tirana and Fairbanks Alaska!

Merchandise too! Pickled hernia sacs, T-Shirts and coffee mugs!

RKS Health: The Great Hernia Adventure:  What Exactly is the Hernia Club and How I Will Make a Fortune Out of it: A Surgical Resort?

Your admission into the Hernia Club (Inguinal Division) commences from the day you emerged from the shower and noticed a bulge just above the waist. Membership ends upon your death. There is no initiation fee, annual charge or minimum bar and restaurant tab required. No need to worry about global inclusion and diversity. The preponderance of Hernia Club members are old white guys but lots of ethnic representation and women too!

I made the effort of patenting and trademarking “The Hernia Club”.

I have received inquiries from readers which lead to a possible conclusion there is money and possibly moral redemption in The Hernia Club!

A consortium of Albanian tourism operators pitched a very profitable idea to me about combining a hernia surgical centre and beach club on the Albanian Adriatic Coast. Take a Shouldice Hospital approach. Surgeons are airlifted in from Cuba. Sort of a cut and coast philosophy. Spend time at the beach for a minimum of 7 days after your hernia surgery. Eat executive chef prepared meals, play shuffleboard, mini-putt and receive healing massages from an Albanian masseuse. You return home with a tan and will be walking about like a spring chicken. Fortunately, I had my friends at Interpol perform a check on the individuals behind the consortium. Seems all have a “worrisome past” dotted with human trafficking, prostitution and food fraud i.e. the old Calabrian trick of making mozzarella cheese out of plastic.

I prefer a similar offer from crack hernia surgeons in Southern California for a Hernia Club Desert Healing Resort in Rancho Mirage. Surgeries will be at the Eisenhower Health Centre in Palm Springs and recovery will be at the resort. Healing desert sunshine, protein miracle Date Shakes and loads of activities for spouses including a lavish Three-Day Post Hernia barbeque (with open bar) to celebrate a migration from bone broth, white rice and hummus to hormone and antibiotic rich squab, squid and organic whole wheat spaghetti.

Stay tuned for the final deal!

RKS 2025 Wine: Mencía a Pinot Noir on Steroids?

One of my favourite descriptors of a grape is attributable to Matt Kramer of the Wine Spectator many years back when he stated the Mencía grape reminded him of Pinot Noir on steroids. Whether that descriptor is correct is less relevant than the descriptor itself! You will find Mencía in Northwestern Spain and in the Dão region in Portugal where it is known as Jaen. 85% Mencía, 8% Grenache and 7% Sousón in this wine.

Aroma: Raspberry, cocoa, cranberry and Catanian cactus pear.

Palate: Brackish with a slight bitterness. Firm yet smooth. Tiny bit perky. Raspberry, sweet Ruby Red grapefruit, Santa Rosa plum and a hint of blackberry with a predominately short finish with some long fade elements. A slight chill (not The Big Chill) is essential

Personality: I am certainly no Pete Rose on steroids. Acidity (not out of control) gives me a perkiness.

Food Match: Pulpo Gallego.

Cellarbility: 2025-year end.

Price: $22 CDN.

RKS 2025 Wine Rating: 88/100. Natalie MacLean 90. Decanter World Wine Awards 97.

(Matilda Nieves 2020 Mencía, D.O. Ribeira Sacra, Spain, 750 mL 13%).

RKS Literature: Sex and a Gas Mask (Andrea Levy)

“All that lily-of-the-valley scent. Hours spent waving my hair and powdering my face to porcelain perfection. Silk stockings, red lips and hands as soft as lah-di-lah. And I was married to a man who wouldn’t have noticed if I’d come to bed in my gas mask. If I could have asked Aunt Dorothy, “Is that all that sex is?” I know what she would have said: ‘Well what did you think it would be?”

Andrea Levy, “Small Island”, 2003.