Amy Stock
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Dire Straits

Lyrics

well this is my back yard - my back gate

I hate to start my parties late
here's the party cart - ain't that great?
that ain't the best part honey - just wait
that a genuine weathervane - it moves with the breeze
portable hammok baby - who needs trees
it's casual entertaining - we aim to please
at my parties

check out the shingles - it's brand new
excuse me while I mingle - hi, how are you
hey everybody - let me give you a toast
this one's for me - the host with the most

it's getting a trifle colder - step inside my home
that's a brass toilet tissue holder with its own telephone
that's a musical doorbell - it don't ring, I ain't kiddin'
it plays america the beautiful and tie a yellow ribbon

boy, this punch is a trip - it's o.k. in my book
here, take a sip - maybe a little heavy on the fruit
ah, here comes the dip - you may kiss the cook
let me show you honey - it's easy - look
you take a fork and spike 'em - say, did you try these?
so glad you like 'em - the secret's in the cheese
it's casual entertaining - we aim to please
at my parties

now don't talk to me about the polar bear
don't talk to me about the ozone layer
ain't much of anything these days, even the air
they're running out of rhinos - what do I care?
let's hear it for the dolphin - let's hear it for the trees
ain't running out of nothing in my deep freeze
it's casual entertaining - we aim to please
at my parties

Richard Diebenkorn

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Delectable: The Only Wine App Worth a Damn

Ever since the iPhone was first released, I've been trying apps that are aimed at wine lovers. For the relatively niche market that wine represents, there have been a surprising number of apps trying to address it. There are maps, buying guides, ratings databases, food and wine pairing, cellar management, e-commerce, wine tasting tools, regional guidebooks, and social networks.

It sounds ridiculous for me to claim that I've tried every single wine app that is out there on the market, and it's probably not true, but let me tell you, I've tried most of them. And they're all crap.

Ninety-eight percent of them either don't offer to do anything truly useful for wine lovers, or, if they do offer to do something useful, they actually don't deliver on their promise. For instance what good is a winery tasting room guide and map of Napa that doesn't have the first five wineries that I search for in their database? How helpful is an app that promises to identify bottles that you take a photo of, but can't seem to get the identification right two out of five times?

The other two percent of wine apps on the market might -- and it is impossible to put too much emphasis on that word 'might' -- offer some value, but any hope of doing so is immediately destroyed by completely awful design and usability. Yes, your app might actually have some interesting advice to give about pairing wine and food, but when it takes me five minutes to drill down through a horribly designed menu-tree of foodstuffs to find the thing that I'm looking to cook, no matter how good your content is, I hate your app before I get to it.

In short, my professional opinion (and it is worth reminding you that by day I run an interactive design agency that, among other things, designs iPhone applications) is that there is one, and only one wine app that I've ever seen that is worth using, and it is called Delectable. Credit given where credit is due, I hadn't heard about it until Jon Bonné of the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned it to me last year, and he introduced it with much the same sentiment I am sharing right now.

But let me explain why, and how, Delectable has managed to pass the ultimate test that any wine app must face: "Will I actually use this thing regularly?"

by Alder, Vinography |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Everybody Knows You’re a Dog

[ed. Evercookie = malware]

Remember 1993? The World Wide Web had already been invented and nobody knew about it. The NCSA Mosaic browser had just appeared in a limited alpha release, but the text-based Gopher service was the closest thing most people had to an interactive user interface to dive into information on the Internet. The commercial use of the Net was still extremely limited in America, as the National Science Foundation’s NSFNet backbone ostensibly prohibited anything but academic use. In other countries, the Internet existed barely, if at all.

Into that void, New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner dropped what is now the most popular and well-known panel ever produced for the magazine: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

In 1993, the Internet was still a great mystery to most people, if they’d even heard of it. America Online (AOL) was the way most people got “online,” and email was the primary use of the Internet — and for people who weren’t connected to an academic institution or using one of the early Internet service providers (ISPs), this happened via gateways from AOL and other walled gardens.

Steiner’s single panel manages to convey the Internet’s newness and the personal purpose to which most people then put it, as well as its fundamental anonymity. The tools to track someone down or even demand a “real” name were nonexistent. One could be a dog (cats came later), and no one would be able to tell the difference. It was a time that now seems remarkably innocent. (...)

When the “dog” cartoon first appeared, pseudonymity on the Internet was a given, and anonymity wasn’t difficult. With the onset of commercial uses of the network and the appearance of widely available graphical Web browsers later in 1993, general anonymity became even easier because one could pay an ISP for access, but the ISP didn’t give two figs what you did online — nor, in those days, could it possibly have had the routers or storage to track behavior if it had wanted to.

One could post comments all over with little or no connection to one’s identity or location. The Web is inherently stateless — there’s no idea of a continuous session built in — which made it hard in its early days to allow for the association of a browser with an identity. The later addition of Web cookies allowed servers to push a unique code and other information to browsers, which browsers would send back with each request. This strings connections like pearls on a necklace and allows continuity, which allows an account and a login.

Such tracking doesn’t necessarily destroy anonymity, but it does reduce it. When a Web site or outside authority has only an IP address and other browser information by which to identify a user uniquely, the task becomes harder, as many networks share a single numeric address on the public-facing Internet and use private addresses internally. And the public addresses can change over time.

Marketers, of course, want to erase anonymity and even pseudonymity, because the less knowable an individual is, the less value that person has to advertisers. The more accurately they track you, the more lucrative it is to sell ads that cater to you or shop your data to other parties that combine online details with real-world purchasing behavior and credit records.

Over the years, Adobe Flash-based cookies and other breadcrumbs that allow tracking over many sites (or that bypass users’ ability to defeat such tracking) have been baked into plug-ins and browsers, often as unintentional byproducts. The “evercookie” proof-of-concept revealed that it was nearly impossible to kill all the stateful tracking elements for a site that wanted to keep you in its sights.

by Glenn Fleishman, Boing Boing | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia

Je Regrette: Why Regret is Essential to the Good Life

There’s a particular disdain for regret in US culture. It’s regarded as self-indulgent and irrational — a ‘useless’ feeling. We prefer utilitarian emotions, those we can use as vehicles for transformation, and closure. ‘Dwelling’, we tend to agree, gets you nowhere. It just leads you around in circles.

Regret is so counter to the pioneer spirit — with its belief in blinkered perseverance, and dogged forward motion — it’s practically un-American. In the US, you keep your squint firmly planted on the horizon and put one foot in front of the other. There’s something suspiciously female, possibly French, about any morbid interiority.

Best, then, to treat the past like an overflowing closet: just shut the door and walk away. ‘What’s done is done,’ we say. ‘It is what it is.’ ‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk.’ (...)

In a culture that believes winning is everything, that sees success as a totalising, absolute system, happiness and even basic worth are determined by winning. It’s not surprising, then, that people feel they need to deny regret — deny failure — in order to stay in the game. Though we each have a personal framework for looking at regret, Landman argues, the culture privileges a pragmatic, rationalist attitude toward regret that doesn’t allow for emotion or counterfactual ideation, and then combines with it a heroic framework which equates anything that lands short of the platonic ideal with failure. In such an environment, the denial of failure takes on magical powers. It becomes inoculation against failure itself. To express regret is nothing short of dangerous. It threatens to collapse the whole system.

In starting to lay out the possible uses of regret, Landman quotes William Faulkner. ‘The past,’ he wrote in 1950, ‘is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Great novels, Landman points out, are often about regret: about the life-changing consequences of a single bad decision (say, marrying the wrong person, not marrying the right one, or having let love pass you by altogether) over a long period of time. Sigmund Freud believed that thoughts, feelings, wishes, etc, are never entirely eradicated, but if repressed ‘[ramify] like a fungus in the dark and [take] on extreme forms of expression’. The denial of regret, in other words, will not block the fall of the dominoes. It will just allow you to close your eyes and clap your hands over your ears as they fall, down to the very last one.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that people’s greatest regrets revolve around education, work, and marriage, because the decisions we make around these issues have long-term, ever-expanding repercussions. The point of regret is not to try to change the past, but to shed light on the present. This is traditionally the realm of the humanities. What novels tell us is that regret is instructive. And the first thing regret tells us (much like its physical counterpart — pain) is that something in the present is wrong.

by Carina Chocano, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Anna Pogossova/Gallery Stock

Bruce Cockburn

Lady in Black by * cikolatali-waffle
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Vapor Trail

The fall day is cloudless, calm and temperate. I’ve just finished a great meal on the patio of a popular café not far from the Plaza. An espresso is en route, and now, there’s only one thing left to do to complete the perfection of my dining experience: scratch a decades-old nicotine itch.

I take a familiar puff, a deep inhale, and there’s a warm collision at the back of my throat. I exhale: a dense but quickly dissipating cloud. It gets better as I repeat the ritual and pair it with the just-delivered caffeine concentrate.

But suddenly I’m aware that this whole thing might not be as satisfying for my waiter and the restaurant’s other patrons as it is for me. No one says a word. The looks I’m catching, though, as I billow out another nebula, range from disgust to curiosity.

That’s not smoke coming out of my mouth; it’s water-vapor. Nothing’s on fire. There’s been no combustion. Still, confusion reigns. So I find a quiet patch of shaded grass beyond the confines of the patio to enjoy what’s left of the afternoon–and my electronic cigarette.

The diners and staff at the restaurant are far from alone in their befuddlement, curiosity and inherent distrust about “e-cigarettes.” They have been around a decade but are only recently becoming ubiquitous in urban society. Studies and surveys show that millions of people are using e-cigarettes, and the number is steadily climbing. Financial analysts predict that, by year’s end, e-cigarettes will comprise an industry that has doubled in size since 2012 to become worth more than a billion dollars. Some even say the rise of the e-cig has contributed to a slight decline in cigarette sales.

The market’s explosive growth, its lack of regulation, an increase in use among children, pressing medical questions about health effects and the products’ association with one of America’s true social pariahs has placed e-cigarettes at the center of a vigorous national public health debate. That debate has found footholds at the state and local levels, too.

Essentially, e-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that heat a solution of vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol and artificial flavoring, converting the mixture into vapor the user inhales. The act has birthed a new verb into the parlance: vaping. The overwhelming majority of vapers, me included, buy e-cig juice that’s infused with the highly addictive drug nicotine at a level chosen by the purchaser.

by Jeff Proctor, SF Reporter |  Read more:

Image: Sean Gallup/Getty Images via: 

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Greg Marquez - Winter Alley, 2013
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Peter Blake, The Meeting, 1981.
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Claude Joseph Vernet, The Shipwreck (1772)
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The Space Needle, Seattle, WA
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The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle

In the months leading up to the hunt, Dylan Mayer trained twice a week in his parents’ swimming pool, asking friends to attack him, splay their arms and grab him, drag him to the surface and shove him below it, pull off his mask, snatch his regulator, time his recovery. By last Halloween, he was ready, and as the light began to fade that afternoon, the broad-shouldered 19-year-old jumped into a red Ford pickup truck with his buddy and drove some 40 minutes from Maple Valley, Wash., to West Seattle. They arrived at Alki Beach around 4 p.m., put on their wet suits and ambled into Cove 2. Then they slipped into Elliott Bay, the Space Needle punctuating the city line in the distance like an inverted exclamation point.

Under the dark water, the teenagers looked around with the help of a diving light. At 45 feet, they passed a sunken ship, the Honey Bear, and at 85 feet, beneath the buoy line, they saw further evidence of the former marina — steel beams, pilings and sunken watercrafts. Marine life thrived in this haven of junk, and for this reason, Cove 2 was a popular dive site. According to the permit he had just purchased at Walmart, Mayer was allowed to catch this sea life and cook it, which is exactly what he set out to do. He wasn’t much of a chef, but he had experience foraging for his dinner. Mayer had attended a high school known for its Future Farmers of America program; he also knew how to slaughter cows and castrate bulls. Now he was going to community college, where he was asked to draw something from nature. He figured that he might as well eat it too. And as he scanned the bay, he could already imagine searing the marine morsels on high heat and popping them, rare and unctuous, into his mouth. He soon spotted his prey. “That’s a big [expletive] octopus,” he scribbled on his underwater slate.

The giant Pacific octopus was curled inside a rock piling, both its color and texture altered by camouflage. Mayer judged it to be his size, about six feet, and wondered if he could take it on alone. He lunged at the octopus, grabbing one of its eight arms. It slipped slimily between his fingers, its suckers feeling and tasting his hand. He reached for it again, and again it retreated. Able to squeeze its body through a space as small as a lemon, the octopus was unlikely to succumb to his grip. He poked it with his finger and watched it turn brighter shades of red, until finally, it sprang forward and revealed itself to be a nine-foot wheel charging through the water.

The octopus grabbed Mayer where it could, encircling his thigh, spiraling his torso, its some 1,600 suckers — varying in size from a peppercorn to a pepper mill — latching onto his wet suit and face. It pulled Mayer’s regulator out of his mouth. His adrenaline rising, he punched the creature, and began a wrestling match that would last 25 minutes.

Eventually, he managed to pull the animal to the surface, where a number of divers couldn’t help noticing a teenager punching an 80-pound octopus. As they approached, Mayer freaked out. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, sucker marks ringing his face. “Maybe we shouldn’t have done this.” But it was too late. He dragged his kill ashore, where a few bystanders, in disbelief, took his picture and threatened to report him. Lugging the octopus to the red truck, Mayer cited his permit. But the divers kept taking pictures. That night, as Mayer butchered the octopus for dinner, they posted the photos online.

In a city finely attuned to both the ethics of food sourcing and poster-worthy animal causes (the spotted owl, the killer whale and marbled murrelet among them), Mayer’s exploits became an instant cause célèbre. On Nov. 1 and 2, Seattle’s competing news stations reported the octopus hunt. The next day, The Seattle Times ran the story on the front page. On Web forums, Seattleites tracked down the teenager’s name and address through the clues in the photos: the truck’s license plate, the high school named on Mayer’s sweatshirt and the inspection sticker affixed to his tank. “I hope this sick [expletive] gets tangled in a gill net next time he dives and thus removes a potential budding sociopath before it graduates from invertebrates to mammals,” read one typical comment, which received 52 “thumbs-ups.” Around the same time, Scott Lundy, one of the men who had confronted Mayer in Cove 2, issued a “Save the G.P.O.” petition to ban octopus harvesting from the beach and examine the practice statewide. By the next day, he had collected 1,105 signatures.

Across Elliott Bay, at the same time, a much subtler food sourcer was at work. Chef Matthew Dillon was building his highly anticipated new restaurant, Bar Sajor (pronounced “sigh-your”) in Pioneer Square. After the success of his first, Sitka & Spruce, Dillon, 39, earned an unsought reputation as the consummate locavore in a city filled with them. He cultivated rare herbs and foraged for mushrooms in the foothills of the Cascades; whereas many Brooklyn restaurants are only now coming around to wood sorrel and perilla, Dillon has been cooking with them since 1995. At Bar Sajor, there would be a rotisserie and a wood-fire oven, but no gas range; Dillon would make his own yogurt and vinegars, ferment his own vegetables and change his menu every day depending on what looked fresh and interesting — including, as it happened, giant Pacific octopus.

So as the “Save the G.P.O.” campaign raged this spring, the city raved about Dillon’s octopus salad. In The Stranger, the influential alt-weekly magazine, Bethany Jean Clement described it as having “a restrained oceangoing flavor, a bouncy but tender texture — sometimes a little chewy but never rubbery,” plated that day with “a thick walnut sauce, dill for freshness, and an oozing egg yolk for vivid creaminess and color.” The Seattle Times also heaped praise. “Bar Sajor Is Matt Dillon’s Finest Yet,” ran one Friday headline, just a week after another: “New Hunting Rules Likely for Puget Sound Octopus.” Whenever the salad appeared on the menu, it sold out. Inevitably this posed a most uncomfortable question for Seattle’s food community: should it save the giant Pacific octopus or just eat it?

by Marnie Hanel, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Mark Saiget and Kyle Johnson

A Piece of the Action

Imagine having acquired a financial interest in LeBron James, Peyton Manning or Roger Federer early in their careers.

A new company wants to make this fantasy a reality for the next generation of superstars.

On Thursday, Fantex Holdings will announce the opening of a marketplace for investors to buy and sell interests in professional athletes. The start-up, backed by prominent executives from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the sports world, plans to create stocks tied to the value and performance of an athlete’s brand.

It will have its debut with an initial public offering for a minority stake in Arian Foster, the Pro Bowl running back of the Houston Texans. Buying shares in the deal will give investors an interest in a stock linked to Mr. Foster’s future economic success, which includes the value of his playing contracts, endorsements and appearance fees.

Buck French, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said Fantex hoped to sign additional players in football and other sports, as well as expand into other talent areas like pop singers and Hollywood actors.

“Fantex is bringing sports and business together in a way never previously thought possible,” Mr. French said. “We have built a powerful platform to help build the brands of athletes and celebrities.” (...)

Nothing about Fantex is make believe. As of Thursday, investors can register with the company, finance their accounts with cash and place orders for shares in the Foster I.P.O. The offering plans to sell about $10.5 million worth of stock, representing a 20 percent interest in Mr. Foster’s future brand income. Mr. Foster will pocket $10 million; the balance will cover the costs of the deal.

Unlike many esoteric Wall Street investments that are available only to so-called high-net-worth individuals, the Fantex offering is available to United States residents 18 years and older, with a minimum investment of $50. There are some restrictions. For instance, investors with annual incomes of $50,000 to $100,000 may only invest up to $7,500 in the offering. Individual state securities laws might also place further limits and who can invest, Mr. French said.

Fantex will market the Foster I.P.O. in the coming weeks, offering 1.06 million shares at $10 a share. No one can own more than 1 percent of the offering, ensuring that it is available to a wide number of investors. If demand is less than the number of shares being offered, Fantex may cancel the deal.

by Peter Lattman and Steve Eder, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Eric Gay/Associated Press

Willy Ronis, Le petit parisien, 1952.
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Deer

Not asking for much kept me safe. There was nothing else to recommend the habit, just that. Books, music, the heat and smell of a fire in the wood stove—those were company and comfort. I didn’t go looking for more or expect it to come for me. I was close to 40 when Carrie held out her hand and we began our slow dance. She gave me time to feel the rhythm and follow it, to be grateful for a gift.

To expect another would have been greed, but I never said so to her.

When Nathan came, I loved him in the same whole-hearted, thankful way I loved his mother, perhaps because there was no one before her and there was no other way I knew. When he was asleep on my shoulder and it felt right and natural to have him there, I put away my suspicion that Carrie and I tempted our luck. I forgot for a while that happiness is fragile, that life is made of glass. Maybe I chose to forget those things or needed a rest from knowing them. Once I was reminded, I never forgot again.

Sorrow was an old acquaintance by the day I lingered at the edge of a cemetery and watched strangers put my wife in the ground and refill the rest of an ugly hole with nothing better than the earth that came from it. When they took all the flowers from people who loved her and laid them on the dirt, what I saw from a distance was a quilt Carrie sewed by hand and filled with down and spread over a bed that we were meant to share.

Nathan was there too, far enough away during the service that everyone knew not to talk to him, not even if—for once—they wanted to be kind. He didn’t want talking any more than I did. I did the bare minimum I was supposed to and told Carrie’s sister I wouldn’t be returning to my own house to eat and drink and mill around in little groups of people, as uncomfortable to be there as I would have been. I’ve never cared to see people or honor an occasion that way and I wasn’t going to do it without Carrie or even because of her.

When the gravediggers climbed back into their truck and drove away, Nathan and I were left to stare at one another across rows of polished granite, gray or pink, until he turned and disappeared behind a tall hedge and I heard the engine of his old pickup turn over. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t see him again for days.

by James Pouilliard, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Jacob Dimiter

Pearl Jam

Tierney Gearon
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