AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Pippa works constantly to amuse and delight me. For instance, the other day she noticed this story on “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,” and promptly illustrated it:

A couple of days later she was watching the third Star Wars movie (Is that the episode entitled The Rebellion Destroys The Second Death Star In Almost Exactly The Same Way It Destroyed The First One?) and discovered a moment of “Pants Wars” glory —

Han: Well, why don’t you use your divine pants and get us out of this?
C3PO: Begging your pardon, General Solo, but that just wouldn’t be proper.

Having broached the topic of wine marketing just a couple of days ago, I’m obliged to point out that Hugh and Stormhoek have offered £1000.00 to any blogger who provides them with a convincing design for their bottle and label. They want their wine to stand out among wine bottles as Apple computers do among a sea of generic PCs. I offer a muted “Bravo” — as you might expect, given what I said earlier. (By the way, they aren’t looking for a full-blown presnetation treatment; as Hugh says, “An idea that works on the back of a cocktail napkin is just fine by me.”)

It’ll be easy to tear off a flashy shape or label; as a buyer, though, I’d be attending particularly to what the design communicates about the wine. (Wine bottles, after all, have drawn near perfection in packaging: optimal packing density, strongly-defined conventions relative to shape and color, and so on). I would commend a clear glass bottle, to help set it apart from the green and brown bottles on the shelf (since part of Stormhoek’s pitch is its freshness, one need not worry as much about the effects that light might have on the wine). The shape of the bottle probably can’t depart too much from present norms without incurring too great an expense in tooling and shipping. Hmmmmm.

OK, so I read the Bill Gates memo to which Doc pointed, which Dave supplied, and the things that strikes me right away is: he refers to “over 92% of Fortune 100 companies.”

Now, I’m sure that people who know more than I do about both math and business read this blog, so permit me to ask, “If it’s more than 92% of the Fortune 100, isn’t it necessarily at least 93%? Are there actually 101 companies in the Fortune 100, or is Bill counting fractional use?”

iTunes’s “smart playlists” make listening more enjoyable for me; I like to hear songs I have’t heard in a while, and it’s easy to make a list that sorts of selections that haven’t played in the last month. When I want to listen to familiar, favorite music, I can rig that, too.

I look forward to the next step in playlist intelligence: a playlist that distributes the frequency with which I hear selections by my rating of the song (at a crude level, I’d hear five-star songs five times more often than one-star selections) cross-factored against how recently I’ve heard the selection (or how often I’d heard it). I’d thus be most likely to hear a five-star song that I haven’t heard in a few months, for instance, and least likely to hear a no-star song that I just heard yesterday. At the same time, it wouldn’t eliminate the chance that I’d hear a less-favorite selection, or a recent-repeat. Over the long haul, I’d hear my favorites most often, but mixed in with other selections I like well enough, and with occasional less-favored cuts.

It ought to be do-able (it may even be possible now with iTunes’ capacity to nest playlists) — and it would really, really rock.

If I recall correctly, the Bush regime did not want to follow through with a full 9/11 investigation, and their Senate proteges have been stalling on the investigation of WMD (un)intelligence (despite the way that the Democrats have until recently been playing Milquetoast; why didn’t the GOP rush through a report before the Democrats drank their morning double espresso?). They’ve been stalling Plamegate investigations and Abu Ghraib investigations.

But once word gets out that the CIA may be maintaining secret prisons, now that needs an investigation, fast. Not the secret prisons, of course — the fact that somebody found out.

Of course they never torture anyone, so please don’t pass that bill making it explicitly illegal to torture people.

Once upon a time, marketing wine involved extremely little obvious panache or verve: bottles had labels, price tags, and some had reputations, and one bought the bottle with the most suitable combination of qualities. Most of us shopped for wine almost randomly, a pattern aggravated by the way labels drifted into and out of stock at particular vendors.

I’ve lately observed two new tacks for marketing wine. The first, which I detest, involves cooking up a cutesy name for the wine, and designing an loud, eye-catching label. Since I do my best to make marginally-informed decisions when buying wine, the uninformative-name-and-label combination adds frustration to condescending insult. Here’s a message to wine marketers: no matter how good your wine is, I will not buy it if you slap a puerile joke name onto it. My (almost) twelve-year-old daughter noticed this trend the other day, and she was insulted by it. Call your wine “Mynah Triumph” and label it with a bird, and you can guarantee I won’t buy a drop of it.

The other tactic I noticed was Hugh’s campaign on behalf of Stormhoek. Hugh has persuaded Stormhoek to give away wine to bloggers — no questions asked. He reasons that (on the whole) bloggers will tell the truth about the wine, and that the odds suggest that a good many will write about it, and so Stormhoek gets the free publicity, the market research, and the meta-PR buzz of having developed a snappy campaign.

Oh, and the name isn’t a cloyingly clever joke, and the label actually tells you useful things about the wine.

[Full Disclosure: No, I haven’t gotten a free bottle of wine to promote the “free bottle of wine” campaign; if offered a bottle, I would accept it, but it doesn’t look as though U.S. citizens have a chance for the time being. I’d rather pay for a bottle of wine I know I’ll enjoy, than try to weed out the noble, workmanlike claret from the throngs of trendy “Goats Do Roam,” “Mad Housewife,” and “Smoking Loon.” For short, my Weinberger Real Disclosure Forward Looking Statement (WRDFLS) = FT2 SUT IJND]

Margaret spotted a story in yesterday’s NY Times, vindicating yet again her contention that she saw a coyote walking down a street in Evanston a few years back. At the time, I mocked her — but since then I’ve had to eat those jests over and over again.

“Professor Gehrt says with confidence that the sensible suburban toddler has little to fear from the suburban coyote, but he will not say the same for the suburban Shih Tzu” — or Bichon Frisé, so watch out, Bea!

I plan to try to work David Weinberger’s newly-re-available philosophy articles (“Austin’s Flying Arrow,” and “Phenomenological Ethics”) into papers and presentations, if I can (I mean, at the very least I can throw in a “contra Weinberger” here or there).

And we’ve had some encouraging developments on the Disseminary front, which I don’t want to get specific about till everything’s nailed down — but even a drop of good news over there feels exciting.

I hope that whoever’s behind the story to which David pointed yesterday has made a big mistake, or that the patent office (not having evaluated the patent application yet) will dismiss it outright. But the fact that someone might think it plausible to patent a story line — just throw in the actions against Google Print, and these cases amply illustrate the chilling winds generated by recent IP laws and decisions.

This morning got off to a rough start — for Pippa, at least — when the parking lot across the street began to fill up early with partisans of the visiting college football team. As this is our seventh football season living on the Northwestern campus (gosh, that seems like a long time; I haven’t lived anywhere longer since I left high school), rowdy visiting fans are not a new phenomenon to us; still, this bunch seemed earlier and more ardent than most we’d experienced, including the Michigan fans from a few weeks ago. Before nine o’clock, someone had blared a klaxon reveille to rally the visiting tailgaters, and it got more lively from there.

I should say that although people were obviously excited and had drunk more beer than advisable before eleven in the morning, I didn’t see anyone misbehave except for the over-endowed student in a Porsche who made a sudden left turn into the parking lot without signalling, and who refused to back up when it became clear that there was no way forward for him, and who finally did back out slowly, blocking traffic on Noyes Street longer than necessary because he seemed to harbor the notion that if only a few cars rolled forward out of the lot, he could squeeze in. Hey, we’ll all wait in gridlock while you come to terms with reality, dude. But I saw no signs of hooliganism or predation (unless you think of beer kegs as an endangered species).

It turns out these early-rising lagermeisters were Iowa Hawkeye fans, so I was predisposed to think the best of them, since some of my very favorite students are from Iowa. On the other hand, I hated to think what the parking lot might be like after the game. The game started at midday, so there would be plenty of time for gloating if the Hawkeyes won, which seemed especially likely when they went ahead 28-7 or thereabouts, or for vindictive vandalism if the Hawkeyes lost.

In the end, Northwestern won with just seconds left in the game, and thunderstorms moved into the region right about that time — so even if the Iowans had felt embittered and destructive (and I have no reason to think they would have — sometimes beer just mellows people out), this would not have been favorable weather for rampaging. Instead, everyone skulked back to Iowa, leaving the customary heaps of trash, bottles, and smoldering charcoal briquets.

Living apart from your beloved entails a number of discomforts and frustrations, as many of you can easily imagine. Many days I wish I were at Margaret’s apartment to give her a back rub or fetch her a cup of tea while she reads, or just offer my shoulder on which she might rest her study-wearied head.

Today I wish I were down there so I could take her out to dinner, someplace romantic and quiet (that serves gluten-free vegetarian entrees and a good red wine), so I could laugh and reminisce with her, so that I could hold up a glass and promise all my energies to making the next twenty-seven years together even better than the first have been.

Happy birthday, Margaret — you give us around you such a brave example of seeing what’s right and pursuing it, of holding up under stress, of always continuing to learn and to teach, of offering your time and strength to so many others who need your gifts as a friend, a mother, a counselor, a scholar. Happy birthday, many happy returns, and let’s get together soon!