Friday, June 10, 2011
Howlin' Wolf
[ed. In recognition of Mr. Wolf's birthday today, June 10, 1910...no one like him.]
Born in White Station, Mississippi, near West Point, he was named after Chester A. Arthur, the 21st President of the United States, and was nicknamed Big Foot Chester and Bull Cow in his early years because of his massive size. He explained the origin of the name Howlin’ Wolf thus: “I got that from my grandfather [John Jones].” His Grandfather would often tell him stories about the wolves in that part of the country and warn him that if he misbehaved, the howling wolves would “get him”. According to the documentary film The Howlin’ Wolf Story, Howlin’ Wolf’s parents broke up when he was young. His very religious mother Gertrude threw him out of the house while he was still a child for refusing to work around the farm; he then moved in with his uncle, Will Young, who treated him badly. When he was 13, he ran away and claimed to have walked 85 miles (137 km) barefoot to join his father, where he finally found a happy home within his father’s large family. During the peak of his success, he returned from Chicago to his home town to see his mother again, but was driven to tears when she rebuffed him and refused to take any money he offered her, saying it was from his playing the “Devil’s music”.
In 1930, Howlin’ Wolf met Charley Patton, the most popular bluesman in the Delta at the time. Wolf would listen to Patton play nightly from outside of a nearby juke joint. There he remembered Patton playing “Pony Blues,” “High Water Everywhere,” “A Spoonful Blues,” and “Banty Rooster Blues.” The two became acquainted and soon Patton was teaching him guitar. “The first piece I ever played in my life was … a tune about hook up my pony and saddle up my black mare” (Patton’s “Pony Blues”). Wolf also learned about showmanship from Patton: “When he played his guitar, he would turn it over backwards and forwards, and throw it around over his shoulders, between his legs, throw it up in the sky.” “Chester [Wolf] could perform the guitar tricks he learned from Patton for the rest of his life.” “Chester learned his lessons well and played with Patton often [in small Delta communities].”
Howlin’ Wolf was also inspired by other popular blues performers of the time, including the Mississippi Sheiks, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, Blind Blake, and Tommy Johnson (two of the earliest songs he mastered were Jefferson’s “Match Box Blues” and Leroy Carr’s “How Long, How Long Blues”). Country singer Jimmie Rodgers, who was Wolf’s childhood idol, was also an influence. Wolf tried to emulate Rodgers’ “blue yodel,” but found that his efforts sounded more like a growl or a howl. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” Barry Gifford quoted him as saying in Rolling Stone, “so I turned to howlin’. And it’s done me just fine.” His harmonica playing was modeled after that of Rice Miller (also known as Sonny Boy Williamson II), who had taught him how to play when Howlin Wolf had moved to Parkin, Arkansas, in 1933.
In 1930, Howlin’ Wolf met Charley Patton, the most popular bluesman in the Delta at the time. Wolf would listen to Patton play nightly from outside of a nearby juke joint. There he remembered Patton playing “Pony Blues,” “High Water Everywhere,” “A Spoonful Blues,” and “Banty Rooster Blues.” The two became acquainted and soon Patton was teaching him guitar. “The first piece I ever played in my life was … a tune about hook up my pony and saddle up my black mare” (Patton’s “Pony Blues”). Wolf also learned about showmanship from Patton: “When he played his guitar, he would turn it over backwards and forwards, and throw it around over his shoulders, between his legs, throw it up in the sky.” “Chester [Wolf] could perform the guitar tricks he learned from Patton for the rest of his life.” “Chester learned his lessons well and played with Patton often [in small Delta communities].”
Howlin’ Wolf was also inspired by other popular blues performers of the time, including the Mississippi Sheiks, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, Blind Blake, and Tommy Johnson (two of the earliest songs he mastered were Jefferson’s “Match Box Blues” and Leroy Carr’s “How Long, How Long Blues”). Country singer Jimmie Rodgers, who was Wolf’s childhood idol, was also an influence. Wolf tried to emulate Rodgers’ “blue yodel,” but found that his efforts sounded more like a growl or a howl. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” Barry Gifford quoted him as saying in Rolling Stone, “so I turned to howlin’. And it’s done me just fine.” His harmonica playing was modeled after that of Rice Miller (also known as Sonny Boy Williamson II), who had taught him how to play when Howlin Wolf had moved to Parkin, Arkansas, in 1933.
Holy Cow, I Just Met the President
by Courtney Comstock
On Wednesday, I met President Obama.
I realize I'm supposed to act all cool and hard-bitten about this, as though it was just another day in the office.
But it wasn't.
I was at the Eisenhower Executive Offices (the building is almost next to the White House, where most of the staff works) for a press conference.
I was sitting around a table with a group of reporters and White House aide Heather Zichal, who was briefing us on how the White House is dealing with rising gas prices.
Then the President walked in.
Until that moment, just the press meeting alone had been exciting for me because I'd never been inside the White House. (My boss, Henry Blodget officially got the invite. Lucky for me he was booked and I raised my hand first when he asked the office, "Ok, who wants to go to the White House?").
We weren't expecting to meet the President. We had been given a general idea of who would be at the press conference -- people "like" Tim Geithner and Elizabeth Warren -- but we had no idea who the actual speakers would be. But of course, we were inside the Executive Offices, so anything was possible.
So there I was, happily sitting hearing how Eric Holder is monitoring speculation in oil and gas markets, and then behind me I heard a deep, "Hello, Everybody."
I spun around. President Obama walked past me and took a seat at the table.
First reaction: My jaw dropped. (Literally, there might be a video of it on the White House website soon. Embarrassing.)
Then I came back to earth and remembered where I was and why. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss economic policy, rising gas prices, and the economic recovery. Okay, reality check achieved. Then I told myself: Hold on, you just met the President. This might not happen again in your lifetime. It's okay to be dazzled.
Read more:
On Wednesday, I met President Obama.
I realize I'm supposed to act all cool and hard-bitten about this, as though it was just another day in the office.But it wasn't.
I was at the Eisenhower Executive Offices (the building is almost next to the White House, where most of the staff works) for a press conference.
I was sitting around a table with a group of reporters and White House aide Heather Zichal, who was briefing us on how the White House is dealing with rising gas prices.
Then the President walked in.
Until that moment, just the press meeting alone had been exciting for me because I'd never been inside the White House. (My boss, Henry Blodget officially got the invite. Lucky for me he was booked and I raised my hand first when he asked the office, "Ok, who wants to go to the White House?").
We weren't expecting to meet the President. We had been given a general idea of who would be at the press conference -- people "like" Tim Geithner and Elizabeth Warren -- but we had no idea who the actual speakers would be. But of course, we were inside the Executive Offices, so anything was possible.
So there I was, happily sitting hearing how Eric Holder is monitoring speculation in oil and gas markets, and then behind me I heard a deep, "Hello, Everybody."
I spun around. President Obama walked past me and took a seat at the table.
First reaction: My jaw dropped. (Literally, there might be a video of it on the White House website soon. Embarrassing.)
Then I came back to earth and remembered where I was and why. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss economic policy, rising gas prices, and the economic recovery. Okay, reality check achieved. Then I told myself: Hold on, you just met the President. This might not happen again in your lifetime. It's okay to be dazzled.
Read more:
The Accidental Bricoleurs
by Rob Horning
I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals. The 21 posits that age as a fulcrum, tenuously balancing the teenage idea of maturity grounded in the uninhibited freedom of self-presentation against the presumptive regrets of everyone older, who must continually be reminded of when it all began to go wrong for them, the day they turned 22.
Forever 21 began in 1984 as a single store called Fashion 21 in Los Angeles. After expanding locally, it spread to malls beginning in 1989, but it has only truly proliferated in the last decade. It now has 477 stores in fifteen countries, and projected revenue of more than $2.3 billion in 2010. The worldwide success of Forever 21 and the other even more prominent fast-fashion outlets, like H&M (2,200 stores in thirty-eight countries), Uniqlo (760 stores in six countries), and Zara (more than 4,900 stores in seventy-seven countries) epitomize how the protocols of new capitalism—flexibility, globalization, technology-enabled logistical micromanaging, consumer co-creation—have reshaped the retail world and with it the material culture of consumer societies.
Though retailers have long employed trend spotters to try to capitalize on bottom-up innovation, fast-fashion companies have organized their business models around the principle, relying on logistics and data capture to respond rapidly to consumer behavior. With small-batch production runs and a global labor market to exploit, fast fashion accelerates the half-life of trends and ruthlessly turns over inventory, pushing the pace of fashion to a forced march. Fast fashion’s accelerated rate—and its unscrupulousness about copying branded designs—means that luxury houses and name designers, which once dictated fashion seasonally, now must increasingly adapt to the ramifications of fast fashion’s trial-and-error approach.
Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager to condemn contemporary capitalism, as the companies almost systematically heighten some of its current contradictions: the exhaustion of innovative possibilities, the limits of the legal system in guaranteeing property rights, the increasing immiseration of the world workforce. Their labor practices are in the long tradition of textile-worker exploitation, offering paltry piecemeal rates to subcontracted suppliers and overlooking how they treat employees. For instance, before the GATT Multifiber Agreement lapsed in 2005, allowing Forever 21 and other garment-makers to outsource much of their manufacturing to Asia, the company’s domestic labor practices generated lawsuits filed on behalf of workers who alleged sweatshop conditions. In a press release, the Garment Worker Center, a California-based workers’ rights group, noted some of the conditions that prompted the suits: withheld wages, long hours without legally mandated breaks, rat and cockroach infestations, and a lack of bathrooms and access to drinking water. The plaintiffs’ lead lawyer claimed that companies like Forever 21 “create and demand these conditions. They squeeze their suppliers and make it necessary for them to get things done as quickly and cheaply as possible, no matter what the cost to the workers.”
But why would the companies create these conditions? What logic drives the imperative to accelerate, regardless of the toll on workers? The all-purpose excuse for sweatshop practices once was the overriding need to offer bargain prices to Western consumers who have come to regard inexpensive clothes as an entitlement. Fast fashion has added the justification of better responsiveness to consumers’ fickleness. The companies overheat production schedules abroad so that they can constantly provide novelty and variety to customers who have come to expect it, who count on the stores not necessarily to meet their wardrobe needs but to relieve ennui. Shoppers come to witness and partake in the spectacle of pure novelty. On the chaotic retail floor and in the frantic dressing rooms of Forever 21’s stores, amid the disheveled racks and the items abandoned by shoppers distracted by something else, creative destruction ends up being staged as semi-prurient guerrilla theater, in which an endless series of hurried consumer costume changes is the essence of the performance.
Read more:
Forever 21 began in 1984 as a single store called Fashion 21 in Los Angeles. After expanding locally, it spread to malls beginning in 1989, but it has only truly proliferated in the last decade. It now has 477 stores in fifteen countries, and projected revenue of more than $2.3 billion in 2010. The worldwide success of Forever 21 and the other even more prominent fast-fashion outlets, like H&M (2,200 stores in thirty-eight countries), Uniqlo (760 stores in six countries), and Zara (more than 4,900 stores in seventy-seven countries) epitomize how the protocols of new capitalism—flexibility, globalization, technology-enabled logistical micromanaging, consumer co-creation—have reshaped the retail world and with it the material culture of consumer societies.
Though retailers have long employed trend spotters to try to capitalize on bottom-up innovation, fast-fashion companies have organized their business models around the principle, relying on logistics and data capture to respond rapidly to consumer behavior. With small-batch production runs and a global labor market to exploit, fast fashion accelerates the half-life of trends and ruthlessly turns over inventory, pushing the pace of fashion to a forced march. Fast fashion’s accelerated rate—and its unscrupulousness about copying branded designs—means that luxury houses and name designers, which once dictated fashion seasonally, now must increasingly adapt to the ramifications of fast fashion’s trial-and-error approach.
Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager to condemn contemporary capitalism, as the companies almost systematically heighten some of its current contradictions: the exhaustion of innovative possibilities, the limits of the legal system in guaranteeing property rights, the increasing immiseration of the world workforce. Their labor practices are in the long tradition of textile-worker exploitation, offering paltry piecemeal rates to subcontracted suppliers and overlooking how they treat employees. For instance, before the GATT Multifiber Agreement lapsed in 2005, allowing Forever 21 and other garment-makers to outsource much of their manufacturing to Asia, the company’s domestic labor practices generated lawsuits filed on behalf of workers who alleged sweatshop conditions. In a press release, the Garment Worker Center, a California-based workers’ rights group, noted some of the conditions that prompted the suits: withheld wages, long hours without legally mandated breaks, rat and cockroach infestations, and a lack of bathrooms and access to drinking water. The plaintiffs’ lead lawyer claimed that companies like Forever 21 “create and demand these conditions. They squeeze their suppliers and make it necessary for them to get things done as quickly and cheaply as possible, no matter what the cost to the workers.”
But why would the companies create these conditions? What logic drives the imperative to accelerate, regardless of the toll on workers? The all-purpose excuse for sweatshop practices once was the overriding need to offer bargain prices to Western consumers who have come to regard inexpensive clothes as an entitlement. Fast fashion has added the justification of better responsiveness to consumers’ fickleness. The companies overheat production schedules abroad so that they can constantly provide novelty and variety to customers who have come to expect it, who count on the stores not necessarily to meet their wardrobe needs but to relieve ennui. Shoppers come to witness and partake in the spectacle of pure novelty. On the chaotic retail floor and in the frantic dressing rooms of Forever 21’s stores, amid the disheveled racks and the items abandoned by shoppers distracted by something else, creative destruction ends up being staged as semi-prurient guerrilla theater, in which an endless series of hurried consumer costume changes is the essence of the performance.
Read more:
Friday Book Club: Ender's Game
by Thomas M. Wagner
Ender's Game is one of the great ones, a novel of extraordinary power that is among the very best the genre has ever produced. Written at a stage in Orson Scott Card's career when it seemed as if he could genuinely do no wrong, Ender's Game takes a familiar theme from war fiction — war as seen through the eyes of a child, as in Ballard's Empire of the Sun — and reframes it by making the child the war's central figure. It is a tale defined by a sense of both tragic inevitability and cold irony. It is not merely about the loss of innocence, as so many stories are with children at their center. It is about innocence systematically deceived and purposefully destroyed in the fanatical pursuit of a misguided higher ideal.
Andrew Wiggin, aka Ender, is a six-year-old boy born into a future that has suffered two devastating invasions from an alien hive-mind species commonly called the buggers. Human population controls are now strictly in place, and Ender is the third child born to his family. The International Fleet, whose task it is to prepare for the next bugger invasion, monitors children through devices implanted on their necks, to determine who can be trained from a very young age to be the next generation of soldiers defending Earth from these marauding beasts. The I.F. originally had its sights set on Ender's big brother Peter. But when it became clear Peter was not exactly what they were looking for, the Wiggins were authorized to have Ender, their Third. This is usually a stigma, but Ender shakes it off by excelling in every way.
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Ender's Game is one of the great ones, a novel of extraordinary power that is among the very best the genre has ever produced. Written at a stage in Orson Scott Card's career when it seemed as if he could genuinely do no wrong, Ender's Game takes a familiar theme from war fiction — war as seen through the eyes of a child, as in Ballard's Empire of the Sun — and reframes it by making the child the war's central figure. It is a tale defined by a sense of both tragic inevitability and cold irony. It is not merely about the loss of innocence, as so many stories are with children at their center. It is about innocence systematically deceived and purposefully destroyed in the fanatical pursuit of a misguided higher ideal. Andrew Wiggin, aka Ender, is a six-year-old boy born into a future that has suffered two devastating invasions from an alien hive-mind species commonly called the buggers. Human population controls are now strictly in place, and Ender is the third child born to his family. The International Fleet, whose task it is to prepare for the next bugger invasion, monitors children through devices implanted on their necks, to determine who can be trained from a very young age to be the next generation of soldiers defending Earth from these marauding beasts. The I.F. originally had its sights set on Ender's big brother Peter. But when it became clear Peter was not exactly what they were looking for, the Wiggins were authorized to have Ender, their Third. This is usually a stigma, but Ender shakes it off by excelling in every way.
Read more:
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Man Eats Bear
[ed. I've eaten bear on several occasions and it's actually pretty good (and sometimes awful depending on how it's stored and prepared). Like pork, fear of trichinosis used to require that bear meat be thoroughly cooked - as in, dry as shoe leather. However, improved cooking methods and a better understanding of food safety have made bear, when it's available, a welcome and interesting alternative to other meat dishes. Like moose.]
by Hank Shaw
I finally ate bear last night, and it was good.
For some of you, the fact that bear can be good eating is no great surprise: The hunting and eating of bears has been going on since long before we out-competed the horrific (and thankfully extinct) cave bear for the best places to shelter ourselves from the rigors of the Ice Age. Bear hunting has been part of American life since we arrived in the 17th century, and roast bear was on the menu for more than a few state dinners during our nation's youth.
Bear regularly made its way to market before the sale of wild game was outlawed in the early 1900s, and it retained a place in the American palate right through the late 1950s. One of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, Meta Given's Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking (first written in 1947) includes a section on bear with helpful butchering tips, such as how to remove the scent glands behind the animal's hind legs.
Even more telling is that the 1957 edition of the Gourmet Cookbook includes three recipes for bear. Gourmet magazine never catered to the redneck hunter crowd: Putting bear in their cookbook means it was a legitimate facet of haute cuisine.
So why have I (and, I daresay, many of you) always felt ambivalent about eating bears? Was it watching Grizzly Adams as a kid? Winnie the Pooh? Maybe it was because I clutched a teddy bear every night when I was tucked into bed as a toddler. Hard to say.
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by Hank Shaw
I finally ate bear last night, and it was good.
For some of you, the fact that bear can be good eating is no great surprise: The hunting and eating of bears has been going on since long before we out-competed the horrific (and thankfully extinct) cave bear for the best places to shelter ourselves from the rigors of the Ice Age. Bear hunting has been part of American life since we arrived in the 17th century, and roast bear was on the menu for more than a few state dinners during our nation's youth.
Bear regularly made its way to market before the sale of wild game was outlawed in the early 1900s, and it retained a place in the American palate right through the late 1950s. One of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, Meta Given's Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking (first written in 1947) includes a section on bear with helpful butchering tips, such as how to remove the scent glands behind the animal's hind legs.
Even more telling is that the 1957 edition of the Gourmet Cookbook includes three recipes for bear. Gourmet magazine never catered to the redneck hunter crowd: Putting bear in their cookbook means it was a legitimate facet of haute cuisine.So why have I (and, I daresay, many of you) always felt ambivalent about eating bears? Was it watching Grizzly Adams as a kid? Winnie the Pooh? Maybe it was because I clutched a teddy bear every night when I was tucked into bed as a toddler. Hard to say.
Read more:
Death of the Phone Number
by Nilay Patel I hate phone numbers. They’re a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers. In fact, I can’t think of a single telecom service that is as restrictive as the phone number: email can be accessed from any device, Skype makes apps for nearly every platform, IM works across any number of clients, there are web-based messaging solutions that transcend platforms entirely — the list goes on. We expect modern telecom services to be universal, cheap, and easily-accessible, and those that aren’t tend to be immediate failures. Ask Cisco how Umi went for them sometime.
Yet the phone number remains stubbornly fixed with a single carrier and single device, even as consumers begin to move every other aspect of their lives to the cloud. And the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems: Why can’t I open a desktop app and use my wireless minutes to make VoIP calls? Why can’t I check and respond to my text messages online? Why can’t I pick up any phone from any carrier, enter my phone service information, and be on my way, just as with email or IM or Skype? Why are we still pretending that phone service is at all different from any other type of data? The answer to almost all of these questions is carrier lock-in — your phone number is a set of handcuffs that prevents you from easily jumping ship, and they know it.
Happily, it seems like the industry is beginning to fight back. No platform provider wants to be limited by something as archaic and stupid as the phone number, and Apple, Google, and Microsoft have each taken serious steps towards eliminating phone number as we know it. What’s interesting is that each company has taken a dramatically different approach, with different tradeoffs along the way — let’s take a look.
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Thursday, June 9, 2011
How to Avoid Credit Card Problems Abroad
by Michelle Higgins
Like many Americans who have tried to use their credit cards in Europe, Elliot E. Porter, a historian from San Francisco, has encountered his share of payment headaches. Perhaps the most aggravating occurred a few months ago at Amsterdam Centraal Station, where he learned only after waiting in line to purchase train tickets that none of his credit cards, which include a MasterCard, Visa and American Express, would be accepted. The problem? They rely on magnetic-strip technology rather than embedded microprocessor chips, which are becoming increasingly common outside the United States.
Like many Americans who have tried to use their credit cards in Europe, Elliot E. Porter, a historian from San Francisco, has encountered his share of payment headaches. Perhaps the most aggravating occurred a few months ago at Amsterdam Centraal Station, where he learned only after waiting in line to purchase train tickets that none of his credit cards, which include a MasterCard, Visa and American Express, would be accepted. The problem? They rely on magnetic-strip technology rather than embedded microprocessor chips, which are becoming increasingly common outside the United States.
“This is a big deal when traveling,” said Mr. Porter, who trekked back to his hotel to get cash, which he then had to exchange for local currency before returning to the train station to wait in a long line to pay for his tickets. He encountered similar problems at train stations in Belgium and Britain. “It just got super frustrating,” he said.There may be some good news on the horizon for Americans like Mr. Elliot. A few banks have begun testing cards with the newer chip technology, known as E.M.V. (for Europay, MasterCard and Visa) and are beginning to offer the cards to select customers. Wells Fargo has issued cards with the embedded chips to about 15,000 United States-based clients who travel internationally, in a trial program. JPMorgan Chase is offering the cards to some of its high-net-worth customers this month. Meanwhile, Travelex, a major currency exchange company, began selling a preloaded E.M.V.-enabled debit card last year. Some credit unions have also begun offering credit or debit cards with chips, including the State Employees’ Credit Union of Raleigh, N.C., and the United Nations Federal Credit Union in New York.
It’s about time. Over the last decade, such cards (commonly referred to as chip-and-PIN cards because users punch in a personal identification number instead of signing for the purchase) have been widely adopted in Europe as a means to reduce credit card fraud; the information stored in the magnetic strips used in traditional cards can be stolen fairly easily. E.M.V.-enabled chip cards, requiring a PIN for authentification, are harder to counterfeit and are becoming the standard in other regions, including Canada, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. More than a third of the world’s payments cards (approximately 1.2 billion) are E.M.V. capable, along with roughly two-thirds of cashier terminals (18.7 million), according to EMVCo, the standards body owned by American Express, JCB, MasterCard and Visa.
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Ruling Favors a 10-Inch Citizen of France
[ed. I like hamsters, so this is good news.]
by Steven Erlanger
by Steven Erlanger
France was punished on Thursday for not taking proper care of its hamsters.
The Court of Justice in Luxembourg, the European Union’s highest court, ruled Thursday that France had failed to protect the Great Hamster of Alsace, sometimes known as the European hamster, the last wild hamster species in Western Europe. If France does not adjust its agricultural and urbanization policies sufficiently to protect it, the court said, the government will be subject to fines of as much as $24.6 million.The Great Hamster, which can grow up to 10 inches long, has a brown-and-white face, white paws and a black belly. There are thought to be about 800 left in France, with burrows in Alsace along the Rhine. That is an improvement: the number had dropped to fewer than 200 four years ago, according to figures from the European Commission, which brought the lawsuit in 2009.
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Sloshed: Maybe We Should Be Judging Wines by Their Labels
by Matthew Latkiewicz
And so, a proposal: If labels are so important to our wine-buying choices — and I am saying they are — then we should understand labels just as we understand the other non-label parts of the wine (e.g., the grapes and the regions and stuff).
But while you can go on the Internet and find very detailed wheel-based charts for wine aromas and tastes, there is woefully little label categorization.
Not to worry: I have gone into the field and done some research. I wanted to know whether I could identify the types of labels I liked and which turned me off. I think I have identified seven major wine-label groupings along with several subclasses. I also tasted a bunch of wines according to their labels and have made wildly ill-advised extrapolations about what the label means for your drinking experience. And so, here is the wine label kingdom.
The French
The grand-cestor of all wine labels; the French is very word-heavy and relies on classic fonts most of the time. Owing to French wine laws, this label must contain specific data on where this wine was made, where the grapes were grown, and who made it. This standardization means that most French wine labels look the same and are all equally intimidating.
What to Expect: The words Appellation Bordeaux Contrlôlée Mis En Bouteille a La Propriété should tell you everything you need to know. It's the fancy stuff, and it will taste sort of like dirt, but in a good way.
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Like plenty of normal people, I buy wine mostly based on the label. Sure, price is important — and those little cards with the scores help, too — but, frankly, if I do not like the label, I will not buy the wine, simple as that. You know that wine with the three moose wearing sunglasses? It’s called 3 Blind Moose? Yeah: I hate that label. I will never buy that wine. This is actually reasonable, I think. Unless you have an extensive knowledge of regions and grapes, the wine you choose is simply not going to matter all that much. What’s the worst that can happen? Unless it literally tastes like those sweat socks that wine people insist on using as a flavor comparison, you still end up with a bottle of wine you can drink. And last time I checked, a bottle of wine will get you nicely buzzed with your friends over the course of an evening no matter what you choose. So why not choose based on the label?
And so, a proposal: If labels are so important to our wine-buying choices — and I am saying they are — then we should understand labels just as we understand the other non-label parts of the wine (e.g., the grapes and the regions and stuff).
But while you can go on the Internet and find very detailed wheel-based charts for wine aromas and tastes, there is woefully little label categorization.
Not to worry: I have gone into the field and done some research. I wanted to know whether I could identify the types of labels I liked and which turned me off. I think I have identified seven major wine-label groupings along with several subclasses. I also tasted a bunch of wines according to their labels and have made wildly ill-advised extrapolations about what the label means for your drinking experience. And so, here is the wine label kingdom.
The French
The grand-cestor of all wine labels; the French is very word-heavy and relies on classic fonts most of the time. Owing to French wine laws, this label must contain specific data on where this wine was made, where the grapes were grown, and who made it. This standardization means that most French wine labels look the same and are all equally intimidating.What to Expect: The words Appellation Bordeaux Contrlôlée Mis En Bouteille a La Propriété should tell you everything you need to know. It's the fancy stuff, and it will taste sort of like dirt, but in a good way.
Read more:
Hard Drive
Today's picture is from 1956, and shows an IBM hard drive. This unit would be used to store information, not unlike your memory stick, thumb drive, or camera memory card. The hard drive pictured weighed over 1 ton, and was capable of storing 5 Mb or data. For comparison, it would take over 1,000 of these units to store the information held in a modern thumb drive.
Doomsday Plane
The U.S. Air Force has offered a rare glimpse inside the President's "doomsday" plane recently.The aircraft is said to be able to withstand the ultimate worst-case scenarios, such as nuclear blasts and asteroids.
The $223 million plane is on standby 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and is fitted with radiation and electromagnetic pulse.
The plane is specifically designed to run the government and the military from the air in the event of nuclear war.
The aircraft runs on 165,000 pounds of state of the art electronics and is protected by an electromagnetic pulse shield.
It is capable of flying for days without refueling and can reach speeds up to 620 miles per hour.
The plane also has a five mile long cable that extends out of its back to help gain reception to communicate with anyone on the ground, as well as nuclear submarines.
"[We] drop is down and [it] transmits coded message traffic to U.S. submarines," Captain W. Scott Ryder told ABC News.
"Give us the phone number of anybody, anytime, anyplace, anywhere on earth, we can get a hold of them," Master Sergeant Joe Stuart of the U.S. Air Force added.
The plane weighs 410,000 pounds and utilizes a 112-person crew that sleeps nearby so it can take-off within five minutes of an attack.
"If the command centers that are on the ground in the United States have a failure of some sort, or attack, we immediately get airborne. We're on alert 24/7, 365," Ryder told ABC News. "Constantly there's at least one alert airplane waiting to get airborne."
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Empty Trash. Buy Milk. Make History.
by Gal Beckerman
On the eve of their marriage in 1682, Hans Hürning and Barbara Herrenmann, like all German couples of their time, invited a local official into each of their homes to catalog every single one of their possessions. The resulting list was exhaustive. It included not just their land and livestock, like his 3 hens and 1 beehive, but every article of clothing (his new calfskin trousers, her old black taffeta bonnet), assorted household goods (1 fire-bucket, 1 grain-husking basket, 1 dung-fork with iron tines), and even the wooden items she made while apparently planning her future (1 diaper-chest without ironwork, 1 cradle). It’s something to behold, a total catalog of a human’s belongings captured — as perhaps only the Germans could — in a meticulously organized and scrupulously detailed list.
Three hundred years after Hans and Barbara made their lists, a graduate student named Sheilagh Ogilvie began searching through the archives of central German villages for a dissertation topic. In every town she visited there would inevitably be reams of such lists, and she was shocked to find how pervasive and untouched these household inventories were. They had been produced by the local municipalities at marriage and death from at least the 17th century onwards, and in many cases nobody had looked at them for centuries: The sand used by scribes to blot the ink just after writing would often fall out onto her lap.
At the time, there were simply too many for her to try to research. But three years ago, armed with computing capabilities that did not exist in the 1980s, Ogilvie — now a professor at the University of Cambridge — began an ambitious project to process every one of the thousands of lists from two towns in the Württemberg region, beginning with the year 1602 and up until the late 1800s.
What has emerged so far is not just a glimpse of German life over three centuries, but also confirmation of a theory of Europe’s economic development. The team has already gone through 28,000 handwritten folios, representing 460,000 separate items of property and their monetary values, and by providing this sort of granular detail into what people owned from 1600 to 1900, Ogilvie has been able to track the beginning of consumerism. When did women start buying butter and beer at the market, instead of churning or brewing at home? When does the first nutmeg grater or coffee cup appear, indicating the arrival of exotic goods? Or for that matter, when do villagers start wearing an imported cotton fabric like calico? These small indicators lend support to a new understanding of the period before the Industrial Revolution, when historians like Ogilvie posit that there was an “Industrious Revolution,” increased consumption of luxury items that led to a desire for more income, changing people’s working habits and spurring the creation of faster, more efficient production models.
A household list might seem a fairly modest starting point upon which to build a whole theory of economic development. But in fact these types of lists are becoming increasingly important to historians — documents produced not as a message to posterity, like a memoir or diplomatic record, but as a simple snapshot of everyday life. Taken as a group, lists offer a rare window into the building blocks of society, economy, and culture — one that is becoming only more valuable as historians gain the processing power to make sense of them.
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On the eve of their marriage in 1682, Hans Hürning and Barbara Herrenmann, like all German couples of their time, invited a local official into each of their homes to catalog every single one of their possessions. The resulting list was exhaustive. It included not just their land and livestock, like his 3 hens and 1 beehive, but every article of clothing (his new calfskin trousers, her old black taffeta bonnet), assorted household goods (1 fire-bucket, 1 grain-husking basket, 1 dung-fork with iron tines), and even the wooden items she made while apparently planning her future (1 diaper-chest without ironwork, 1 cradle). It’s something to behold, a total catalog of a human’s belongings captured — as perhaps only the Germans could — in a meticulously organized and scrupulously detailed list.
Three hundred years after Hans and Barbara made their lists, a graduate student named Sheilagh Ogilvie began searching through the archives of central German villages for a dissertation topic. In every town she visited there would inevitably be reams of such lists, and she was shocked to find how pervasive and untouched these household inventories were. They had been produced by the local municipalities at marriage and death from at least the 17th century onwards, and in many cases nobody had looked at them for centuries: The sand used by scribes to blot the ink just after writing would often fall out onto her lap.At the time, there were simply too many for her to try to research. But three years ago, armed with computing capabilities that did not exist in the 1980s, Ogilvie — now a professor at the University of Cambridge — began an ambitious project to process every one of the thousands of lists from two towns in the Württemberg region, beginning with the year 1602 and up until the late 1800s.
What has emerged so far is not just a glimpse of German life over three centuries, but also confirmation of a theory of Europe’s economic development. The team has already gone through 28,000 handwritten folios, representing 460,000 separate items of property and their monetary values, and by providing this sort of granular detail into what people owned from 1600 to 1900, Ogilvie has been able to track the beginning of consumerism. When did women start buying butter and beer at the market, instead of churning or brewing at home? When does the first nutmeg grater or coffee cup appear, indicating the arrival of exotic goods? Or for that matter, when do villagers start wearing an imported cotton fabric like calico? These small indicators lend support to a new understanding of the period before the Industrial Revolution, when historians like Ogilvie posit that there was an “Industrious Revolution,” increased consumption of luxury items that led to a desire for more income, changing people’s working habits and spurring the creation of faster, more efficient production models.
A household list might seem a fairly modest starting point upon which to build a whole theory of economic development. But in fact these types of lists are becoming increasingly important to historians — documents produced not as a message to posterity, like a memoir or diplomatic record, but as a simple snapshot of everyday life. Taken as a group, lists offer a rare window into the building blocks of society, economy, and culture — one that is becoming only more valuable as historians gain the processing power to make sense of them.
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Papa Legba
[ed. I'd love to find a clean video version of this song being performed by either Talking Heads or Pop Staples, but alas, there doesn't seem to be one. Rompiendo la monotonia del tiempo = Breaking the monotony of time.]
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Beginners
by Andrew O'Hehir
I totally lost my heart to Mike Mills' "Beginners," and I don't think I want it back. A multi-talented, multimedia dude whose work includes graphic design, music videos, documentaries and now feature films (his first was "Thumbsucker" in 2005), Mills is the kind of person who would be completely irritating if he weren't both so sincere and so authentic, a nearly impossible combination in our calculating age. You might say that the same description applies to "Beginners," which is a sad, sweet, funny and ultimately unforgettable love story about a man and a woman and a father and son, and also ranks among the most affectionate and sensitive portraits of homosexuality ever crafted by a straight person.
If I tell you that "Beginners" is rooted in Mills' own story, and that after Mills' mother died a decade or so ago his father came out to him, found a much younger lover, and spent a few years as a Pride-flag-flying, book-club-joining, socially active Los Angeles gay senior before his own death, that leads you toward one understanding of what kind of movie it is. Christopher Plummer plays the dad, Hal, in a generous and heartbreaking performance that I hope will not be forgotten come Oscar time, and Ewan McGregor plays the autobiographical protagonist, a depressed and lonely graphic designer named Oliver. I have no idea how the public perceives McGregor at this point, and he's certainly not the red-hot leading man he once was. But I can't be alone in thinking he's getting better and better all the time. He seeks out understated roles in mid-size quality films ("I Love You Phillip Morris," "The Ghost Writer," now this), and he has that mysterious Dean-Brando-Pacino ability to take a moment when nothing is officially happening and make it urgent and powerful.
But that description also might make it sound as if "Beginners" were a sweet, slight personal story, with a possibly tedious political agenda, and doesn't convey anything about how subtle and beautifully crafted it is. Drawing on his experience as a designer and his knowledge of film history, Mills has created a complex work of collage and montage, with a mixed-up chronology that breathes naturally and never feels arty or artificial. Indeed, while "Beginners" isn't one-fifth as showy or as labored as Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" -- the standard of comparison for all self-reflective family films at the moment -- it actually considers many of the same questions about mortality and loss and memory and parenthood, and employs a similar narrative strategy (minus the dinosaurs and the direct address to supernatural entities). Mills' direction and Kaspar Tuxen's natural-light camerawork feel lo-fi and naturalistic, but from its first moments "Beginners" is an ingenious construction that tells several stories at once.
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I totally lost my heart to Mike Mills' "Beginners," and I don't think I want it back. A multi-talented, multimedia dude whose work includes graphic design, music videos, documentaries and now feature films (his first was "Thumbsucker" in 2005), Mills is the kind of person who would be completely irritating if he weren't both so sincere and so authentic, a nearly impossible combination in our calculating age. You might say that the same description applies to "Beginners," which is a sad, sweet, funny and ultimately unforgettable love story about a man and a woman and a father and son, and also ranks among the most affectionate and sensitive portraits of homosexuality ever crafted by a straight person.
If I tell you that "Beginners" is rooted in Mills' own story, and that after Mills' mother died a decade or so ago his father came out to him, found a much younger lover, and spent a few years as a Pride-flag-flying, book-club-joining, socially active Los Angeles gay senior before his own death, that leads you toward one understanding of what kind of movie it is. Christopher Plummer plays the dad, Hal, in a generous and heartbreaking performance that I hope will not be forgotten come Oscar time, and Ewan McGregor plays the autobiographical protagonist, a depressed and lonely graphic designer named Oliver. I have no idea how the public perceives McGregor at this point, and he's certainly not the red-hot leading man he once was. But I can't be alone in thinking he's getting better and better all the time. He seeks out understated roles in mid-size quality films ("I Love You Phillip Morris," "The Ghost Writer," now this), and he has that mysterious Dean-Brando-Pacino ability to take a moment when nothing is officially happening and make it urgent and powerful. But that description also might make it sound as if "Beginners" were a sweet, slight personal story, with a possibly tedious political agenda, and doesn't convey anything about how subtle and beautifully crafted it is. Drawing on his experience as a designer and his knowledge of film history, Mills has created a complex work of collage and montage, with a mixed-up chronology that breathes naturally and never feels arty or artificial. Indeed, while "Beginners" isn't one-fifth as showy or as labored as Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" -- the standard of comparison for all self-reflective family films at the moment -- it actually considers many of the same questions about mortality and loss and memory and parenthood, and employs a similar narrative strategy (minus the dinosaurs and the direct address to supernatural entities). Mills' direction and Kaspar Tuxen's natural-light camerawork feel lo-fi and naturalistic, but from its first moments "Beginners" is an ingenious construction that tells several stories at once.
Read more:
image credit:
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