Archive for 2009
We like this one a lot. Starbucks has just unveiled a new and ambitious –and possibly risky—business strategy with the launch of its new “Via” instant coffee line. That’s right. Instant coffee. As in the Sanka or Nescafe type. The kind of coffee that usually belongs in a college dorm room and which, well, doesn’t usually live up to the normal, brewed cup. Starbucks’ new Via instant coffee, which was test launched earlier this year in Seattle, Chicago, London and a few other US cities, comes in small packets. You simply dissolve them in some hot water and, presto, you have a pretty decent cup of coffee. How do I know this? Because I actually grabbed some packets this past spring and tried them. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week’s trifecta of tacky behavior –Joe Wilson, in a historic first, heckling the President before a formal address to Congress, Serena Williams screaming expletives and threats at a line-judge at match point at the US Open, and a drunk Kanye West grabbing the mike from winner Taylor Swift at the MTV VMAs—was a strangely aligned set of events that have underlined what many have suspected about social civility in the US: it is rapidly withering away. Read the rest of this entry »
Cartoon by Carolita Johnson
Hey, kids, I don’t know what the hell your nut-job parents were all upset about. The President gave a back-to-school speech this morning at a high school in Virginia, a patriotic message about dedication and personal responsibility that was beamed to all schools in this country.
Your parents thought this speech was tantamount to some propaganda shilling for Democratic social programs like that public option in the current health care fight up on Capitol Hill. This was supposed to be the speech where the force of Mr. Obama’s charisma was going to hypnotize you into becoming a free-spending and taxing Socialist, and indoctrinate you into the ways of Karl Marx. Read the rest of this entry »
Where did Summer ’09 go? It’s Labor Day weekend and we’re already making plans to go back to school or work after our much-deserved vacations. Time to pack up all our gear and tuck away all of our memories that kept us on the beaches and parties during these past warm months of summer. With it, we remember all those songs that somehow made the summer distinctive. Read the rest of this entry »
Ted Kennedy: A Senator, A Patriarch
The passing of Senator Ted Kennedy surely represents a significant loss in American politics. The “lion of the Senate” for 47 years was at the forefront of American social policy. Through his long and distinguished career, he was if nothing else an extraordinarily gifted legislator and a master of the coalition-building and deal-making needed to craft what were some path-breaking legislation of the 20th century.
Look up the Civil Rights Act, immigration reform, health insurance as we know it, No Child Left Behind (despite his reticence once it passed), educational reform, etc —make no mistake, Ted Kennedy was behind every one of those pieces of law. You know the employer-based health insurance coverage, Cobra, that stays with you once you have to leave your current job? Yeah, that’s Ted Kennedy, too. It will be hard to imagine what the US Senate will be without him. His absence has been especially acute now during the acrimonious health care debate, packed as they are with the town-hall meetings. Now it’s up to the legacy of Kennedy, and all that represented in his career-long battle for health care reform, to help rescue it in some way. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re big fans of “Top Chef”. The other night the new season of “Top Chef Las Vegas” began just as this past summer’s “Top Chef Masters” was ending. The “Masters” series focused on 24 of the best and most accomplished chefs in America, pitting them in challenges each week. The winner, announced on Wednesday night, was awarded $100,000 that went to the chef’s charity. This year’s Master, went to famed Chicago restaurateur and owner of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, Rick Bayless. Read the rest of this entry »
The image of Sonia Sotomayor, accompanied by her mother and her brother, taking the oath from Chief Justice John Roberts, to become our nation’s 111th Supreme Court Justice was surely a thrilling, moving moment for many of this country’s Latino population.
After winning Senate confirmation last week, Sotomayor was promptly sworn in at the Supreme Court (and not at the White House, in order to show independence) on Saturday morning, and it culminated several weeks of debate and sometimes angry discourse from opponents who did not care for some of Sotomayor’s previous remarks that she, as a “wise Latina” somehow had a better perspective than older white males. Read the rest of this entry »
Who is Eric Moore?
Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest idea who Eric is. But I did find his camera’s memory card at a Vista Point in Oregon about a week and a half ago. The mysteriously abandoned 2 GB Kingston SD card was chock full of memories (398 to be exact) and was laying conspicuously face-up, undamaged on a curbside along Hwy 5 at an unmarked Vista Point.
The card, was labeled “Eric Moore #3” by way of black Sharpie. Read the rest of this entry »
(More) Cash For Clunkers
By all accounts, the federal “Cash for Clunkers” program, launched this week, has been a success. Many Americans have flocked to car dealerships across the country in hopes of turning in their heaps for a rebate of up to $4500 towards the purchase of more efficient car. That’s the hope of the new program. We’re being told that this spending incentive will not only spur the economy out of its miserable recession, but also help reduce the carbon footprint in our car-obsessed society. Read the rest of this entry »
First it was the chicken wars –KFC launching its new grilled chicken and Oprah announcing it on her show, causing nationwide lines and ruckus, and El Pollo Loco throwing down the gauntlet by charging that the Colonel’s chicken is actually not all that healthy, and that it is cooked in beef fat. We’ll let these two companies slug it out and pass out the freebies to us. Read the rest of this entry »
Namechk is a useful site that allows its users to find out if their favorite username or vanity url has been taken on just about every social networking site known to man (80+).
How it works: Go to the site, type your standard Internet moniker, and Namechk will quickly search and find if your “johnnyfortran8″ is available to use on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Vox and many others.
On the flip side, if you’re in the final stages of erasing your name and presence from the Internet in an attempt to Become Web Dead, you can use the service as a means to verify that you’ve actually wiped clean all of your accounts — even the obligatory services you signed up for in an attempt to get that one piece of information you couldn’t live without. Give it a shot. Read the rest of this entry »
A Personal Foul
Keyshawn Johnson is not an interior designer. But that’s what the producers of his new eponymously named reality series want you to believe.
In this by-the-numbers show, “Keyshawn Johnson: Tackling Design”, it’s unclear what the focus really is. Is it a how-to show on turning a drab home interior into something vibrant and fresh, complete with actual instructions or at least a few minutes discussing how to use flocked wallpaper or how to use primer to paint walls?
On that score, the show fails miserably and no serious aficionado of HGTV would ever take this half-hour show seriously. At least on “Color Splash”, the fey host with the sleeveless tees shows an admirable sense of aesthetics and an overall vision of how to really transform, say, a family room. Read the rest of this entry »
Times of Yore
How well do you remember the pop songs when you were younger?
I remember being 8 years old one Christmas morning when the best gift I got was a small Panasonic transistor AM/FM radio. That silver radio, about the size of my palm, was with me all the time, including the endless Sunday mornings from 9 until noon, when I faithfully listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, and all those mawkish “long distance dedications”.
Obsessive pop music fan and data collector that I am, I used to write down every #1 song and kept track of this for years. It’s a shame, now, that as of last week, Kasem, at the ripe age of 79, has finally (finally!) decided to retire. It’s the end of an era indeed. Read the rest of this entry »
Once again I have squandered several weeks of Saturday night summers by watching TV. Last year it was “Swingtown”, the retro series whose plot seemed only to consist of upwardly mobile Chicago swingers in the bell bottomed, sideburned 70s. It even had a cool soundtrack that CBS endlessly plugged; a Time-Life 70s hit collection CD was hawked every week in a commercial by that old Easy Rider himself, Peter Fonda! Read the rest of this entry »
The Barrier is Broken: A Sub $100 Blu-ray Player
So now we finally have it. For all of you HD movie aficionados who’ve been holding out on buying a Blu-ray player in the hope that the psychological $100 price barrier would be broken: your day has come. Read the rest of this entry »
