I went to some Korean BBQ with John and the par­ents yes­ter­day. I usu­ally try to go at least once every time I come back home, a lit­tle rit­ual I’ve had since first year. Korean BBQ is a unique eat­ing expe­ri­ence; the food one orders is brought for you in lit­tle trays, uncooked and mar­i­nated, and one cooks it on a round, embed­ded flame grill in the cen­tre of the table. There are vents all the way around the grill to suck the smoke away from the food. We got the all you can eat deal, where they bring you as many beef strips, spare ribs, salmon strips, pork strips, chicken breasts, cow tongues, cod strips and cow liver as you want for $10.95. Even the all you can drink deal was only $1. I real­ized that they make their money by bring­ing smaller por­tions of the food to slow down one’s eat­ing, let­ting the food sit in one’s stom­ach to get fuller faster, along with the fact that they don’t have to pay any­one to cook.

John kept opin­ing on all of his eccen­tric polit­i­cal ideas, and it was only in the mid­dle of din­ner that I really felt I under­stood Julia’s attrac­tion to him. One of the more inter­est­ing ideas was tak­ing cig­a­rettes out of the small busi­ness mar­ket and sell­ing them exclu­sively in the LCBO. That elim­i­nates the prob­lem of under­age smok­ing, since the LCBO is much more strin­gent in ask­ing for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion than the local cor­ner store. The prob­lem would be that peo­ple would start going to Quebec for cig­a­rettes, in the same fash­ion as alco­hol, along with the fact that lot­tery tick­ets and cig­a­rettes are the main sta­ple of many con­ve­nience stores while almost all the other prod­ucts are there for impulse shop­ping. If this were to hap­pen, the LCBO would gen­er­ate an even more income for the gov­ern­ment, while reduc­ing the num­ber of kids addicted to smoking.

I also enjoyed his idea of hav­ing no sum­mers for school, so that peo­ple could grad­u­ate from high school years ear­lier, since North Americans have fallen into the unnec­ces­sary habit of hav­ing a sum­mer vaca­tion over 150 years ago when the archaic act of har­vest­ing crops was done. Of course, I didn’t com­pletely agree since most peo­ple don’t have their brains devel­oped enough for the con­cepts intro­duced uni­ver­sity until at least their late teens, and such a cur­ricu­lum would leave many peo­ple behind. So he brought up the idea of spe­cial­ized, instead of stan­dard­ized, school­ing. That way each school would meet the needs of the stu­dents attend­ing it, such as schools in farm­ing areas hav­ing the flex­i­bil­ity of a sum­mer vaca­tion where it’s actu­ally needed. In my opin­ion, some­thing like this wouldn’t work too well for the cred­i­bil­ity of the Ontario school sys­tem, since noth­ing is being too con­trolled, but there’s always the inde­pen­dent school “option” if par­ents can afford it. If the school sys­tem of Ontario is effec­tive, how­ever, then it should be able to prove itself and improve it’s own cred­i­bil­ity, but an idea as the­o­ret­i­cal as this would be extremely risky.

I never thought I’d say this, but John was a born politi­cian, and I’ve never been more proud to be his friend.