Quotulatiousness

October 29, 2010

Why some vintage dates matter more than others

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Environment, France, Randomness, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:36

If you’re not a wine fan, you may wonder why wine snobs pay so much attention to vintage dates. If you drink the occasional bottle of “Raunchy ‘Roo Red” or “Zesty Zebra Shiraz”, the vintage dates matter very little: by the name, you’d guess they’d be from Australia or South Africa, both hot climate wine countries. Vintage dates are much less important for hot climate wines: the variation from year to year is relatively small. As Michael Pinkus points out, however, it matters a great deal for cool climate wine countries:

Many wine drinkers never notice the vintage date on the wine they are drinking — they just blindly go off buying wine. I talk to many people and very few know what year they’re drinking, just the producer. In a wine region like Ontario that’s a odd way to be drinking your wine. We’re a cool climate region after all and if you don’t understand the difference between a good vintage wine a mediocre vintage wine you could be stuck with a lot of 2003s in your cellar for 10 years or more. The key is to know their drink-ability (2003) or conversely, know how long you should be holding onto wines like [these], a few extra years of aging will give these wines time to mature and integrate, drink them too early and you’ll miss out on all the fun.

In a cool climate region (Ontario, Bordeaux, New Zealand) Vintage date means more than in a hot climate region (Australia, Argentina, Chile) — there temps are always beautiful (read: warm and sunny) and vintage variation plays little part in the finished wine; while in a cool climate region harvest is a waiting game and in many years prayer is a grape farmers best friend.

Take 2010 for instance, this year has the likelihood and pedigree to be even better than the much lauded 2007. What makes 2010 better? Glad you asked. While 2007 had lots of heat and little rain (which grapes love), 2010 has been a longer growing season, with lots of heat and rain has come at the “appropriate” times. If you’ll recall our winter was very mild and bud break occured in April, at that time the prayer for farmers was the ‘Psalm of No Frost’. A longer growing season with lots of heat means good grapes — but that does not always apply to all grapes, but that’s really a discussion for another time.

Most determine a good season by how well the red grapes are going to be — in a cool region white grapes grow well year-after-year — but many of the Bordeaux red grapes struggle (Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc). 2007 was a great year for the usual Bordeaux varietals as well as others reds that don’t often ripen fully under the Ontario skies.

October 28, 2010

Clothing designers now in rumble with motorcycle gang

Filed under: Law, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Fight! Fight! Trademark case! Trademark case!

The Hells Angels are apparently going to war with British fashion house Alexander McQueen after accusing the couturiers of infringing on their trademarks.

The California-based motorcycle club, whose fearsome reputation includes the sudden and brutal application of trademark lawyers, believes the dressmakers, and its retailers, have overstepped the mark with a series of clothes and accessories featuring a skull and wings death head design.

Alexander McQueen, whose eponymous founder committed suicide earlier this year, allegedly sold items including a $495 Hells Four Finger Ring and a $1595 Hells Angels Jaquard Box Dress, the Hells Angels charge.

October 27, 2010

Are you ready for the scariest day of the year?

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Yep, I’m talking about Halloween, but not because it’s scary for the kids, it’s because it’s too scary for the parents:

Halloween is the day when America market-tests parental paranoia. If a new fear flies on Halloween, it’s probably going to catch on the rest of the year, too.

Take “stranger danger,” the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the “Bewitched” and “Brady Bunch” costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.

That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger’s Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)

October 24, 2010

How the contents of your closet helped you get through the recession

Filed under: Economics, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

Virginia Postrel reveals how the glut of western “stuff” we’ve been accumulating over the last decade may have helped ease us through the recession:

In today’s sour economy, however, what once seemed like waste is starting to look like wealth: assets to draw on when times get tough (and not just because of all those ads promising top dollar for your gold jewelry). Material abundance, it turns out, produces economic resilience. Even if today’s recession approached Great Depression levels of unemployment, the hardship wouldn’t be as severe, because today’s consumers aren’t living as close to the edge.

Take clothes. In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas, according to Cotton Inc.’s Lifestyle Monitor survey, which includes consumers, age 13 to 70. The typical wardrobe contained, among other garments, 16 T-shirts, 12 casual shirts, seven dress shirts, seven pairs of jeans, five pairs of casual slacks, four pairs of dress pants, and two suits — a clothing cornucopia.

Then the economy crashed. Consumers drew down their inventories instead of replacing clothes that wore out or no longer fit. In the 2009 survey, the average wardrobe had shrunk — to a still-abundant 88 items. We may not be shopping like we used to, but we aren’t exactly going threadbare. Bad news for customer-hungry retailers, and perhaps for economic recovery, is good news for our standard of living.

By contrast, consider a middle-class worker’s wardrobe during the Great Depression. Instead of roughly 90 items, it contained fewer than 15. For the typical white-collar clerk in the San Francisco Bay Area, those garments included three suits, eight shirts (of all types), and one extra pair of pants. A unionized streetcar operator would own a uniform, a suit, six shirts, an extra pair of pants, and a set of overalls. Their wives and children had similarly spare wardrobes. Based on how rarely items were replaced, a 1933 study concluded that this “clothing must have been worn until it was fairly shabby.” Cutting a wardrobe like that by four items — from six shirts to two, for instance — would cause real pain. And these were middle-class wage earners with fairly secure jobs.

October 21, 2010

QotD: Linguistic voids and what they say about that culture

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:45

I thought a bit more about how languages differ on how they assign words to concepts and how this affects the thought processes of people who think in those languages. For example, imagine if some language had only one word that meant both “buy” and “steal”, and you had to express the notion of free markets to them. Yet equally absurd examples abound in English that, despite its huge vocabulary, still uses one word “love” to express how newlyweds love each other, a parent loves a child, a Southerner loves good barbeque and a liberal loves Che Guevara, even though all four are utterly different things. Equally oddly, the verb “play” is used for poker, hopscotch, trumpet and Hamlet: maybe this somehow makes sense for native speakers, but in Finnish all four are different words. Another gap in English that I find ever stranger the more I think about it is how you have to say “extended family” since English does not have a separate word for this hugely important concept (at least I have never heard of it). Such gaps reveal a lot about the speakers who develop the language; for example, recall how the Chinese have one word “crisatunity” to mean both crisis and opportunity, Russians have no word for “freedom” and the French lack the word for an “entrepreneur”.

Ilkka, “A word for everything and everything in a word”, The Fourth Checkraise, 2010-10-21

October 20, 2010

Some combination tools work well … and then there’s this one

Filed under: Humour, Randomness, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:05

Christopher Schwarz gives in to the urge to try out a new tool that combines the rasp and the chisel in one not-so-easy-to-handle package:

Now usually when I see a tool like this I just ignore it. Boneheaded ideas like this usually end up in a mass grave with the bones of dodo birds, passenger pigeons and AMC Pacer automobiles. But a couple weeks ago I stumbled on a set of these tools for sale — new — on Amazon.

These tools must be stopped. So I bought a set of three to take a look. They are as bad as I feared.

The tools are incredibly heavy. The rasp teeth are coarse and not very aggressive. They manage to make more of a farting sound than any scratches in the wood. Of course, it doesn’t help things that you have to use the rasp one-handed — grabbing the chisel tip is ill-advised.

Or is it? The chisel edge is as sharp as Lennie from “Of Mice and Men.” And when you do pound the chisel into a piece of wood (thank you Mongo the Mallet) the tool stops dead after 1″ because the rasp teeth dig into your work.

And the worst thing of all? They are branded as Nicholson — the once-great rasp maker.

But if this tool can succeed in the marketplace for 10 years, what other opportunities are toolmakers missing out on?

October 15, 2010

Elie Mystal on why bullying should not be a crime

Filed under: Law, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

As someone who was bullied in my time, I found Elie Mystal’s story resonated for me. I had no real problem with bullies until I was about 10 or 11, when I didn’t grow as fast as the other kids. I was also non-athletic, addicted to books, and had a funny accent — I was probably a gift to the budding thugs in higher grades at school.

My experience was nowhere near as bad as Elie’s, however:

It needs to stop. No, not the bullying — which is unavoidable when more than one male competes for whatever status/prestige/sex is on offer — but the tragic overreactions to the bullying, and the accompanying rush to the courthouse steps.

I say this not as an alpha-male with a caviler attitude towards the feelings of others. I say this as a former omega-male who got the crap beat out of me like I stole something from the age of 7 through the point I realized that no girl would ever mate with a guy who couldn’t basically stand up for himself….

I wasn’t always this big or this strong. As a kid, I was a polite, articulate little boy who did well in school. Or “Oreo fa**ot,” as my friends liked to call me. I’ve shared some of my childhood scrapes before — and I still hate Halloween.

My best story (it’s funny now, I think) involves me trying to walk a girl home from school when I was 12. She was walking, I was walking and rolling my bike, and then the bullies spotted us. As they approached, she said, “It’s okay, you can run.” And I did — I hopped on my bike and booked out of there. They were on foot, so I easily put some distance between us. I looked back and flipped the head bully (we’ll call him “Lewis” because his name is Lewis and he’s in jail now so he can’t read this) the finger. But that took my eyes off the road — and the tree branch in front of me. Bad times. I tumbled, they caught up, and then five kids proceeded to twist my flimsy bike around me. They got both wheels around me, and I had to waddle the rest of the way home. I was a latchkey kid, and I couldn’t reach my keys since my arms were effectively pinned to my body and I couldn’t reach my pockets. I had to sit on my stoop for hours (which felt like days), until my parents came home to let me inside (and take me to the bike shop to free me).

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

October 14, 2010

Old stereotypes still thrive in niche ecologies

Filed under: Humour, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

An exchange that wouldn’t have been at all surprising in, say, 1950:

"Jo,
As much as I appreciate your reply, I think this manuscript is perahps [sic] too heavy for you.
Don't get me wrong, I am not remeaning [sic] your professionalism, it's just VERY profound and maybe too much for a female to edit.
A delicate mind I do not want editing this.
Best regards,
Etc"

Jo Caird called on deep reserves of patience to respond:

"Dear Etc,
Thanks for your prompt reply.
Thanks too for your candid (not to mention eloquently expressed - although I believe the word you were looking for was 'demeaning', not 'remeaning') appraisal of my intellectual and professional capabilities. It's reassuring to me, as a 'female' (again, I believe you mean 'woman') of delicate sensibilities and feeble judgement, to know that considerate gentlemen such as yourself exist to protect me from that which I lack the depth of character to understand.
As to how you've assessed that I am too weak-minded to work on, or even indeed to read, your manuscript, given that we have never met, or even spoken on the phone, I can only speculate. I wish you, in any case, all the best with it.
Have a lovely weekend.
Kind regards,
Jo"

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

Nathan Fillion: Floral Gum fan

Filed under: Food, Media, Randomness — Nicholas @ 07:21

I knew I liked this guy for more than his dashing style:

Those horrid little Floral Gums are one of my few remaining vices from childhood. You can only get them at the occasional “British Tea Shop” kind of store, and only now and again. I always stock up on the addictive things when I have the chance.

October 10, 2010

Calculate your odds of winning the lottery

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:09

By way of the ever-helpful Roger Henry, here’s a site that lets you simulate your lottery habits to determine how much you’ll win and how much it’ll cost:

Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!

It is really hard to win the Mega Millions lottery. So hard that it can be difficult to comprehend what long odds confront its players.

Why not try for free on this Mega Millions lottery simulator? You’ll be able to try the same numbers over and over, simulating playing twice a week for a year or 10. You’ll never win.

I ran 1040 simulations. It would have cost me $1040. I would have won $243. Not a good return on investment. I actually “win” more by not buying a ticket at all: I avoid the loss of that $797 in ticket purchases.

October 6, 2010

Gun hobbyist’s dream

Filed under: Liberty, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

L. Neil Smith, in an ideal world (that is, after the Libertarian revolution), would like to do some serious gunsmithing:

I have some interest in reclaiming good technology that has been abandoned by our civilization, usually for the most stupid of reasons. Living in a free country would mean that I could return to a dream I’ve had for years, of becoming a weapons-manufacturer. For example, as a gunsmith, I don’t believe that history and humanity are quite through with the design known as the “Broomhandle Mauser”, the first commercially successful semiautomtic pistol. The Broomhandle is so different in conception and execution from the Browning-invented weapons we’re all used to, as to seem like the product of an alien mind.

If you’re not familiar with the Broomhandle Mauser, here’s a picture from http://www.g6csy.net/c96/database.html:

Some folks don’t like the Mauser’s grip, which I find perfectly comfortable, and seem to forget that we almost never shoot a revolver today with handles shaped like its frame. I love neoprene grips like the Pachmayr “Presentation” model, myself. They make shooting magnums pleasant. Others don’t like magazines situated in front of the trigger, rather than inside the handle, but they’re happy with sport-utility rifles like the AR-15 and the AK-47 built exactly the same way.

What killed the “Broomie” was the inadequate cartridge, 7.63x25mm, it was made for. By the time a more effective offerng was available — 9mm Mauser Export, which rivaled the .357 Magnum — it was too late. Browning designs and their imitators had taken the field over. But with modern steels and production techniques, in effective calibers — like .40 S&W, 10mm, or .45 ACP — there is still a place for the Mauser design. I’d even like to make a miniature that shoots .22 Long Rifle.

Make no mistake, I absolutely venerate St. John Moses Browning’s 1911, and his P35 Browning High Power is also “of the best” — or at least it would be if it could be made for a worthwhile cartridge without messing up its marvelous handling qualities, as I find the .40 caliber version does. I have some fresh ideas in this area, beginning with a 145-grain .375 bullet loaded into a modified 8mm Nambu parent case.

The Browning 9mm was first handgun I ever fired, and is still one of my favourites:

At the same time, however, I would bring the Dardick pistol back, an absolutely revolutionary design that combines the best qualities of automatics and revolvers, without any of the drawbacks of either. Critics at the time of its introduction said it looked too weird — rather like an oldtime Weller soldering gun — but how do you suppose the Broomhandle, the Luger, and the 1911 looked to generations of revolver-shooters? Aesthetics are arbitrary, and shooters would get used to the Dardick as they did to other weapons, if it served them well.

The Dardick was indeed an odd-looking weapon:

The Dardick used special plastic-cased cartridges with a roundly triangular, or trochoidal, cross-section, loaded with a .38 caliber bullet. It was pretty clearly aimed at the police market, where the standard at the time (the late 1950s) was the wildly-successful Smith & Wesson Model 10, of which it is said more than six million were produced.

There’s no reason that the Dardick concept couldn’t be mated with much better calibers than it was offered in. With its double-action works, and an astonishing magazine capacity (in 1958) of fifteen “trounds”, it might well have nudged the Model 10. But it fell victim, not to the market, but to a corporate boardroom dispute, and history lost one of the most effective devices for personal defense ever invented.

As Neil pointed out in one of his books, the Dardick was the answer to a bad crime writer’s prayers: it was literally an automatic revolver. (For those following along at home, an “automatic” has a magazine holding the bullets which are fed into the chamber to be fired by the action of the weapon: fire a bullet, the action cycles, clearing the expended cartridge and pushing a new one into place, cocking the weapon to fire again. A “revolver” holds bullets in the cylinder, rotating the cylinder when the gun is fired to put a new bullet in line with the barrel to be fired. The Dardick is the only example I know of that combines both in one gun.)

It’s probably a good thing that I live in Canada, where owning handguns is a legal marathon, otherwise I’d probably have another expensive collecting hobby . . .

October 5, 2010

Another new think tank . . . but this one’s different

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Randomness — Nicholas @ 07:19

These days it seems that there’s a new think tank springing up on every corner, covering so many different issues and interests. But there’s one area that’s still underserved in the think tank world, so Adam Thierer is inaugurating a new think tank to cover those areas:

I’m pleased to announce my new venture: The Sin Think Tank. The mission of the Sin Think Tank will be to promote prurient interests, gun play, gambling, unhealthy eating, and alcohol and tobacco appreciation. Some of our positions or programs will include:

* The Bob Guccione Fellow in Cultural Studies
* The Joe Camel Chair in Environmental Analysis
* The Smith & Wesson Institute for Peace
* The Jack Daniels Center for Spirited Discussion
* The Center for Gambling Promotion
* The Dunkin Donuts Nutrition & Nourishment Initiative (aka, the “Feed the World” initiative)
* The Hunter S. Thompson Foundation for Free Living & High Times

October 3, 2010

Losing my “mass media” awareness

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Elizabeth and I have been working through the DVD set of Castle season 2 over the last week (a couple of episodes per night, then off to our respective other activities). We got to the end of the last disc, watched the bonus features and briefly skimmed through the “sneak peak” offerings. All but one of the featured DVD sets was completely unknown to me (“Is that Sally Field?” “I didn’t know there was a mainstream sword-and-sorcery series” “Have you heard of this one either?”).

I’m going to have to hire an inveterate TV watcher to keep me posted on just the names of the current TV shows . . .

October 2, 2010

QotD: A critique of “reading with critical distance”

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 21:43

There is another lit crit thing — I consider it a perversion, myself — that they call “reading with critical distance”. From the writer’s point of view, it as if one has knocked oneself out to prepare a bang-up with-all-the-trimmings Thanksgiving dinner, and had one’s guests troop in, weigh and measure the viands and photograph the table — and then depart having eaten not one bite.

It’s dinner, dammit. You’re supposed to eat it, and be nourished.

And then sit around discussing it, sure, and ask for the recipes, and exchange cooking tips and anecdotes and tales of dinners past, and so on to the limits of the metaphor.

Reading with critical distance only seems to me very nearly the same as not reading at all. For one thing, such a reader is very likely to miss all the essential emotional connections evoked between the lines. To switch metaphors, it’s like serving to a tennis player who stands there and doesn’t hit the ball back, watches it roll off to the side of the court, and then says, “I don’t see the point of this game.”

Bash ’em with me racket, I will…

So whoever it was who was finding this sort of analysis disturbing, I suspect what was happening was you were being pulled out of a former full engagement with the story by this sort of approach to the text, and rightly feeling that something valuable was being taken away, without necessarily being replaced with something of equal or greater value. Trying to hold both modes of reading in one’s brain at the same time must be kind of like having Simon Illyan’s memory chip in place. It may be best to take turns with the two modes.

Supposedly, training to critical reading makes one “a better reader” but if it results in one being able to happily read far fewer books, I’m not exactly sure where the merit lies. It’s like the hazard of revisiting beloved books of one’s childhood, and finding them swapped as if by bad fairies with inferior changelings. How can one call oneself a better reader as an adult if one is clearly having a much worse read…?

Lois McMaster Bujold, email to the LMB mailing list, 2010-10-01

September 29, 2010

Taser shotgun shell

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

In a word, YIKES!

That is something nobody wants to be hit with, especially fired out of a shotgun.

The “X12” Taser shotgun is made by Taser International of Scottsdale, Arizona and fires a battery-packed 12-bore shell with forward-facing barbs that deliver a debilitating electric shock.

In August last year, New Scientist revealed research that showed an early version of the weapon was both difficult to aim accurately, putting victims’ eyes at risk, and sometimes delivered a shock for more than five minutes, rather than 20 seconds.

A five minute jolt rather blurs the line between non-lethal and kinda-sorta-lethal, doesn’t it?

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