(Shhh…don’t tell Frank, but it’s a GRAPH, not a map. You can download the full-sized version at Malts.com)

I tried to develop a taste for Scotch, I really did, but it just isn’t my drink. Bridget even bought me a bottle of Balvenie for Christmas a couple of years ago, but it’s still just sitting there, unloved, right next to the mostly-empty bottle of Jameson.

Online trend-watcher mag EcoSalon recently had this article about “The 10 Types Of Foodies”. It’s mostly on-track, although even the writer can’t really make any distinction between Number 1 and Number 10. I suppose her editor wouldn’t accept a “Top Nine” list.

I have to cop to being at least five of the ten nine at one point or another in my foodie phase. The one phase she’s missing, that I definitely went through, was the “knows every unknown spot in town”. In big cities, where there’s a lot of genuinely first-rate high-end dining, you earn a lot of foodie cred for knowing the local scene.

I consider myself sort of post-foodie now. I gave up serious cooking, I can’t afford high-end dining, and having tried all those local joints I can’t be bothered to go back to the majority of them. I never take pictures of food anymore. I rarely bother with wine, and now that I’m lactose-intolerant I have to curtail my cheese eating quite substantially. Being able to buy pretty much anything you could possibly want online has diminished the thrill of scoring hard-to-find items, and I was never much for weird exotic things in the first place. It’s a lot simpler.

Back in the summer of 2010, we made a little weekend getaway to South Deerfield, Massachusetts to visit the Yankee Candle factory store and see Old Deerfield. As things turned out, the visit to the historic village got washed out by rain, but we did spend an afternoon at the candle store, and one of the highlights of that was when Bridget had a wax casting made of her hand (as you can see above).

After Bridget was done, Charlotte wanted to give it a try, too, but as soon as she stuck her hand in the molten wax she had a change of heart. We tried to convince her it was okay and that she should go through with it, but I guess we must have left a lasting impression on the guy running the activity, because I read this post at the funny Not Always Right.com blog the other day, and it sounds SO MUCH like my charming wife that it HAS to be about us.

Most American cities have recognizable neighborhoods with their own demographic identities, but Chicago is perhaps the quintessential city of neighborhoods (link downloads a PDF).

Designer Steve Shanabruch has undertaken a small project to create unofficial logos for some of Chicago’s better-known neighborhoods and you can see them on his website (via Coudal Partners). They have a decidedly retro feel to them, harking to design and typography from Chicago’s 1920s heyday. As such, they don’t necessarily reflect the nature of some of those neighborhoods as you would find them today, but still capture some of the history and heritage of those places. He’s only got about a dozen so far, and there are officially about 200 neighborhoods according to a landmark survey done by the city in the 1970s, so he’s got a long way to go.

If you want some inside dope for next year’s Name Of The Year contest, you could do worse than to have a look at this list of very amusing names over at Futility Closet.

The stories are heartbreaking, infuriating, inspiring, and they are ours. These people are workers, business owners, teachers, parents. They are not millionaires, bankers, CEOs, or celebrities. They don’t want bailouts or tax cuts, they want the inequity that has concentrated most of the wealth of the nation into the hands of one percent of the population to end. They are…WE are the 99 percent.

The outages occur because the Ugandan government exports electrical power and is willing to force its citizens to go without for the sake of the revenue. Remembering the Enron-created electricity crisis in California back in the early 2000s, and thinking about the utter determination of current Republican and Tea Party politicians to ransack the economy and refusal to invest in our infrastructure, as well as their libertarian pie-in-the-sky nonsense, I read this paragraph wondering if she was not just describing Uganda as it is today, but America as it could be in the not-so-distant future (I have highlighted the sentence I think really nails it):

Small businesses, including grocery stores, without generators lose money and products due to outages. Families who have electric appliances are forced to abandon the conveniences they worked to afford. Other families can’t iron clothing, some can’t boil water, or watch the news- all of which are key to health and working. As one of five children now doing homework around an oil lamp every night, it is not very conducive to learning either. Much worse, hospitals may have some generated power, but certainly not enough for all wards if they have a generator at all. People dependent on any sort of machine for life really do die. Doctors who are asked about the situation are resigned more than indignant. Some people protest, but who do you turn to when you no longer have faith in your government to stand up for you and provide basic services? My host-mom has been fuming about our electricity bill since in came yesterday. We have been billed for 15 more hours of power than we actually had because they meter was kept running. This is regression for a nation that had already developed beyond this point. As Becky’s host father said, it really isn’t about how you get by, he is willing to pay for the power, why shouldn’t he have it? Who is anyone to say he can get by just fine without?

]]> http://www.briankaneonline.com/2011/09/19/uganda-2011-or-america-2020/feed/ 0 http://www.briankaneonline.com/2011/09/12/and-the-trains-run-on-time/ http://www.briankaneonline.com/2011/09/12/and-the-trains-run-on-time/#comments Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:36:59 +0000 Brian http://www.briankaneonline.com/?p=8233

Just when you thought there weren’t ANY World War II propaganda posters you hadn’t seen on the Internet, John Ptak proves you wrong with a selection of posters from Fascist Italy. I kind of liked this one with the Axis powers and their formidable allies such as Finland and Romania all pumped up for some guy named Vince Remo.

]]> http://www.briankaneonline.com/2011/09/12/and-the-trains-run-on-time/feed/ 0 http://www.briankaneonline.com/2011/09/01/son-daughter-of-blog/ http://www.briankaneonline.com/2011/09/01/son-daughter-of-blog/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 15:34:51 +0000 Brian http://www.briankaneonline.com/?p=8167 It must be something in the water. Not one but two of my blogging buddies now have daughters off traveling the world AND blogging about it at the same time.

First, there’s Iris, whom you and I have known for so many years as “Beta” on her father’s blog that I’d almost convinced myself that was her real name. (Which reminds me of the time Mig sent me to a cello-maker’s house to scout a carbon-fiber cello for him and I learned his real name from that guy’s wife…another story, but your secret is safe with me as long as you keep the payments regular, “Mig”) Annnnnnyway, Beta has been spending the last few weeks tramping around India with what seems to be a somewhat variable group of young people. The blog is called “meinasia”, which was supposed to be a sort of bilingual word-play being both “me in asia” for the English-speakers and “mein asia” for the German-speakers (The Family Von Mig lives in Austria, where they make dirndl skirts and sell watery beer to gullible American tourists). Apparently, though, the German part of it doesn’t really work. Whatev. The blog reads like a behind-the-scenes look at an episode of “The Amazing Race”, with train stations, airports, weird border crossings, and scary encounters with pushy souvenir peddlers. Because the trip is only six weeks long, the posting won’t last much longer, so be sure to have a look before it ends.

Meanwhile, my old friend Tony‘s oldest daughter, Lindsay (who, to the best of my knowledge has never had a cool Internet secret name) got on an airplane during the middle of Hurricane Irene and headed off for an entire semester in Uganda. Pretty ballsy, I think. She also fired up a blog as she was on her way. It’s called “Lindsay Leaves Home”, which doesn’t leave a lot of mystery, but at least there aren’t a bunch of people in Austria scratching their heads over some possible double entendre. When most of us think about a semester abroad, we tend to think about kicking around Paris or Rome, learning how to drink too much wine, smoke nasty cigarettes, and hookup with oversexed Eurotrash. There’s not a lot of glamour and romance in Uganda, I’m afraid, but not many Americans have even the slightest comprehension about life in a Third World nation, so the learning opportunity seems a bit more valuable than the typical 16-week European holiday semester. Lindsay is a pretty intense person anyway, so that’s fair. She’s only been in-country for a couple of days, so the stories haven’t had time to go too far yet. I hope she sticks with it for the whole time.

The thing that’s fascinating about blogs like these is that you get to learn about the authors as they are learning about themselves. Old geezers like me and Mig and Tony, we are fully-formed creatures for the most part, and if our blogs are revelatory, it’s usually because we carefully choose what we want people to see. Soon enough these young women will be vastly different people than they are right now, and the journeys they have set upon will be the agents of a great deal of that change.

I don’t know if anyone will be blogging at all another decade from now, when Charlotte is old enough to set out on such an adventure. And I genuinely despair that the world will not offer itself up so readily for her then. But even if she doesn’t get to see some exotic far-off place, I know she will find other agents of change that will shape her life, and I hope I get to see it through her eyes just like this.

]]> http://www.briankaneonline.com/2011/09/01/son-daughter-of-blog/feed/ 6 http://www.briankaneonline.com/2011/08/31/end-of-an-era/ http://www.briankaneonline.com/2011/08/31/end-of-an-era/#comments Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:32:41 +0000 Brian http://www.briankaneonline.com/?p=8145

One of the earliest and best-known original blogs, Jim Romanesko’s “Obscure Store And Reading Room”, is being retired at the end of this week after thirteen years. Romanesko is also giving up his gig blogging for the professional journalism industry website Poynter.org (which *will* remain running). He isn’t giving up blogging, he’s consolidating into a single new site, but the end of Obscure Store is genuinely a milestone in the world of blogging.

I have been a regular reader of the site since the fall of 2000, not long after I launched this website and realized I needed to find some sources if I was going to find things to post with any regularity. From the outset, Romanesko was tuned into enough newspapers and news organizations to have plenty of links to weird news stories, when most of us were still figuring out the whole idea of using the Internet to get and share news. As my blog evolved, I found plenty of other places to find stuff and didn’t very often use his links, but I read it virtually every day. In the olden days, he also had an extremely eclectic blogroll, linking to online zines, other blogs, and unusual websites. A lot of those sites are long since gone and completely forgotten, but it is via Obscure Store that I first came upon MetaFilter, which was also only about a year old in the fall of 2000. Eleven years later, that site remains one of the premiere community sites on the web and is one of my main hangouts online. I believe I also “discovered” FARK through Obscure Store, and the very-much-missed Grow-a-brain.

I’ll be very interested to see how Jim Romanesko’s new site develops, but I will unquestionably miss one of the real legends of the Golden Age of Blogs.

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