There appears to be a shortage of Laphroiag in this city.

Update, Dec. 29

It was on the shelf at the Ossington LCBO on Bloor West yesterday. Who knew? The clerk at Spadina told me that only Summerhill or Queen's Quay would have had it. In any event, it'll have to wait until I work through a bottle of GlenDronach, which is okay, but doesn't have that peatiness I'm looking for.

ABC News is reporting that al Qaeda is urging Islamist terrorists to conduct a strike in Britain over the Christmas period. The reporters base this claim on web postings and other Internet "chatter."

However, the story also contains this proviso:

While there are no specifics to the concern -- no targets, no corroborated intelligence and no very specific timing -- authorities are taking the information more seriously than they otherwise might.  Their concern stems from the knowledge that at least 1,200 al Qaeda operatives are at large in Great Britain, with about 18 key al Qaeda members among them and at least two highly placed linchpins to al Qaeda operations, who may have made Britain their home base.

Click Here for Full Blotter Coverage.

Oddly, neither the UK-based BBC, the Guardian, the Times Online, the Independent or the Telegraph are prominently reporting this dire news on their websites at this time.

I'll check back and see if that changes.

Meanwhile, the big news is the holiday travel havoc at London's Heathrow Airport due to a thick bank of (terrorist-caused?) fog.

Update

The closest news story I could find about a terror threat was this BBC story:

Defending the high security levels which have been maintained in London, Sir Ian (Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police) said the threat of terrorism was "far graver" than those faced during World War II, the Cold War or the IRA.

He said although there were no details about a terrorist attack during the Christmas period, the country faced a "level of unparalleled threat".

He added: "I think the threat of another terrorist attempt is ever-present.

"We have no specific intelligence but listeners may remember that there was a terrorist plot in Germany against one of their Christmas markets in 2002, so it's a possibility."

That story was played "below the fold" (the first screen) of the UK home page in a subsection entitled "England."

Now, maybe it's not big news on Friday in Britain because Home Secretary John Reid made a similar warning last Sunday (see this Dec. 11 Guardian article).

However, here is what Sir Ian Blair said in a Dec. 23 Guardian article:

There was no specific evidence of any immediate threat, he said, playing down a recent suggestion from the home secretary, John Reid, that an attack was highly likely before Christmas.

I then went to the home page of MI5, Britain's domestic security agency (the Brit equivalent of CSIS).

That page hasn't been updated since Dec. 15.

They do describe the threat as "severe" -- as of Aug. 14, 2006.

"Severe" means an attack is highly likely. "Critical" means an attack is imminent.

However, if the agency hasn't updated its threat level, perhaps MI5 doesn't consider the al Qaeda chatter to be as threatening as ABC News does.

I posted the following at CTV.ca in the comments area of David Akin's post on the Great Journalists' Contract Hunt initiated by Conservative MP Scott Reid:

Read this.

However, I believe the Done Right Inn on Queen West, here in T.O. (land of government regulated liquor sales) has been doing this for some time.