Yesterday, Cinnamon and I set out for Shaumburg, intent on test-driving a couple cars and maybe shopping for a new sofa. After we arrived, we discovered that car dealerships are closed on Sundays (doh!) so we reverted to the secondary goal.
You see, back just before the e-commerce bubble burst, we purchased a couch from furniture.com. (Despite the appearance of being a survivor, the current iteration of the site is a completely different company founded on the ashes of the original's fire sale.) Lured by the promise of low prices and free(!) in-house delivery, we bought a beautiful contemporary model for just over $1000.
It was a terrible decision.
The material -- which we picked based on a 2-inch square sample sent to us by mail -- is a burgundy chenille-like stuff, perfect for both showing off our cats' shed hair and serving as a scratching post. Within a few weeks of our getting the sofa, it looked years old and worse for wear. And despite its neat design, it's not comfortable at all -- it's too firm, and the seat height and cushion depth conspire to make it difficult to get comfortable unless you sit indian-style. There is no slouching on this sofa, unless you like back pain. The only assets are the extrawide, flat armrests, which allow for putting down a book or letting a cat nap under the lamp.
So we're finally breaking down and getting a new one. We stopped in a couple stores -- Carson's furniture store, Walter E. Smythe and Marshall Field's Home -- and although we didn't mean to, we've ended up leaning towards leather. I know it sounds opulent, but consider the advantages: cat hair clean-up is a snap, leather lasts forever (well, much longer than fabric) and the cats won't be able to dig their claws in. And depending on the grade of leather, most scratches will be easy to rehabilitate -- just a little leather conditioner and it's all better. We've pretty much picked the one we want, which means we'll be out there again next weekend.
After we got sick of sitting down on the multitudes of sofa offerings, we headed to Mitsuwa, a Japanese supermarket/semi-mall nearby, for lunch and a brief shopping trip. We both got an assortment of sushi, and I picked up a spam-egg-mayo handroll for the hell of it (I passed on a similar handroll with what looked like tempura hotdog).
We had last been to Mitsuwa four years ago -- it was called Yaohan then -- to get sushi-grade fish for a dinner party. We picked up a much smaller selection this time, including some beautiful salmon and hokkigai. We picked up some organic soysauce (didn't know there was such a thing) and a canned coffee drink called Boss, mainly for the great graphic design. I had a can this morning; probably much more caffeine than I really needed, but oh well. I couldn't find a decaf can, and it was only about 6 oz.
One of the nice things about working in PR is the ability to be in on the joke. Press releases are often lame, formulaic tripe -- not the way I write them, but still -- and if anyone can cuttingly satirize hack writing, it's a PR pro. We're trained professionals at hack writing.
For instance: There's a thread in MetaFilter's MetaTalk section about what everyone's day job is. One member, planetkyoto, piped in that he wanted to be another member's cabana boy. Several people ran with the idea, and it became a running joke throughout the thread, coupled with a margarita pool party. A few minutes of brainstorming, and voilà -- instant press release.
OUTER PENINSULA, Mich. (June 27, 2003) -- Meepzorp Corp., an Internet content provider, announced today that Nils "planetkyoto" Ferry has joined the firm as cabana boy. The company also announced a pool party this weekend at its Boston location, featuring margaritas, a piano player and other party favors.
Planetkyoto will report to Julie "madamjujujuve" ___, vice president of cultural affairs for Meepzorp, in this newly created position, and will be responsible for distribution of margaritas, maintenance of the pool and collection of discarded swimwear.
"Planetkyoto is a key member of our management team," said X. Caliper "quonsar" Bleeb, president and CEO of Meepzorp. "He brings 18 years experience in corporate finance and systems analysis, and is expected to play a significant role in the future growth and expansion of the company's margarita party."
In his previous position, planetkyoto served as an English translator for Tamagatchi Pharmaceuticals. He lives in Kyoto, Japan, with his wife. He is a member of his local shinto shrine's Welcome Wagon and enjoys participating in the MetaFilter online community.
Meepzorp Corp. is a premium online content provider providing the premier content on the Internet. Its premier product is Everlasting Blort, a premium Internet Web site providing content at a premium to content preemies. Additional information is available online at www.meepzorp.com.
I love silkscreened concert posters. I've got a good-sized collection of them, going back several years. The first one I picked up was for a band called the Doll Rods (no relation, as far as I know, to the Demolition Doll Rods) that was up in the breezeway at Kafein when I was in high school. Until this year, I never paid for a poster, instead I'd wait until the show was past and ask the record store/coffeeshop/whatever if I could have the poster, or I'd snag it from the wall. Once I had Brandon jump out of the car on Lincoln Ave. near Belmont to grab several copies of a particularly nice poster that had been tacked up to the outside of a construction walkway.
This year, I've bought two posters, both involving Chris Ware. (Another favorite of mine: I've been cutting out and saving his Acme Novelty comics from New City and The Reader for years now.) One was the poster for the recent This American Life live show at the Chicago Theater, signed by the performers and Ware. The other is from a Dan Clowes/Chris Ware book signing at a comic shop in Portland, also signed by both artists, that I bought to help Fantagraphics survive the bankruptcy of their distributor. Total outlay: $80, plus s&h for the second one. Not bad, considering I've got probably 50 posters.
One of my favorites I came across by accident, and it's not really a concert poster. When Chris, David and I were out in LA a few years back coordinating a Kill Hannah gig at the Viper Room, I ended up walking a good length of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood (don't ask). As I was walking, I noticed a hand-screened print placed in the frame on an LA Times paperbox, in the frame where promo cards are usually placed -- you know, where the newspaper boasts about a hot story, like Bulls Win Six! or War on Iraq! The print, on paperboard, is an old map of Los Angeles overlayed with a shooting target, overlayed with several WWII fighter planes. The print is red, white and black and is unsigned, so I have no idea who did it. I took it home with me and somehow managed to keep it from getting crumpled in my suitcase.
At some point, I'd like to get the posters framed, but it's a big hurdle -- frames aren't cheap, and many of the posters are odd sizes, necessitating custom matting and/or custom frames. In the meantime they sit next to my desk rolled up together, or slipped between the wall and a cabinet, nestled into a pad of newsprint.
Last night, pretty much on a whim, Cinnamon and I went to Ravinia to see the Blind Boys of Alabama and Buddy Guy -- mostly to see the Blind Boys. She rode the train up and met me, I basically just stopped on my usual route home.
It was a great night to be out on a lawn listening to music. The heat of the day dissipated as the tall trees blocked the sun, leaving the lawn a comfy 80-ish. Despite one of our neighbor's complaints about mosquitos, neither of us saw or were bitten by one, leading me to believe the lady was just high-maintenance. The ground was hard, and since we didn't plan ahead we had just the old Amtrak blanket from my trunk to lay on, but that was fine.
A blues concert at Ravinia leads to an interesting mix of people. To our right were the aforementioned high-maintenance lady and her husband, drinking wine -- one bottle of red for him, one white for her -- out of expensive Reidel glasses and de-mosquitoing the region with their gigantic citronella candle. On our left was a group of hard-living types in their 40s, getting trashed on beer and razzing each other about various things. Their candle was a House of Blues prayer candle. Behind us were some yuppies and in front of us were some post-yuppies. One thing they all had in common: the crowd was overwhelmingly white.
The Blind Boys were great. Soulful and enthusiastic, they got the crowd (most of whom had probably never heard of them) going in no time. One of the singers, not sure which one, had the lung capacity of a horse, holding notes for a minute or more, much to the audience's pleasure. Everyone got into their rendition of "Amazing Grace" to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun," which was more bluesy and soulful live than on the album, Spirit of the Century.
Buddy Guy was good, a predictably solid performance. Souring jams gave way to quiet guitar noodlings, Guy's banter was fun and self-deprecating, etc. We took off around 10, before he was done and ahead of the big traffic jam, and cruised down Sheridan road with the windows down and smokey jazz on the radio.
On the way to work this morning, I had a great opportunity to look at the backs of a whole lot of cars. A surprising number of them, traveling between Chicago and the Northwest Suburbs, (still) have patriotic stickers of various sorts on them, including several that also sport anti-war stickers. Interesting.
As I drove, I thought about the lack of dissent represented by the stickers. Sure, those "Attack Iraq? No!" stickers were nice, but there were no real un-American stickers on display. There's got to be a market for them, don't you think? And, being a good capitalist, I thought about ways to exploit this market.
I only have a PC-version of Photoshop 3.0 available to me at work, but this is what I came up with:
The New York Times Magazine reports that an underground hit, the favorite beer of bike messengers, punks and other "alternative people."
Pabst Blue Ribbon -- P.B.R., as fans call it -- is currently enjoying a highly unlikely comeback. In 2002, sales of the beer, which had been sinking steadily since the 1970's, actually rose 5.3 percent. From the start of 2003 through April 20, supermarket beer sales are up another 9.4 percent. It is endorsed in ''The Hipster Handbook,'' a paperback dissection of cool, and is popping up in trendy bars from the Mission District to the Lower East Side. Sales in Chicago are up 134 percent. But the growth started and is most pronounced in Portland -- a city best known in the cosmology of beer as a haven for fancy microbrews -- where most agree that bike messengers have been in the P.B.R. vanguard.
I think Pabst has the right idea -- don't advertise like nuts, or you'll ruin it. Just let it happen. Gotta give them credit for not screwing up a good thing. But why should we kow-tow to the predominant indy trend? Why not start our own? We could choose Schlitz -- which is owned by the same group who owns PBR, and brewed by Miller under contract, just like PBR, so it's practically the same thing. Or we could go with the home-town favorite, Old Style, whose six-packs are cheaper than soda in a lot of places.
The NYT reporter makes a point of mentioning that the PBR fad will be over the moment Ashton Kutcher shows up on MTV's Punk'd drinking a can. I beg to differ -- it's over the moment the New York Times Magazine does a feature on it.
So, the Wall Street Journal published its overview of the summer's "hot" CDs in the the Weekend Journal today, and I just had to groan. Jewel and Liz Phair, Metallica and Macy Gray, Beyoncé and The Eels?
The most disappointing thing about music for me right now is that I don't hear much that I find interesting. My CD player in my car is broken, so I've been forced to listen to the radio. On XRT I'm bored by folksy alt-rock and an odd resurgeance of raggae; on The Zone I'm even more bored by the non-stop, mind-numbing hard rock. Thank you, Korn and Limp Bizkit for turning the 18-24 male market into a frenzy of thrashy riffs and meaningless-but-aggressively-wounded-sounding lyrics. Even the snippets of the new Radiohead singles (I keep managing to switch stations just in time to hear the last 30 seconds) isn't exciting me. The only song that's been a stand-out to me has been the new Jane's Addiction track -- which sounds vitrually just like what they were doing ten years ago, except Perry's voice is deeper.
I've mentioned before that I feel like rock'n'roll is casting about for a new trend, something to break it out of the crap we've got now. The last time that happened (in a good way -- the rapmetal bands were a downgrade, in my opinion) was in the early '90s when grunge and industrial forced a change. I can't think of another period since when so much really good music was being created by so many artists. I want that to happen again, and I can't see where it's going to come from.
But perhaps I'm just being a stick in the mud. Maybe I haven't heard the right stuff, been clued in on the good shite. You tell me: what's the hot tip? I'll give you an idea of where my tastes lie, and you give me a recommendation. OK? Cool. Here:
+ ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Source Tags and Codes -- excellent, love it.
+ Hot Hot Heat's new one -- Not bad, but way to repetitive on the lyrics.
+ Andrew Bird: Weather Systems -- one of the best I've heard recently.
+ Ani DiFranco: Evolve -- Better than the hardcore fans make it out to be, but I'm looking forward to the new solo album.
+ The Thorns -- as much as I like Matthew Sweet's early stuff, this sucks.
+ White Stripes: Elephant -- the music's decent, but Jack White bugs the hell out of me with his at-tit-ude.
+ Radiohead: Hail to the Thief -- Tentative approval, having heard bare moments.
+ DJ Shadow: The Private Press -- Groovy, but Endtroducing was better.
So? Tell me my fortune.
Hung out with a few bloggers last night at the monthly Meetup: Paul, Ursula, Alice, Rachael, Phineas, Shylo, Nikolai and I decended (ha!) on 3rd Coast, a nice little place in the Gold Coast at the same time as a Women In Business function and a meeting of some nebulous group of "Democrats." (I was going to link to Women In Business, but there are several groups calling themselves that, and I can't tell which it was.)
Conversations rolled from topic to topic, covering everything from reality television to overly religious families to White Sox baseball, a subject that led me to describe my first game at the new Comiskey Park -- now anonymously known as U.S. Cellular Field -- and subsequent acquisition of a brick from the old Comiskey.
I went with the Doughty family, with whom I spent a good amount of time that summer. Our seats were in the second-to-last row of the upper deck, first base side. The view was incredible, but also a bit frightening thanks to the severe angle of the stands -- as you walk down the stairs it looks as if you'll tumble right off the edge if you trip. I don't remember much of the game, actually, other than I think we won, and we were almost at eye level with the fireworks when someone scored a home run.
We also had a view of the darkened shell of old Comiskey, across the street and surrounded by chainlink fence and wrecking cranes. On our way back to the car we past the old field, and Wil and I noticed a section of the fence was buckled. We slipped inside and grabbed souvenirs -- I picked up a big chunk of the outside wall, and Wil found a brick with two sides painted. I traded pieces with him, since his dad was a huge fan who'd grown up watching the games and I didn't have a place to store a big conglomerate of bricks and mortar. My Comiskey brick now holds open my bedroom door, thick on two sides with 80 years of white paint.
Dave isn't the only one who's been paying more attention to birds lately. I too have been watching the skies (and trees, etc.).
There are a whole lot of hawks living near my daily commute, which takes me past a large forest plains preserve. I've seen as many as three hunting along the same mile of Lake-Cook Road. And a couple weeks back I saw about a half-dozen buzzards (turkey vultures, really) circling in Deer Park. Buzzards! This isn't even their normal territory. On the other hand, I've seen almost no crows so far this year, thanks to West Nile Virus.
Besides the unexpected buzzards, there is also a contingency of what look to be black egrets of some sort that has taken up residence in the trees next to a pond in Wheeling. As I pass by, again on Lake-Cook, The elegant black birds look completely out of place on their perches 50 feet up -- they look like they ought rather to be stalking in the shallows of the pond below, darting their China red bills into the water after small silvery fish.
Interesting that there are suddenly all these unexpected birds in the area, home to one of the only remaining nesting grounds for herons and egrets in Illinois, right here in Barrington. Every day I'm greeted with the pleasing sight of blue herons and great egrets lazily flying home after an early morning of fishing thousand-dollar koi out of the ponds of nearby estates.
I heard the new Metallica single, "St. Anger," on the radio at lunch today. Other than being surprisingly short-attention-spanny (apparently they copied the System of a Down model of songwriting for this one -- used to be SoaD copied them), it's an interesting return to their thrash-metal roots.
Anyway, the idea of a Saint Anger intrigues me. What if we had saints for emotions, kinda like the deities of the past? Saint Anger could be joined by his (according to Metallica, St. Anger is a he) opposite, Saint Pleasure. The assorted Saints Happiness, Sadness, Boredom, Bitchy, Shy and Confident would reign, like an extended set of beatific Dwarfs, over the humors of Mankind. Kind of a neat, silly idea, isn't it?
Today, of course, I have been governed by Saint Busy.
Able to spot egregious stereotypes wherever they may lie!
Now, most people who know me are aware that I'm not much of a fan of political correctness. It's a long way around a small problem, and usually sounds more stilted and wrong than the supposedly crude or insensitive phrase it replaces. However, that doesn't mean I'm in favor of stereotypes. Sure there's a chewy truth at the center of each of these suckers, but that doesn't mean they're fair or even accurate.
It's rare to see a stereotype show up in the media these da-- actually, no it's not. They're in there all the time, wreaking havok on the common man's ability to understand and sympathize with cultures other than his own. Case in point, today's column by Richard Roeper in the Sun-Times, in which he discusses the heckling of Sikh golfer Vijay Singh:
What cracks me up about this incident is the utterly tame nature of the heckle: "Hey Vijay, I think Annika could have put it in!"
Oooh, scathing. It's a wonder Singh was able to finish the round without collapsing in sobs.
I mean, that sounds like something you'd hear if you couldn't properly load the Slurpee machine: "Hey Vijay, I think Annika could have put it in!"
I don't think so. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive, but I think if I were to go to the convenience store in the strip mall next to my office and ask the Indo/Pak owner what he thought, he might bristle a little. I bet if I showed it to an Indian doctor he'd fume just a bit. And I wouldn't blame them.
Separately, Sun-Times TV reviewer Phil Rosenthal reports that Orlando Jones has a new talk show debuting tonight on FX. Making a play on the star's initials -- O.J. -- he claims the star has done some polarizing in the past.
But love or hate his ubiquitous (and presumably lucrative) 7-Up commercials--rooted in the premise that leaving a bad taste in your mouth will have you reaching for something that tastes good--don't hold them against Orlando Jones as he launches his new late-night gabfest, "The Orlando Jones Show," at 10 tonight.
Only one problem: that's not Orlando Jones. Jones hasn't appeared in a new 7-Up commercial for more than a year. The commercials Rosenthal described star actor/comedian Godfrey, who, other than also being black, looks very little like Jones. Whoops.
Outside my office, a battle scene, and I'm behind enemy lines. Cottonwood paratroopers float aimlessly in an ongoing assault on sinuses, their smashed bodies mashed into the doormat and cling to the rough cedar siding. A white line of insecticide rings the base of our building, keeping the carpenter ants at bay for now. The line is punctuated with spots where the exterminator shook the can, creating miniature bursts like the carbon scars of exploded bombs. A few junebugs have died, their carcasses abandoned tanks on the front lines, but the cool weather has kept most of them alive thus far. The box-elder bugs of late summer have yet to begin their attack.
There is grass in the air as well, decapitated green bits shoaled up in waves in the parking lot, unswept-up by the Groundskeeper Willies (or, more likely, Juans) yesterday. And a few yards away, traffic continues its endless barrage on the pavement and my ears. I open the door, slip back to safety, climb the stairs and enter the climate-controlled office.
So, VH1 thinks they've got the list of the 100 best songs from the past 25 years, eh? Boy are they ever wrong.
I usually dismiss these lists, since they are almost always skewed toward more recent songs. Whenever you do a list that starts today and goes back X number of years (to 1978 in this case*), the songs that come to mind first are going to be the ones you hear today, right? Surprisingly, more than a third of the songs on the list are from 1978-1983, the first five years of the period, while only 13 came from the past five years. And of the top 10 songs, six are from the Eighties, three from the Nineties and only one from the Oughties (Naughties?). So it's actually a pretty well distributed selection, possibly even weighted too heavily to the oldest songs.
However, I do take issue, as many others have, at the selections. "Hot in Herre," by Nelly? A novelty song. Same with "Mmm Bop" by Hanson -- who even remembers any lyrics to that one besides the title? Were there lyrics? Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" over "Love in the Elevator?" Come on. And where's "Bizarre Love Triangle?"
And some of the included songs really should be higher up -- the Clash's "London Calling," #38, should at minimum be above "... Baby One More Time," #28.
Of course, VH1 is just doing a television show, and who knows how they chose this list, other than perhaps video ratings data, so we really shouldn't get all riled up about it. It should also be pointed out that although it's called "The 100 Greatest Songs of the Past 25 Years," it's really the 100 Best Pop songs of the Past 25 Years, "pop" standing for popularity in this case. Sure, there's some rap in there, but no heavy metal or electronica (Metallica's "Enter Sandman" and Madonna's "Ray of Light" do not count) represented. I mean, if Moby's "Southside" isn't one this list, you know at least one genre is getting the shaft (not that that's the best electronica song ever, but it's certainly one of the most popular).
*Meat Loaf's "Paradise By the Dashboard Light," No. 59., was on Bat Outta Hell, which came out in 1977. So technically it shouldn't be included here. Oh well.
So, looking through my referral logs, I noticed an odd one: the Simpsonesque yoink.org. I pulled it up, and it's a link to the comments section of kottke.org -- just the comments, not the post that they're connected to. The title of the page says kottke.org, even. According to Google's cache, Jason briefly (as in one post) toyed with MT over there -- perhaps as a testing ground for his switch away from Blogger for the main site? Interesting.
Alas, this is not news so much as a rediscovery: Weblog Wannabe exposed a little of this back in Sept. 2000 -- along with finding the odd fishbulb.com (what the hellll?). Anyway, I think it's an interesting solution to what I would assume is a space issue -- by shunting bandwidth-hogging comments to another, underutilized URL, kottke.org's bandwidth and memory remain accessible even when there's a comment storm abrewing. (Interesting, though, that comments for the main column content aren't hosted at yoink -- you'd think he'd put them over there, too, since there are regularly double-digit comment counts over there, versus a small handful per entry on the "remainders" column.)
I'm...a bit stuffed up. I've never had very bad allergies before, but this year cottonwood season has me beat. Maybe it's the cool, wet weather we've had this Spring -- lots of pollen and mold in the air. It's definitely worse in the suburbs than in the city.
When I was a kid, I was mildly allergic to cats. Basically, I'd get a stuffed up nose and sneeze a lot, but since I had cats all growing up I pretty much grew out of it, or at least developed a tolerance. Other than that, the only other allergy I've had has been to members of the mint family, spearmint and (not really a mint but closely related ) marijuana being the worst. The DEA would love my nose -- I can smell probably one part per billion of pot smoke on the air. The main symptom of mint exposure for me is major sinus pressure, followed by dizzyness if I don't get away from it quickly enough.
What I've got going on right now is a combination of those symptoms: a sinus pressure headache and a stuffed up nose. My throat is scratchy, but that seems to be mostly due to sinus drainage. It's kind of hard to breathe or concentrate at the moment.
And with that, I'll stop grossing you out and focus my attention on getting at least a little work done today. Antihistamines await when work is done.
Peter finally introduced his girlfriend to the family over the weekend. They've been dating for quite a while, but he'd been shielding the relationship from the harsh glare and miriad questions of our mother. We had a cookout at my parents' on Saturday, just an excuse to get everyone back together again before Grandma heads back to Arizona, and Pete wisely took the opportunity to bring M---- out at a nice low-pressure time (as opposed to, say, Christmas or Grandpa's memorial.)
It worked out exceptionally well. M---- was charming and warm, and kept trying to help the women in the kitchen -- who politely kicked her back out or gave her some small item to put on the table outside. (We assured her that she'd eventually be allowed to help...in a couple years.) She answered every question the fam threw at her with grace, and even took my dad's mild needling in stride. She held her own against a lecture session from Uncle Jim, too.
Cinnamon and I couldn't help but be amused by how easy she got off. When Cinnamon was introduced to the family, my mom was cold and my dad tried hard to get under her skin on various issues once he found she's a feminist. my mom apparently told her that she didn't compare to my ex, whom they both repeatedly told her went to Harvard. (There was, of course, an intervening girlfriend or two, one of whom they actually met, but that wasn't the point, I guess.) It wasn't until she started arguing and prodding them back that they started to accept her -- although I think our growing longevity together also probably had something to do with it. Eventually, after a couple of years, the women even let her help with family dinners. A little.
So I think Cinnamon paved the way for my brother's girlfriend's easier introduction. That, and I think everyone was on their best behavior so Pete would bring her a second time.
In addition to being the most likely animal vector for the SARS virus, the palm civet, is famous for one other thing: $300-a-pound coffee. (Actually, it's not the same species of palm civet, but rather a cousin.)
Legend has it that coffee was discovered in the Middle East by shepherds who noticed their goats were getting all excited after eating the berries of a wild bush. Well, Kopi Luwak, the rarest and most expensive coffee in the world, has a similar story. It seems palm civets also eat the berries of coffee trees, but they're very selective -- they only eat the ripest, reddest coffee cherries. However, they aren't able to digest the bean inside, so the finest beans from the finest cherries are excreted by the civet. Some enterprising person thought it through to what we have today: coffee made from the civet-processed beans. It's supposedly a very rich, slightly funky flavor, as I would tend to expect considering its provenance. Good luck finding a cup, though: almost all of the couple hundred pounds produced annually goes to Japan.
The 2002 Bordeaux wine futures are in. (Are you familiar with this? Basically, Sam's and some other wine shops will rate and list prices for Bordeaux wines that haven't been released yet, allowing customers to pick up great bottles at lowest possible price. Pretty cool.)
The Lafitte Rothschild Pauillac sounds awesome. This is a sister wine to the the Grand Cru Chateau Lafitte Rothschild that Cinnamon and I bought to celebrate our first home purchase -- we plan to drink it when we buy our next one (although I may veto that in favor of honeymoon/10 years together anniversary, whichever comes first). I'm seriously thinking about ordering a bottle. Sure it's $109, but it'll probably be double that when it hits shelves.
You're possibly wondering what the hell the difference between a $100 wine and a $10 wine is. I mean, really, how different can they be, huh? Quite different, quite. To give you an idea, I picked up a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon for $45 at Sam's last summer, which we drank at Brandon's going away dinner. It was from a small winery, and they only made I think about 500 cases -- 6,000 bottles. Normally I'm not much of a fan of Cabernets. They're very often too tart, as if made with cranberries in addition to the grapes, and they obliterate the flavor of any food except red meat. At least, that's how $10 Cabs taste. This bottle was incredible: beautiful depth of flavor, well balanced and complex with notes of cherry, mulberry and leather, and even a little tar in the aftertaste. It not only went well with steak, but duck and pork tenderloin and even salmon without overpowering any of them. Nine months later I can almost still taste it as I write this. It was 45 bucks well spent.
That's what we're expecting out of our outrageously priced bottle of Bordeaux. It's what we got from our expensive balsamic vinegar. And it's what you ought to expect if you're paying more than $30 for a bottle of wine in a restaurant.
It's amazing, isn't it? Seems like no matter how big, how successful someone gets, they always do something to screw up. Sosa corked his bat. Martha Stewart did some insider trading. Michael Jackson fondled little boys. And made himself white. And started going around dangling his kids out windows. And...
And what makes it sad is that they could have so easily avoided it (well, maybe not Michael). The things they got in trouble for are fundamental issues surrounding their careers: Corking a bat is one of the most egregious violations of baseball's rules, and Martha Stewart started out as a stock broker, so she knows all about the dangers of her actions.
Sammy claims he used the cork bat for batting practice and home run exhibitions -- to please the fans, he says. He used it in the game "by accident." But if he's such a great hitter, what does he need an enhanced bat for? Especially since cork allows for a faster swing but takes away some power. Are the fans pleased now that they know he was duping them during practice? Maybe his "accidental" use of a corked bat had more to do with his toe injury leaving him out of practice at the plate, under pressure to perform. Now he'll face a suspension, which will make him even rustier. And he'll be lucky if he doesn't get an asterisk next to his home run total in the record books.
Martha, on the other hand, is quite familiar with the workings of the SEC and probably knew exactly what she (allegedly) was doing when she sold her Imclone shares the day before an announcement sent the stock nosediving. It didn't take investigators very long to connect the dots from Imclone's CEO to Martha through her daughter, who dated said CEO for a time. The allegations sent stock in her own corporation tumbling; after all, if the company's namesake is doing shady deals, what is the company up to? (Interestingly, shares in Marth Stewart Omnimedia went up after the indictment was announced.) Who knows what'll happen next, but chances are she'll be paying a multi-million dollar fine and walking away sans jailtime.
Both of them will no doubt say they'll never do it again. Of course they won't, but it's too late now. The damage is done.
Back in January, I touted (in the ...random... section of the monthly Huff Report) my success with quitting caffeine (still clean, though I have an occasional decaf coffee with brunch on the weekends) and decided to try my 12-month plan to lose weight. Six months later, I've lost no weight, and probably gained a bit.
How is that possible, you ask? Haven't you been exercising? Well, no. And there's a big reason and a lot of little reasons for that.
The big reason is the weather. It's been roundly crappy here in Chicago. We set a new record for low temperature yesterday: 38° on June 2. That's just wrong. Between unusual cold and buckets of rain, I haven't been able to do much of the biking I was planning on. Sure, I could suck it up and say weather be damned, but that's where the lots of little reasons come in. They're all the activities I've had going on. I expected this year to be a bit less busy, but it's ended up being just as bad as last year. So instead of having the chance to bike or jog or whatever almost every day, I've had one or two crappy evenings to bike or jog or whatever.
This is all on top of the natural inertia of too many years of apathetic exercise habits. But save your breath admonishing or encouraging me -- part of the reason I'm writing about it here is to guilt and goard myself into doing better for the rest of the year. My goal is modest, 15 pounds by New Years, so I should be able to make it, even with the pitfalls of Thanksgiving and Christmas before then.
The FCC is voting today on relaxing rules governing media ownership, and unless a meteor striks their offices today, the changes will most likely pass.
Here's an article that summarizes the changes that will occur. Among them are a few stand-outs:
Proponents of these changes claim they'll foster better news coverage because media outlets will be able to pool newsgathering operations. I have to ask you: when something happens, are you content to hear about it from one person, or do you prefer to hear more than one perspective? In a controversial situation, is it better to have one viewpoint or many? Or put another way, when you're reading an article about a court case in the newspaper, is it satisfactory for there to be only one quote?
Your answers in all these cases (in case you weren't sure) should be on the side of multiple viewpoints. It's never better to have just one source for news. Any claim that consolidation will lead to better journalism is a bold-faced lie, or else an amazing delusion.
In the years after radio ownership regulations were relaxed, Clear Channel Communications has amassed more than 1200 radio station under its empire. The previous cap on ownership was 40. That's a 30x expansion. The result has not been an improvement, unless you really want to hear the same news, the same 20 songs and the same set of deejays on every station you listen to. Here's an example of what can happen under such a condition, courtesy of MoveOn.org:
Where were Minot's DJs on January 18th, 2002? Where was the late night station crew? As it turns out, six of the seven local radio stations had recently been purchased by Clear Channel Communications, a radio giant with over 1,200 stations nationwide. Economies of scale dictated that most of the local staff be cut: Minot stations ran more or less on auto pilot, the programming largely dictated from further up the Clear Channel food chain. No one answered the phone because hardly anyone worked at the stations any more; the songs played in Minot were the same as those played on Clear Channel stations across the Midwest.
---MoveOn.org Bulletin, 5/2/03