I am a big fan of the wine writing of Beppi Crosariol in the Globe and Mail. He writes well about all sorts of wine, from the rare and expensive to the everyday lowcost wines. In this article, A rare value chardonnay from Burgundy – The Globe and Mail, he writes about a

“terrific Burgundy value was just released … in Ontario… Louis Jadot Macon Villages 2007 ($14.95, product No. 164145) (it) will reach a few other provinces before the year is out. (It’s) medium-bodied, it’s clean and crisp, with a moderately silky texture and notes of tangy lemon and chalky minerality. The toasty, vanilla-like influence from oak-barrel aging is subtle and nicely integrated into the fruit. It could match nicely with a lot of light, vegetarian fare but would probably be best paired with chicken, veal or salmon. For the money, it should make connoisseurs just as happy as bargain-hunters.

It just makes you want to serve up some roast chicken and have a glass.

As for reds, he notes two of my favorite Italian reds….

“Ready for a killer red bargain? It’s name is Citra Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 2008 ($7.45, No. 446633). Familiar to bargain hunters and Italian-wedding caterers across Canada, the Citra brand from Italy did wonders with this wine from the 2008 vintage. Ultra smooth and remarkably concentrated for a wine of its price, it delivers a ripe, almost voluptuous cherry core and nice balancing acidity. Very versatile and nice on it’s own.

Returning to full inventory after a brisk sales run is another great Italian value that I’ve mentioned before, Spinelli Malbec (discounted by 50 cents to $7.45 until April 25, No. 143750). Full-bodied, succulent and smooth, it offers up juicy berry flavours and a hint of mulled-wine spice.”

Spinelli has a number of great, low cost red wines at the LCBO. They are Farnese are worth a try.

Finally, in this article he talk about Guigal from France and Côtes-du-Rhône wines. Guigal’s Côtes-du-Rhône is consistently good and well worth it, although I find many of the Côtes-du-Rhônes at the LCBO are good to very good. Now that BBQ season is coming upon us, you might want to search for them, starting with Guigal’s.

While this is a really good article in some ways, Big Banks Draw Big Profits From Microloans to Poor – NYTimes.com, it is so snarky that it detracts from the reporting. For example:

“In recent years, the idea of giving small loans to poor people became the darling of the development world….”

or

“Actors like Natalie Portman and Michael Douglas lent their boldface names to the cause”

finally

“The fracas over preserving the field’s saintly aura “

It’s really simple. Microloans work well when they enable people to borrow very small amounts of money at a reasonable rate in order to kick start their business or help them deal with other financial needs that they could not have satisfied through other means. Microloans are not meant to be “trendy” or “saintly”, any more than lines of credit or personal credit cards are. Now they that have been shown to be profitable, the crooks and loan sharks are moving in. As the economist who started it says very well:

“We created microcredit to fight the loan sharks; we didn’t create microcredit to encourage new loan sharks…Microcredit should be seen as an opportunity to help people get out of poverty in a business way, but not as an opportunity to make money out of poor people.”

I think it is a testament to the strength of microfinancing that the greedy are getting involved. But while testament is fine in a limited way, what is really needed is better governance of the lenders to restrict them from ripping off people who have little money. That’s what’s needed. What isn’t needed is snark on the subject matter from Neil MacFarquhar of the NYTimes.com.

I hope Americans read this opinion piece by Timothy Geithner in the Washington Post:  How to prevent America’s next financial crisis. And once they read it, I hope they will call their representatives in Washington and urge them to support this reform.  I can say this even as a Canadian, because what affects Americans this way affects the rest of the world as well. We are looking for Americans to take the lead here and get a grip on the Weapons of Financial Mass Destruction, as Warren Buffett once referred to derivatives (PDF link).

… act as a calculator, look up area codes and convert currency? Sure, it can find web sites, but as this article, 10 Simple Google Search Tricks – NYTimes.com shows, it can do a few things you likely didn’t know it could do. Neat!

Simple: he could retire/rest on his laurels. Instead, he is incessant in looking for new venues for his ideas. Here’s his latest: designing for Coca-Cola, no less.

Anyone looking to get pregnant and has heard of this should read this great piece of journalism, Robitussin: Pregnancy in a $5 bottle of hope – The Globe and Mail. It covers the story very well in addition to showing what I suspect is the state of affairs with regards to human fertility. What was also interesting is that it highlights that the makers of Robitussin are not jumping on the bandwagon with this potential new feature of their product. Lastly, even the comments — always a weak spot in the Globe and Mail — are good.

Superb science/health reporting.

What I like about WeekPlan is that it is not just a todo list tool (though there’s nothing wrong with that). Instead, it is a weekly dashboard with your todos for the week as well as your goals that you can break down by into groups (E.g. here the author has stated his Dad goals, his husband goals and his own goals. You could add work goals, creative goals, etc.).

It also has likes to your overall vision, helping you stay focused. As Lifehacker states, WeekPlan Pairs Your Tasks with the Motivation Behind Them. Check out the Lifehacker article and then checkout the tool. It’s simple and easy to use. I highly recommend it.

Looking at this photo and reading this post on the blog on The Edge of the American West and learning that Vishniac selected his photos to suggest a narrative made me think of the phrase: what we want.

Like this….

…go see…Intimate Vignettes: Selling photographs

A fascinating documentary by a fascinating documentarian on the art of the street and the search for the elusive Banksy. Watch:

YouTube – Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop (Exclusive 5 min Extended Sneak Peek)

P.S. Love the title.

Kevin Kelly coins a new term, The Shirky Principle: “complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.” Sadly, though, he refers to the Peter Principle in devising the term.

The Peter Principle “says that a person in an organization will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. At which point their past achievements will prevent them from being fired, but their incompetence at this new level will prevent them from being promoted again, so they stagnate in their incompetence.” It was developed by Dr. Lawrence Peter in the 1960’s. I think it may have had alot of revelance in the 1960s and the 1970s, but when I started working in the 1980s, a new phenomena was occurring. In the 1980s, you had the notion of plateauing. With plateauing, no one was being promoted, competent or incompetent. The Peter Principle was, if not void, was severely limited. People at higher stations in the company who started work in the 1950s and 1960s may have experienced the Peter Principle, but people who started work after the baby boomers had been promoted did not. Indeed, may people who suffered from plateauing had a different outlook on work than the baby boomers, an outlook that was resigned to not getting promoted, and looked at work differently.  The same was even more true for new employees that came after that.

That leads me back to The Shirky Principle.  I wonder at what point it will no longer be true. It may be that it has no sooner been stated that it is already becoming obsolete.

This post by Clay Shirky, The Collapse of Complex Business Models, has been getting alot of attention, as it should. Let me cut to the chase and by slightly paraphrasing Shirky, highlight the main idea:

“Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond….When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. … Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.”

I think this is a valuable analysis of a complex system, and for complex systems where all the inputs and outputs are tightly linked together, I think that this collapsing behavoir is one you would expect to see.

I also think his examples of media companies and AT&T are good ones, because you have companies where all the input (the lines of business and associated revenue streams) are tightly coupled to the output (profitability). Furthermore, the dominant lines of business (e.g. print) constrict the subservient but more profitable lines of business (new media).

I think there are a few things wrong with this idea, however, and they center around the ideas of complexity and collapse. Some of the organizations with complex business models that are due for a collapse aren’t just in trouble because of complexity; they are also in trouble because they are singularly focused. There is little if any diversification. They are not just inflexible: they’re like one big tower of playing cards. Smart investors and businesses diversify their portfolio. Not only that, but smart businesses should have parts of their businesses in different phases of development, so that if a new line of business collapses, other new lines of business or mature lines of business will continue to support the growth of the company. Indeed, in most organizations, the mature lines of business may be complex, but the new lines should be less so. If not, then this is an organization behavioral problem more than a complex business model problem.

There is also the notion of how you manage collapse. For example, smart businesses recognize mature lines of business and know how to milk them while preparing for their eventual demise. There is not so much a collapse as there is an orderly winding down of the business. It takes discipline and an acknowledgement of the circumstances, but the collapse is orderly, not catastrophic (walking down stairs versus tumbling down them). Companies that don’t have discipline and don’t acknowledge the circumstances will fail catastrophically.

A number of years ago CityTV in Toronto took on a new, cheaper approach to gathering the news. It was simpler and cheaper than the way other media companies did it. But it was effective, and it forced the other companies to do that. The other media companies did not collapse, however. They adjusted, however painfully.

I think Rupert Murdoch is trying to make the adjustment as well. He is experimenting with different forms of media (MySpace) and different ways of generating revenue. He is failing to some degree, which makes it easy for people to say he is a failure. He may fail completely, unable and incapable of generating new business models to support his company. But if he succeeds, he will have found a way to be profitable with new media and likely generating new, simpler business models that will support them. Other companies will follow his lead. (Or someone else’s lead.)

I think media/communications companies may have to abandon some of their business models, but I think such companies will remain and they will eventually develop new mature and complex business models.

Anyway, some thoughts on Shirky’s post. It’s a great post, and a great extention of the idea of collapsing complex societies to collapsing complex business models.

It seems absurd at first thought. But read this article in The Atlantic, on Papalgate: The Pope’s Nixon Problem, which starts this way:

The ever-widening scandal over Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of Church sex abuse cases has an eerily familiar ring: it’s unfolding in much the same way that Watergate played out for Richard Nixon. Each day brings new revelations, to which the Pope and his supporters respond with carefully crafted explanations and pointed counterattacks.

Is this Watergate with holy water? Here’s a look at some of the ways in which Pope Benedict XVI has found himself caught up in a scandal of Nixonian proportions…

As author Tom McNichol explains, there are four ways this is similar:

1. The nagging question: What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?
2. It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Cover-up
3. Shooting the Messenger
4. The Dangers of Infallibility

I see alot of #3 happening right now. Obvious the Pope has risk #4 in a big way. As more and more investigation happens in various countries, #2 is becoming a bigger and bigger concern. Which leads more and more to #1.

Difficult times for the Pope and the Church lie ahead.

according to the BBC News, they are thinking of allowing proper nouns to come into play in Scrabble rule change. Proper Nouns!? Madness! Next they’ll be letting you form words on the diagonal! 🙂

I am not a conservative person by default, but when it comes to such things as Scrabble, I think the way the game is currently designed is perfectly fine.

Bruce Schneier, Chief Security Technology Officer for BT, has a good article in Forbes on Google And Facebook’s Privacy Illusion.

The commentary is good and something I strongly agree with. If I can effectively sum up some of his points:

• Young people care about privacy.

• To them privacy is about control.

• Big companies like Google and Facebook have a vested interest in you surrendering some of that control, and so they take steps to make it easier for you to give up that control.

Before you read another “privacy is dead” article, read Bruce’s first/instead.

What do Chicken Little, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and How to Slay your Dragon have in common? Well, you could apply this paragraph which I tweaked very slightly from the Movie Review in the NYTimes.com by A.O. Scott on How to Train Your Dragon and use it for all three movies:

The hero is a misfit adolescent who proves his mettle, pleases his hard-to-please father and saves the world while learning important lessons and rattling off some wisecracks. Supporting characters include a spitfire love interest, a gaggle of goofy friends and a cute nonhuman sidekick.

(Ok, everyone is non-human in Chicken Little, but there is still the sidekick.)

There’s other similarities: there is no mother, the father is big and gruff and has a hard time with emotions and is ashamed of his son, and the son has a secret. The films are so similar I looked them up on imdb.com to see if they came from the same studio or same writers, but they don’t.

I liked all three films, as did my son. But I think there are better ways to show father-son relationships, and I hope they show them in upcoming animated films. At least these fathers aren’t the hopeless inept fathers I see so often on TV shows. Still.

I love this video: I love the song, the setting, the way it’s filmed with the splitting of the frame. Of course Ayo is gorgeous and the many things she wears are beautiful as well. All in all, a fine way to spend some time on as Sunday evening. Here’s Ayo, “Life Is Real”.

…then read this: iPhone Users Are More Than Willing to Pay for Apps – But Don’t Want to Pay a Lot.

Bottom line: people will pay some money, but not alot (as the folks at Wolfram discovered with their $50 app).

In this article Historicist: Greeting Easter 1910 – Torontoist there is an ad featuring men’s hats from a century ago:

…with Silk Hats (think:deluxe top hat), derby hats (think: English banker) and alpine hat (think: German hat geat in Oktoberfest). Clearly if women had to have their Easter bonnet, then men had to have their corresponding new hat to make the social circuit at this time of year. Eventually silk hats faded away sometime after 1919, and by the time the 1960s arrived, hats in general for men disappeared. (Unless you count baseball hats, which I don’t.)

Back in 1910 I am sure people would have found it difficult to believe that men would go out in public without a good hat. I wonder what people a century from now will think about our attire. I am sure that they will find it odd we still wear two piece suits and neckties. Perhaps even dress shoes as they are now will see odd.

It’s hard to match up orange with other colours. But one thing that goes well with it is beige, as you can see here:

The beige mutes the orange which brightens up the beige. A great balance of colours.

(Found via A CUP OF JO: Airplane wedding)

If you have alot of money, you can get clothing that is constructed impeccably of the finest materials. But there’s more to having style than that. Indeed, as this Joe Fresh show at Toronto Fashion Week illustrates, you can look very stylish indeed with low cost clothing. H&M have been proving this for years by having big name designers like Lagerfeld and McCartney creating lines for them. Now Joe Fresh does it too.

It’s all about how you wear your clothes and carry yourself that determines your style. Not how much it all costs.

I’ve been reading alot of pro and con articles about the iPad. David Pogue at the NYtimes.com had both in his review. And now there’s this:
Cost and Redundancy Issues Confront iPad – NYTimes.com. I partially agree with this: the early adopters are going the snap up the iPad, just like they did with the iPhone. And if the iPad was a design dead end, then I would worry if I were Apple. But of course it’s not a design dead end; if anything, it is designed as just the start of a new platform for people. There are lots of things that can be done to improve the iPad, and I am willing to bet Apple will include those overtime. Overtime the people with netbooks and laptops and other portable devices will be looking to upgrade and then they will buy an iPad or some other tablet device. (I wouldn’t assume that Microsoft is going to be left out of this, or RIM for that matter, or Acer, or HP or Dell.)

I would be hard pressed to imagine some future other than one where Apple sells alot of these. Then other devices like the Touch will die off. Costs will come down as competition ramps up, too. But by that time, Apple will have some new device. It’s a pattern we have seen before, and I can’t see it being broken.

As for me, eventually I will get one, I think. I love my Touch, I have a few iPods, and I like my netbook and my laptop. I think it will be a good thing to have, but it is just a computing device, and not even a terribly innovative one at that.

The question is hard to hear, but the answer is clear, in many ways.

Philp Pullman talked about his book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

(Found via Andrew Sullivan)

Ok…I am a big fan of CBR….I mean, what’s not to like?

YouTube – Corinne Bailey Rae – Closer (Live on Ellen DeGeneres 01-28-2010) [HD]

If you get nothing else from this frightening article, How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords on Lifehacker, get this: make you password is long (at least 8 characters) and make sure it has upper and lower case letters with some numbers and other characters (e.g. “curse” symbols like #$%@) mixed in.

I knew alot of this stuff, but something I should have guessed was this: if you can’t use a different password for every site you log into, make sure the really important passwords (e.g. for banking) is very good and very different than those sites (e.g. newspaper sites) which may have weaker security.

Hey, it’s your money and your identity. Protect it.

Well, if you are Bill Cunningham (who is 81), you want to continue to be a great photographer. The Lens Blog has a story about Cunningham and a documentary about him. What I love about him, though, is that he is “old” only in the sense of having lived many years. Otherwise, there is little that is old about Bill Cunningham. He is a hard working fashion photographer, a role that needs you to think “new”, not “old”.

So what do you want to be when you are 80? And if you are 80 already, then you should be planning your 100 birthday. Please invite me.

There’s a good review of the new Toronto bistro, Cafe Leopold, in blogTO. I am a big fan of bistros and their well prepared, tasty, unpretentious, (and great value) food. Seeing new bistros open cheers me up, which makes me happy and looking forward to checking out Cafe Leopold. If you are out on St. Clair, just west of Bathurst, and you are feeling hungry, look for this place….

I loved this photo from…well you guess…

Gizmodo has a post on the body language of the two men which is interesting, even if I am skeptical of it, here. What I thought was interesting is that Steve Jobs dresses in a black shirt, jeans and running shoes ALL THE TIME! I thought he just did that for big presentations. I guess he finds it simplifies his life. I also thought it interesting that they are just hanging out in a coffee shop (Starbucks?) just like the rest of us. No big fancy schmantzy board room meeting somewhere. Maybe they accidentally ran into each other! (“Steve?” “Eric!” “Steve! Let’s have a coffee and talk shop!” :))

WTH? In the United States at least, after HCR (Health Care Reform) we are going to see alot of people in the media and politicians talking about FinReg (Financial Regulation Reform). And just like with HCR, Ezra Klein at his Think Tank blog at the Washington Post has alot more good things to say about Finreg, including this. Well worth a read.

…I had a difficult time conveying what makes a Mark Rothko or a Barnett Newman painting great. 

However, seeing these three painting from the wonderful blog 2 or 3 things I know might do a better job of explaining it visually than my words did.

Here we have “green”:

and “black”

and “white”

Each image has a different feel to it, and the relationships of the colours to each other affects the way we perceive the works, as well as how the viewer relates to these colours generally. But having an image of a house on a horizon makes that somewhat easier to comprehend somehow than if we remove the house. The house gives us a bridge to appreciating the expressionistic nature of the paintings. Indeed, the paintings are practically abstract, though the iconic nature of a house makes us think otherwise.

 At least it seems that way to me. What do you think?

Then you want to read dye naturally at oliveloaf design. Easy to do and good looking results!

How is this done? Well, Pentagram has done work at the Achievement First Endeavor Middle School in Brooklyn to inspire children and teachers there to work hard and succeed. The work was part of a “refurbishment and expansion of an existing building” and its a powerful example of how something smart and low cost be very effective.

I love this in particular. For kids in middle school at some point must think: why must I continue to go to school and learn all this stuff? And there are lots of reasons. But I think these five, painted here, are essential reasons, and a great thing to constantly remind people of:

I also thought this was a great thing for anyone going up the stairs to see:

Go to Pentagram’s site for more info.

(Thanks to the great blog Sunshine and Design for pointing this out.)

Sinead O’Connor has written a searing editorial in the washingtonpost.com criticizing the Pope for what has happened and what is being done with regards to the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church. Regardless how you feel about this issue, it is a remarkably well written piece and deserves a reading for many reasons.

One of those reasons is an aside, but a worthwhile one. O’Connor was sent to a Magdalene laundry for 18 months when she was younger. I only had a vague idea what this was. Not only did I learn more about them in this wikipedia article, but that article itself was well worthwhile reading, especially in light of everything.

(Photo of Magdalene Laundry in England, early 20th century, from wikipedia)

I love this photo:

From the White House photostream on flickr: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2682/4470941729_f4fdf684ea.jpg

P032810PS-0918 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

On the sex abuse scandal and what can the Pope do? Rod Dreher at beliefnet offers this advice:

I think the best thing he can do now — indeed, possibly the only sensible thing — is to admit any role he had in transferring priests and failing to do the right thing by sex abuse victims. Explain these decisions in context of the times and the culture, but overall don’t be defensive, but rather be humble. Confess all, and be publicly penitent. Many people will scream condemnation at the pope and the Church, and much of that will have been deserved. But I think men and women of goodwill will appreciate a genuine attempt to come to terms with this evil situation, not by denying and stonewalling, but by admitting and asking forgiveness. The pope already has uttered some extraordinary words of regret, but I think people are looking for something more.

I think this advice makes sense for American public officials. The American people are more expectant and accepting of leaders who go this route.

But the Pope is not an American official. And what might be acceptible for Americans may not be acceptible for European, South American, African or Asian Catholics. I would say that such a confession might wreck more damage to the Catholic church as an institution than stonewalling will. That doesn’t make stonewalling right, but it is something to consider in watching the behavior of the Pope and the Church.

I also believe that people who think the Pope is going to resign are looking at the Pope as a politician — which he is — and not as a Pope in a long line of Popes. Switching Popes is a big deal. Plus I think Benedict has wanted to be Pope for a very long time. Given that, there will be lots of steps that will be taken before resignation occurs.