The first thing that strikes me about a restaurant is the approach, the grounds, the exterior. glo is surrounded by great public walkways, great public sculpture, and overflowing public trash cans.

I anticipate the excuse, “picking up garbage is the city’s job!” Well, the government is ruining your restaurant: Stop making excuses and busk the cans into your dumpsters.

I love the space glo is in, and hate the hip hop blasting over the front door. I’m a giant hip hop fan, but when the music is so loud it’s fuzzing your speakers you are doing it wrong.

I’d add something in the long entrance hallway as well, video screens or similar. The corridor is perfectly designed for busy waiting — don’t bore the people lining up to give you money. That said, my party was immediately seated on the patio on a sunny, beautiful, busy day.

The interior was almost empty, except for delivered cases of kitchen supplies which hadn’t been properly received littering the tables.

We were seated outside under pleasant shade, which is a neat trick. I’ve been red for a few days, first from the beach, second from a patio with poor brolly shades. Worse, however, are those patios that are over-shaded and get no sun. glo achieved a nice balance.

Then we got our menus.

Laminated, dilapidated menus with no graphic design didn’t fit the quality the rest of the establishment was aiming for. This is basic stuff: Use heavy paper with a standard design, possibly a cover, and reprint and recycle as needed.

Edifice: 2 of 5.

Our server introduced herself and recorded our drinks. My new trick has been to ask for an Arnold Palmer, which seems beyond most Victoria bartenders. She repeated the order and I could tell she had no idea what I wanted.

The server returned with an iced tea, coffee, and a question for me: “Okay, we’ve had a discussion. Some of us think an Arnold Palmer is a light beer with a shot, some of us think it’s iced tea with a shot. Which is it?”

Fail.

I changed my order — they didn’t have lemonade — and ended up waiting an unreasonable amount of time. The tea eventually showed up with a round of waters, nicely sweetened. Lots of iced tea in Victoria is over-sweet, which is confusing because Americans, our main tourist demographic, drink the stuff sugar-free.

The drink service foreshadowed the food: slow, and not quite right. The medium-rare steak in my party came medium, and our eggs benny had clearly spent some time under a hot lamp. Not only that but the English muffin — which the server called an “English McMuffin” — was burnt.

I had a chorizo goat cheese omelet with spinach, mushrooms, diced tomatoes, and disgustingly overcooked eggs: scorched rubber. The flavors and textures would have worked had the dish been properly cooked — one side effect of the excessive heat was to string out the spinach.

These cooking problems were all a symptoms of an overly-busy kitchen. Obviously a steak order takes time, and when you’re busy it might go out a touch over-done (and should then be sent back). Omelets and poached eggs take minutes, or seconds, to cook and should be done last. Even a busy person has enough time to send omelets back until they’re right.

The egg dishes tasted like they’d been started with the steak and then kept warm — unacceptable. Here’s how to properly scramble eggs, imagine your way to a properly cooked omelet from here:

None of the tables around us got food in a timely fashion. glo’s kitchen is either under-staffed, under-experienced, under-motivated, or under-skilled. Or maybe some combination thereof.

The food was served without an eye to presentation, which is disappointing because most of the dishes I saw on other tables were presented with a pseduo-haute flair.

Service: 1 of 5.

glo feels more than informal — it feels too relaxed, like the difference between a sweater and a sweatshirt.

The patio’s bamboo shades had been trimmed into uselessness and then left in place. The planters blocked isles and bottlenecked traffic. They’d been useless long enough that waiters were stepping over the boxes — so why even have them?

Combined with the trash cans, the tatty menus, the entryway speaker-fuzz, and the unstowed cooking supplies, the unthinking arrangement of the bamboo planters gave the place the feel of a restaurant without a manager. Or maybe with a tasteless one. In either case, that lack of care was reflected in the food.

That said, the space is great and the “hard” aspects of the design — those that are more resistant to a lack of care, like the building and internal fixtures — work well. And being in Victoria on a sunny day is pleasurable by default.

Ambiance: 2 of 5.

Overall, glo is fine for a relaxed time out. I feel as though I’ve panned it more than it deserves, like a nice-but-stupid dog you keep having to choke. Let’s put this review in the context of the reviews I haven’t written yet: glo is above-average for its class in Victoria.

But with a little discipline it could be so much more. It just feels unmanaged — no consistent vision, no steady hand.

Final: 2 of 5.

The United States is a truly shocking country. Its politics never fail to entertain.

Again, the English usage (mostly the nautical jargon) is fantastic. Atlantic English is something different again. Alcohol is the key: Drink with Acadian chicks and the sons of rural families. You get code-switched sentences like, “Moment! J’alle au the gas station pour acheter gas for my truck” and usage that’s just not understandable “Alex! Alex! Tell me where you’re to! I wanna come to where you’re at” (which, apparently, is a statement about drinking)!

Just for a moment leave the unintelligible Newfie baywop aside. ‘T’s not dat ‘t t’ain’t beau’ful, dere just ain’t nah room fer ‘t ‘ere, baye.

Men don’t really sing in the West. There’s a weird gender-spanning neuroticism here that’s totally absent on the other coast. There’s a real sense of community there like nothing I’ve experienced here without being too drunk to enjoy it.

Belting that song in a Maritime pub Friday after work is the closest I’ve come to an authentic community experience in, let’s say… the last thirteen years.

But once they lost it acquired an edge that made it Rebel Music. That’s the key: Once the women at home have given up the cause only the men with a truly balls-out, psychotic understanding of death-before-dishonor keep fighting. I heard this in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and dug it:

English is a truly beautiful language, and I love the usage in that song. At parts it conjugates the past tense of “fought” as “fit”. It uses both, I wonder if there’s a deeper rule? The past tense of “caught” — “caughtched”. The slang — “a chance of Yankees”. The incorrect usage of the verb “to be” throughout. The broken pluralization (the rhythm of the repeated “I hates”). The unrepentant patriotism. The historic-cultural references. Fantastic, like nothing we get in the mainstream voice, and there’s more there than I mention.

A couple years back Dr. Z turned me on to The Band, who did another goodie in Scorsese’s “Last Waltz”, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, by a Canadian songwriter who dug the Lost Cause aesthetic:

Shoulder pressing close to shoulder, Let the odds make each heart bolder!

I pay close attention to the albums I listen to New Years day. I try to enjoy complete albums that reinforce my worldview, to start the year with a reminder of what I hold dear. Here are the five I started this year with, in order.

My current favorite album. Warren Zevon wrote track seven, Mohammed’s Radio, in one manic all-night session after he failed to meet Hunter Thompson at a costume party one Aspen Hallowe’en, inspired by one of the guests’ costumes:

When I sit down with my screenplays and start writing scenes I often put a single track on loop that conveys the feeling of the sequence to me (and then I usually write it into the script, even though you’re not supposed to). As it repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats I get the nuance and rhythm and try to write something that hits the same emotional note.

The indie script I’m working on is action-oriented and Mohammed’s Radio is the track I looped for the relaxed, vaguely menacing opening sequence.

The classic isolation concept album, Dr. Z clued me onto this one back in ’06. It took over my brain so quickly, with such resonance, that I used it in therapy in ’08.

Partially responsible for me flaming out of accounting, The Wall literally changed my life. Ahh, the corporate drone mentality: Stress, drugs, and rock & roll. I wish I missed it.

Soulful, heroin-fueled surf-reggae punk music from Brad Nowell, the second most influential rock musician of the 90s after Cobain (I’ve never been a Nirvana guy). Someone also once called Sublime “the second most important reggae act” after Bob Marley. That’s good for a best double-finish award.

Life is too short, so love the one you got…

The first time I heard this album was Summer 1994 and I thought it was catchy. It took until 1996 for it to really set my brain on fire.

An all-time favorite. Perennial.

I learned the word “cunt” from this album, Manson’s best. His albums until 2007′s Eat Me, Drink Me were successful variations on Portrait.

I learned the more complicated and interesting pejorative “cuntfucker” from Cake and Sodomy. Great workout music.

Quotes Presley in this: