On Friday, we drove up to Vancouver to celebrate Lee’s 40th Birthday. Mark and Lee live in London and have come back to Seattle for a couple weeks. We got a late start, we left Seattle at 2pm and got to the border by 4pm, but with Friday traffic into Vancouver, it took another hour to get to “our hotel”:http://www.opushotel.com/. We haven’t been to Vancouver since “Gay’s (late) birthday in 2005″:http://troyandgay.com/blog/2005/04/17/vancouver-2/.
This is sad. “Robert Mondavi died today”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/business/17mondavi.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin at 94. I just read and enjoyed his autobiography “Harvests of Joy” and another great book that tells the story of Napa Valley, “Napa: An American Eden”, in which Mondavi played a significant role. He was a great thing for the American wine industry, both technologically and in marketing. His story is an inspiring one: He was run out of his family’s wine business after a feud with his brother and, at the age of 52 when most people would have started to think about retiring, started his own winery and worked hard for many years to make great American wines that could compete at the level of French wines.
Gay and I visited Napa Valley in 1998 and rode our tandem through it, stopping at the Mondavi winery and snuck into the “Opus One”:http://www.opusonewinery.com/ winery for a memorable lunch on top of the beautiful winery. Hardly a month would go by when a bottle of Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon wasn’t in our wine rack waiting to be drank. Cheers!
“Gasoline is cheap”:http://www.slate.com/id/2191491/:
bq. When measured on an inflation-adjusted basis, the current price of gasoline is only slightly higher than it was in 1922. According to the Energy Information Administration, in 1922, gasoline cost the current-day equivalent of $3.11. Today, according to the EIA, gasoline is selling for about $3.77 per gallon, only about 20 percent more than 86 years ago.
bq. Gasoline is also a fairly minor expense when you consider the overall cost of car ownership. In 1975, gasoline made up 33.4 percent of the total cost of owning and operating a car. By 2006, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, gasoline costs had declined to just 17.1 percent of the total cost of car ownership. … the fixed costs of ownership-insurance, licensing, taxes, and financing-have increased nearly fivefold since 1975. Maintenance costs have also quintupled over the same time period.
bq. On the environmental front, people concerned about greenhouse-gas emissions should be cheering today’s oil prices. Expensive motor fuel is the only thing that will lead consumers to use less oil and make the switch to hybrid vehicles, smaller cars, and public transit. Higher oil prices are convincing automakers to change their fleets.
The Washington Post talks about “misogyny in the Democratic race”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/14/AR2008051403090.html. It’s sad that in 2008 women are still kept down and that it’s acceptable. I imagine one day I’ll have to explain to my daughter that it’s good to be smart and ambitious. That’s a talk I won’t need to have with my son.
There really is such thing as “free beer”:http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/when-bad-laws-create-good-outcomes-prohibition-edition/!:
bq. Several restaurants participated in a local food festival, serving tasty morsels in a public square. For $10, I could buy 5 “tickets” entitling me to five small plates of Philly’s finest offerings. Interestingly, only one group was offering its wares for free: the Philly brewery serving locally made beer.
bq. Presumably this reflects the difficulty of obtaining licensing to sell their brews. So the beer tasting was free, and instead of just enjoying one glass with dinner, I may have ended up indulging a bit more, tasting each of their varieties.
But it must have been lousy beer:
bq. A strange postscript to this event: We usually expect prices to equate supply and demand. Yet at 9 p.m., as the food festival was closing down, most of the restaurants charging $2 per plate were out of food, but the brewery still had ample supply, continuing to sell its beer at $0 a pop.
Wow, I wish “BeerMenus.com”:http://beermenus.com would add Seattle bars and pubs to its database. It’s Manhattan and Brooklyn only now.
(Source: “NYT Blogs”:http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/1386-bottles-of-beer-on-the-web/index.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)
Hmmm…. by my calculations, Gay scores 5 merits and 7 demerits for a total of -2 on the “Wife’s Marital Rating Scale”:http://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/05/marriage.html used by a respected marriage counselor in 1939.
My brother met the President “6 weeks ago”:http://troyandgay.com/blog/2008/03/27/my-brother-met-the-president/, here’s his photo. Left to right, President Bush, King Hakala:
My brother makes him look short.
How do you know that Intelligent Design is not science? “George W. Bush understands it”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201686.html.
If you want to see evidence that the US actually can make the correct decisions, and overwhelmingly so, in the courts, in public opinion and in education, watch “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial”:http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Judgment_Day_Intelligent_Design_on_Trial/70086394?trkid=226870. It’ll restore your belief that America is not full of ignorant hillbillies.
Although for Seattle residents, you’ll be embarrassed that a “think tank” on Intelligent Design, “the Discovery Institute”:http://www.discovery.org, is headquartered in Seattle. Even the Catholic Church, hardly the bastion of scientific understanding, started accepting Evolution as far back as the 1950s — 30 years _before_ they accepted that the Earth revolves around the Sun! Yet there are some Americans who believe don’t believe in Evolution cuz da bible tells ‘em so.
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