Drinking green

Yesterday being Saint Patrick’s Day, and myself being Irish, the natural supposition might be that I was out celebrating until the wee hours.

However, that supposition would be wrong.

New Year’s Eve and Saint Patrick’s Day are when all the amateurs come out to drink, and I don’t particularly relish being puked on in any event. So I usually go private for any imbibing I choose to do to mark the occasions.

My office mate, being of an age and gender where it’s viewed as a character defect if you don’t overindulge, did go out to various faux-Irish establishments at the weekend to drink copious amounts of various substances.

One potation in particular caught my attention, an “Irish car bomb”. It starts with Guinness, which puts it beyond the beyond for starters as far as I’m concerned. (I’m not into drinking industrial sludge.) Into a pint of Guinness you’re meant to drop a shot glass with Bailey’s Irish Cream and a float of Irish whisky.

Then you’re supposed to actually swallow it.

According to my colleague, the trick is to get it down fast, “before the Bailey’s starts to curdle”. (He wasn’t completely kosher about the bibulous methodology: he poured the Bailey’s/whiskey into the Guinness, as, “I figured a lot of people had handled the shot glass.”)

The drink does have one benefit, he adds: “it kind of feels like you already threw up”, what with the Bailey’s curdling like cottage cheese in your mouth, “so you don’t puke.”

According to Wikipedia, the name “Irish Car Bomb” “is sometimes considered offensive due to its reference to IRA terrorism. It is not uncommon for genuine Irish pubs to refuse to serve them.”

Well, hmm.

I think the difficulty with that statement would be in trying to find an actual, you know, “genuine Irish pub”. There being squillions of faux Irish pubs around. And I don’t think you can count those pub-in-a-box franchises that give you sure-fire instructions for building an Irish pub in downtown Riga or suburban Peshawar.

Still—I should think drinking abomination (regardless of what you call it) would be its own punishment.

Then there would come the bar bill.

Rosebud

Hearst Corporation has announced that it’s shutting down the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Today is the final print edition. From now on it’ll be Internet-only.

As you might imagine there’s been a lot of booing & hooing—mostly from the PI itself—about how this closing represents the End of Civilization as We Know It.

Well, I’m a print journalist & therefore biased towards news in a corporeal form. However I can’t get excited about this demise.

This rag is as provincial as they come—which wouldn’t be a bad thing except that its pretensions are megalithic. Most of the national & all the international stories come from feeds & the local reporting is, well, booster-ish.

Business reportage—pretty much all wire feeds—constitutes two to four pages at the back of a 16-page sports section. (All Huskies, all the time.)

Culture is presented as an exclusive purview of Seattle, & yet there’s more gardening, even in winter, than book reviews. So “culture” may refer more to nematodes than non-fiction.

&, BTW, reviews are heavily skewed towards “local” interest, whether that be authorship or subject matter—no matter how tenuous the connection. Evidently something’s only “real” if it’s “Seattle”.

Thinks I, the paper doeth protest too much.

Another quirk that got straight up my nose: that Turkish Airlines crash in Amsterdam last month? Most headlines were along the lines of, “Nine killed as Turkish plane crashes near Amsterdam airport”, or “Turkish plane crash in Amsterdam”.

The PI blared, “737-800 crashes in Dutch field; 9 killed”, with a sub-head: “Four Boeing employees aboard; their fates are unknown”.

Now, Boeing’s the home team (sorta—the manufacturing plant is still here although the company moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago a few years ago), but still. The "news" wasn't really the aircraft, it was the human event.

Plus, dunno who’s more at fault here—Boeing for giving out the names or the PI for hotfooting it to the Boeing staffers’ homes—but the paper butted into the lives of the families of the four to ask what they knew before it became apparent that three of the passengers were among the dead.

Okay, okay—it is a Hearst rag, but still.

So I won’t miss this paper, as much as I want to see the tradition of print journalism continue.

I just want to see it continue with some modicum of quality.

Corporate outrages (chapter 27)

A lot of media—traditional & blog—attention is being paid to outrage over corporate excess. You know:

AIG taking billions from you & me (courtesy of our Congress-slime) & then blowing nearly $500K on an “executive retreat”, & now forking out $165M in "performance bonuses" to the very morons who "led" the company into massive failure;

Merrill Lynch pushing through billions in bonuses in the final hours of 2008 so as to relieve new owner Bank of America from the pesky duty of maybe cutting or eliminating them altogether;

That same BofA throwing a five-day $10M Super Bowl bash;

The Gang of Three flying (separate) corporate jets to Washington, D.C., to beg for bailout money in the billions & billions;

Wells Fargo planning a twelve-day “business meeting & recognition event for hard-working team members”—at the Wynn & Encore hotels, for some undisclosed outrageous sum of money.

All of the above (with the exception of Ford) have asked for & accepted billions from us beleaguered taxpayers. They’ve all defended their splash-outs as “not coming from bailout funds”—like you can separate that stuff.

& their lower lips are much extended at them getting spanked for this, because they claim it's necessary for business as usual.

(Clearly, they haven’t got the point that “business as usual” got us all into this mess.)

I particularly love the argument for bonuses & corporate jollies as being necessary to attract & retain the “best talent”; without them the "best talent" would leave in droves. Like that “best talent” isn’t responsible for these companies going into a death-spiral & taking the rest of us with them.

Besides—if this mythical “best talent” does indeed walk—where the hell are they going to go? There are no hedge funds or investment banks left with openings for high-flyers. The masters of those particular universes are clinging to their current paychecks with death grips.

Well, whatever.

What bothers me is that this media fury is probably going to be no more effective than the outrage that permeated the airwaves in the last meltdown: Enron/WorldCom, etc.

In a couple of years everyone will be back to business as usual & the best talent will be back on corporate jets headed to “business meetings.”

Plus ça change…

Laptop security

Those folks at NetworkWorld have done a totally unscientific study on how security-minded (or not) people are at various WiFi locations. They went around various WiFi hot-spots (airports, coffee shops, etc.) & asked laptop users what precautions they were taking.

What’s interesting is that pretty much everyone (with the exception of the technician) is playing roulette with the security of their (& their employers’) data. In fact, none of them at all has taken measures to protect the laptops themselves, such as a laptop labeling or tracking service to aid in recovering a lost/stolen machine.

Of particular note was the CFO who was too cheap to buy a cellular data service & relies wherever possible on free connectivity.

NW does give you some tips on how to minimize your chances of self-immolation with your data. Some of them seem to be stating the blindingly obvious (don’t send anything via email that you wouldn’t want everyone at the coffee shop to read), but what’s obvious is that most of the people they polled were blissfully ignorant of the danger.

So take a look, see what you can implement for yourself. When all else fails—put down the laptop & get a life.

GM's art of cost cutting

GM has announced that it will cease funding the documentary work of Ken Burns (since they need those few hundreds of thousands of dollars to subsidize their ex-pat programs for senior execs who require $30K worth of private school fees per year, & all. Plus, there are those Byzantine “work 10% fewer hours & get paid 5% less; so you’re going to get 5% of your salary for doing nothing” schemes…).

Okay, they’re not talking about the parenthetical part, but they have cut off the flow to Burns.

I understand—times are hard. But it’s really a great pity. I love Burns’ work.

I think one of my favorites is “Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip”, about a medical doctor who took it in his head to be the first to drive from California to New York in 1903. He, a driver & a dog named Bud made it across the country—which did not at that time have either a real road network or petrol stations—in a little over two months. There’s something magical about that story.

Toward the end there was a photo of a family—perhaps around 1910—on a trip; males in the front, females in the rear of an open touring car. The expressions on their face were absolutely classic: this was not a family having fun.

I assure you, I’ve been on that trip.

Anyhow—at the moment no telling how Burns will finance future efforts. The final project to be subsidized by GM is on the US National Parks.

Octomom redux

I hesitated about whether to pass on the report that Nadya Suleman’s latest publicist has quit. Really—I did.

About three nanoseconds.

I mean, after all—if a train is going to derail right in front of you (again & again), aren’t you duty-bound to take the photos with your mobile phone & post them on the Internet?

It’s bad when your own publicist tells the world, “This woman is nuts.” Victor Muñoz also says, “Nadya got real greedy.”

No details, alas, but I fully expect they’ll emerge shortly.

The frugal oenophile

In keeping with last week’s news about the recession hitting the restaurant business, the WSJ’s wine columnists have recommendations on how to cut the bill when ordering wine while eating out.

I have to say that their number one suggestion, avoid wines by the glass, is tough if you’re dining alone. I’ve noticed that, outside of the Napa area, I’ve not found it a common practice in the US for restaurants to offer half bottles of wine (as you find frequently in France) or half-carafes of decent wine (as in Italy or Austria). So your only choice is the glass—unless you are ready to walk away from half a bottle.

Now, precisely because I couldn’t find decent wines by the glass at an upscale restaurant in Port Angeles (Olympic Peninsula) last November, I did ask if Washington permits carrying opened bottles in your car, & the server assured me it does. So I ordered a bottle of Pinot Gris and took it with me to enjoy for a couple more nights.

(Having grown up in California, I did jam the cork back in, wrap it in two plastic bags and stick it in the trunk of my car, though.)

I don’t get why there aren’t more half bottles around—it’s the perfect solution not only for single diners, but also for people who don’t want to order a single white or red. I suppose it’s a marketing ploy for restaurants to sell full bottles, but I think it’s short-sighted.

I do endorse Gaiter and Brecher’s recommendation of the Grüner Veltliner. That’s a terrific summer wine, perfect for sipping on a terrace watching the sun set. If you want to eat something with it, okay; but it’s fine on its own.

I haven’t seen any half-price deals around this area, although decent wines do show up by the glass at half-price during happy hours. Including sparklers, which is all I need to hear.

Qwest-Citi redux

A while ago I recounted why I fired Qwest as a landline telecommunications provider. (If you don’t want to read the post, it’s because of their bait-&-switch practices, which no one there gave a toss about until I told them I was cutting the line. At that point I was handed off to a special rep who tried like crazy to keep me as a “valued customer”—trying everything except giving me the services I’d ordered at the price I’d been quoted.)

After that call, I received the final extortionate bill (for nothing but phone service—no Internet—$65) & paid it. So imagine my surprise to receive a bill for $0.55 a couple of days ago, for “long distance”.

Naturally I called to ask why I was being billed for less than a dollar of long distance “service”, after I’d paid the final bill. I was connected to someone named Rhonda (which may, of course, be simply a nom-d'abuse for work purposes)—let me just say this about Rhonda: she should not be in a customer-facing position. & she definitely was not interested in trying to convert me back to customerhood by demonstrating her commitment to customer satisfaction.

Speaking as though to a cretin, she tried telling me the L-D service is paid "in arrears", & that $0.55 was for the final day, the day I cut off service. I said I'd received & paid the final bill, so I didn’t understand what this was about. After a few go arounds where she kept repeating that it’s because you pay “in arrears”, she finally really sullenly said she'd "zero it out", which took her about five minutes to do.

But at least it cost them about $10 to try to get $.55 out of me.

BTW—in that January post I also discussed telling CitiCard to take a hike after repeatedly applying my electronic payments late & charging me those extortionate fees & interest they so love to collect (especially since I “zero out” my bill each month).

Imagine my surprise to find that I’m now getting those “come join us” credit card offers from none other than CitiCard. Evidently they haven’t discovered the concept of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, where that account manager (who also tried like mad to keep me as a valued customer when I cancelled) might have entered a notation that I’d been quite explicit about my intention to never use their products again.

I find it interesting to discover again & again that businesses seem to think we the consumer public haven’t caught on that very, very few of them are not in fact offering unique products or services, & that we really can go to a competitor when they start treating us like serfs with bank accounts.

Hello, folks—that’s a basic tenet of capitalism. Which you on the federal bailout program might have forgot. But trust me—ain’t none of you irreplaceable.

You might want to think about that before you piss off those customers who can still afford to buy your offerings.

Politics & prezzies

Evidently it was a slow news day in the UK Friday, as a tempest has risen in that particular teapot over Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s visit to the US.

No, not over a jumped-up Labour party apparatchik-made-PM-by-default (when Blair read the graffiti on the wall & resigned to take up the role of World Elder Statesman, & collecting huge speaking fees) coming to this country to lecture President & Congress on the need to avoid protectionism (American) in solving the global economic crisis. (Because the UK needs all the economic help it can get.)

Evidently they’re in a snit over the exchange of official gifts. To wit: Brown’s-to-Obama = superb; Obama’s to Brown = sucko. & this is a matter of complete outrage to the British press.

Oh, please.

Iain Martin, reporter/blogger for the Torygraph was so worked up as to not only write about it; he imperiously condescended to be interviewed by NPR on the subject.

According to Martin, Brown “clearly put a great deal of thought” into the choice of official gifts: a pen holder carved from oak timbers of HMS Gannet (a ship of some apparent significance to the Brits) & a framed commissioning paper (whatever that is) for HMS Resolute, sister ship to the Gannet. & also a first edition of Martin Gilbert’s massive biography of Winston Churchill.

In return, Obama gave Brown a boxed set of classic American film DVDs.

Martin also whines that the gifts exchanged on behalf of the prime ministerial & presidential offspring shortchanged the Brown boys: Sarah Gordon presented the Obama girls with an outfit from Topshop (a British slightly upmarket clothing chain store—with outlets in the US), & six British children’s books. The Brown boys got a couple of toy helicopters modeled after Marine One.

Again, Martin snipes that Sarah Gordon “put a lot of thought” into the choices, while, again, the Obama gifts smacked of “someone realizing that at the last minute that a gift would be required & sending someone down to the White House gift shop to get something.”

He’s referring to this exchange as “Giftgate”. How droll.

What I love, though, is him attributing the choice of Brit-gifts to the Prime Minister & his wife. Like they weren’t picked out by underlings, exactly the way the Obamas’ prezzies were chosen by aides.

Let me just say this: if the Browns were spending time pondering just the right tone to set with bleeding official gifts (that the President cannot keep beyond his term in office anyhow), then that would explain the current state of the British financial situation. Not a good recommendation for the former Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I’ll concede that a set of DVDs wouldn’t be what I’d be looking for in the way of gifts-I-can-return-for-obvious-reasons. But perhaps the Yankee thinking was along the lines of, “the PM has a lot to do, what with the state of their economy, & those pesky Tories nipping at his heels. Let’s get him something entertaining, that he doesn’t have to devote a lot of concentration to.” Would that be a seven-volume biography of FDR? No—movies!

Although the scandal is roiling exclusively in Britain; it’s hardly made a blip in the American media. The Times, the Guardian, the Daily Mail & others have ponderously weighed in on the alleged scandal. NPR, the Chicago Sun-Times & a few bloggers are the extent so far over hear.

Of course, British media are accustomed to covering those gritty beats of Royals’ antics & lager louts getting tossed out of soccer matches across Europe, so this might be considered both something of a departure & right up their alley.

Here’s some advice to the media in that sceptred isle: get over yourselves. If you feel slighted on behalf of your leader, do what you usually do: go on a binge. & then grow the hell up.

Sunshine on your shoulder

Sunday marks the switch to daylight saving time for the US. You may be wondering why, exactly, we move the clocks (& watches & VCRs & car clocks & microwaves & electronics of all types) forward. It’s to save energy.

No—really. It’s to save energy.

California’s Department of Energy has a handy-dandy little site explaining all this. You may find it of interest that the clock-changing is one of the offshoots of war, specifically World Wars I & II.

Whatever—enjoy the sunshine later into the day. Summer’s on its way.