Category: Consuming

Malcom Gladwell’s article on SUVs, published in the New Yorker this winter, is now online. Brilliant, and required reading for anyone thinking of buying a “light truck.”

Home-ownership. What a dream: buy a broken-down wreck for a few hundred grand, then match the purchase price in repairs, match it again in sweat and heartbreak, and you’ve got a beautiful building, one you love and know, one that is you. You have roots. Roots.

Also, off-street parking. Mmmm, off-street.

The Phoneix, not the world’s greatest alt-weekly, has really good coverage of the marriage debate around these parts. My favorite is the woman who had a commitment ceremony and says weddings are a drag when you have two bridezillas. That and the poster “My Pedophile Priest Supports Traditional Marriage.” Happily, we’re now describing the debate in terms that take control of the debate: pro-marriage (people who are in favor of love, kindness, and all that is good) and anti-marriage (homophobic benighted forces of darkness who can’t stand the idea of true love or goodness).

I sometimes wonder how it is that people who disagree with me can exist. I mean, sure, there’s people with whom I have honest and reasonable disagreements about, say, Ben Stiller, or trade policy, or religion or what have you. But there are some basic cultural issues that I feel that it’s important to share, like plurality and the separation of church and state. I’m willing to imagine that people think homosexuality is a disgusting sin, but I’m not willing to think that reasonable human beings can’t understand that their opposition to it is a religious opposition.

And then it occurs to me that there are people with a radically different worldview: Middle America. Which is why I have to read blogs like Koolgrrrl’s Guide to Life. She keeps me in touch with the mass of humanity that isn’t in major coastal cities:

We were supposed to see Mystic River, but that was before I realized that Julia Roberts is NOT in this version! Somehow I got it confused with Mystic Pizza. I can be a dimwit sometimes–in fact, that’s the hub’s “pet name” for me. Dimwitted Deb. Or Double-D’s.

I’m still trying to decide if she’s a Jean Teasdale-style joke or not. I mean, it’s not like I’m such an incredible snob that I would be unable to imagine someone saying “what a true artist” about Celine Dion. No, in fact, I am that big a snob, and it was her admiration of Celine Dion that really made me think it’s an elaborate joke.

Negatives! We’ve had very good luck so far, but we have managed to find two wines we actually didn’t like:
Roccaducale Rosso di Montefalco 1999: Big, sort of, but mostly dusty and with a weird aftertaste. Not very good. Copertino something or other, thin and acidy and just not very good at all.

Tonight however, we’re drinking something completely marvellous and completely random: Moscato del Solo, from Bonny Doon’s Italian-style label, Ca del Solo. Hey, it’s Saturday night, instead of going out let’s open a sparkling dessert wine. This would be great for a Sunday breakfast– it’s relatively low in alcohol and bubbles, and heavy on fruit and sugar. My father would probably think it’s too sweet, but I love it.

I’ve been hoping Slate’s Ad Report Card feature would take on the IBM Linux ad with the creepy kid, and sure enough, they did.

I spoke with some IBM marketing people about the ad last week at LinuxWorld Expo and they said “the kid is supposed to be a child prodigy, like Linux.” I think the ad is a little better than the first series of cryptic ads– peace, love, penguin– in that it gives you some sort of idea what they’re talking about. People at first didn’t even know the ads were for Linux! Of course those ads were aimed at building street cred with techies, so I guess that makes sense. These ads are aimed at building credibility and image, too– there’s no call to action, like with other ads (“Ask your doctor about the Meat Lover’s Pizza, call 1-900-MEATY now!”).

But really, the ones where Linux was a basketball player against the Bad Guys team (Virus, etc.) were clearer and gave you more of a feeling about what the heck they were talking about. They obviously have some sort of strategy there, and I’m certainly glad to see Linux being promoted so well, and given such a cool face, even if, as the review notes, there’s not a lot of substance behind the ad, and it’s mostly aimed at a very small group of people, leaving the rest of us to feel that we’re kinda out of the loop. Maybe that’s it– we all need to figure out what this is, so we can be cool like that creepy-ass kid who talks to celebrities.

Craigie St. Bistrot gets 9.3 out of 10 from Citysearch and I think it deserves it. Despite the quality and price tag indicating a formal special-occasion restaurant, the place has a friendly style. The menu focuses on fresh, seasonal, and local ingredients in a decidedly French presentation and equally French wine list.

The equally well-rated Evoo, however, remains my favorite Boston-area restaurant.

I’m in NYC this week at LinuxWorld Expo. The elevators at my hotel are being reprogrammed and reinstalled, or something, and the upshot is that it takes up to fifteen or twenty minutes to leave the building at peak times. 50 floors, a dozen or so elevators, general insanity.

The tradeshow is what a tradeshow is: sore back, lots of hand-shaking and smiling, dry air, overpriced everything (I thought three bucks for a Coke was bad, but apparently the actual show management prices are worse: for having anything delivered to the show floor– a letter, say, or a laptop– the fees start at $200. This is called “drayage” which is defined as “the use of a dray” or “the fee paid for the use of a dray.” And a dray, as you all know, is a horsecart or similar low cart used for pulling heavy things around, which has largely been replaced by wood pallets and forklifts.)

At the end of the day I begin to wonder if I’m repeating myself. I am, of course, but I can’t remember if I’ve said a particular portion of my spiel to any given customer. After a few hundred times, it gets confusing.

Anyway, after all the polish and shine of the day, I was amused to find Robert Love selling an ironic trucker hat. Oh, sure, trucker hats are ironic appropriation in and of themselves– but this one is a trucker hat’s trucker hat. Brilliant. (See also the Dave Camp fanboy shirt).

I recently tasted two mid-priced sangiovese wines– the 1999 Ca’ Del Solo from Bonny Doon, $15.99 at Mall Discount Liquors, and the 2000 Monte Antico, $9.99 at the same shop.

The Sangiovese (“Jupiter’s Blood”) grape produces a big, deep-red wine– not as purple as a Malbec, but rich in color and similarly rich in flavor. It’s not the most common of Italian wine varieties, but an increasing interest in varietals means that it’s getting up there– it’s not a Chianti, but it’s more well-known than, say, Nebbiolo, and more widely grown outside of Italy– such as in, say, Bonny Doon’s vineyards in California.

The Monte Antico was what I expect a Sangiovese to be: rich, tangy, and delicious. It smells like a big, flavorful wine, and it has plenty of body. The Bonny Doon was a real disappointment: thin-bodied, not enough flavor, too light on the tannins– it was OK, but not really interesting. It improved with air, but not enough to make me want to buy it again, not for fifteen bucks anyway. I’m definitely considering getting a case of the Monte Antico though, especially given that Mall Discount has a 20% case discount through the end of January.

Looks like I’m going to have to buy a suit.

Once again consuming: Holt Uncensored has a piece this week on how Amazon really ought to just pay authors a few cents every time it brokers a used-book transaction. After all, it’s got all that money and technology and there’s no reason not to, right? The author brings up the fact that the British library system apparently pays authors every time their books are checked out of libraries. I’m not sure who exactly pays that money, though, and I’m not sure whether it’s all rights-holders, just the living authors, or maybe British authors only. Anyway, that sounds lovely but try getting that paid for by state taxes in the US.

I agree, as a writer, that it would be nice to get a few cents every time one of my books was resold. But before you suggest that, ask yourself as a book seller what you are selling. When I buy a book, is it mine or not? Am I free to read it and use it in the manner I see fit? What are the implications for the ownership of intellectual property if authors (more accurately, rights-holders, who often aren’t the authors at all) have greater control over resale of their works?

When I buy a DVD, of course, I know that it is a crime to watch it or on an unapproved device such as a foreign DVD player or Linux-based computer, to make a backup copy or skip the copyright warning material. And when I buy an e-book, I know that it may be a crime to have it read aloud to me by software, to print it, or to lend it to a friend. Books, on the other hand, are mine to read. I may be unable to skip the FBI warning and commercials at the beginning of my DVDs, but dammit, I can skip the introduction to “Yellow Dog.” And although I may be prohibited from selling the copy of Windows XP that came with my last computer, at least I can buy a book knowing I’m free to unload it later.

The British library system sounds lovely, but it’s a state-backed system paid for by taxes intended to promote literature. A similar system in the US would probably turn libraries into something like the US commercial radio system: for every song played, the record label pays an “independent” promoter who in turn pays the radio station for playing the song. Small labels don’t have the money for what is essentially payola, so small labels don’t get played. Artists of course get nothing from any of it. Imagine if libraries were paid to promote lending of particular books, to carry some books and not others, and imagine the temptation to do that if you were a typically underfunded library. And what about authors who have died? Should Amazon pay Disney when I sell my child’s outgrown Winnie the Pooh books?

Libraries in the US, whether personal, public, or private, are under no obligation to pay authors for each loan of a book, and Amazon as a merchant is under no obligation to involve the author in the sales of used books. I’m sure it sounds at first like a “nice thing to do” but you’re leaping step into an intellectual property minefield.