Apparently Wine Snobs Are Actually Just Snobs

Steven Levitt over at Freakonomics has a good post about a blind wine tasting he held at Harvard's Society of Fellows. The result? "fancy people with lots of training can tell cheap wine from expensive wine, but regular people cannot."

I thus had two different expensive wines and one cheap one. I tried to
make things more interesting by splitting one of the expensive bottles
into two different decanters.

The results could not have been better for me. There was no significant
difference in the rating across the four wines; the cheap wine did just
as well as the expensive ones. Even more remarkable, for a given
drinker, there was more variation in the rankings they gave to the two
samples drawn from the same bottle than there was between any other two
samples.

Who says he has no sense of humor?

Responding to recent criticisms about his lack of humor, Barack Obama's campaign has released a set of Obama jokes, to help late-night TV hosts. Here are my two favorites:

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station
attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, "You know, we don't
get many kangaroos here." Barack Obama replies, "At these prices, I'm
not surprised. That's why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign
oil."

A Christian, a Jew and Barack Obama are in a rowboat in the middle of
the ocean. Barack Obama says, "This joke isn't going to work because
there's no Muslim in this boat."

The Cause Of, and Solution To, All of Life's Problems

New York Magazine has a short review of Ian Gately's new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol. Worth a browse, if only for the drink-related trivia. For example, did you know:

Aztecs liked fermented sap, but had a legal drinking age (52)
higher than their average life expectancy—although every four years
they’d hold a New Year’s festival called “Drunkenness of Children,” at
which all citizens, including toddlers, were required to drink.

and...

Before Europeans arrived, many Native Americans didn’t even have a word for drunkenness.

Mad Men

I don't watch the show, nor do I know anything about the Advertising industry, but I found this essay/memoir on Design Observer totally fascinating.

When I started at Compton, account executives on Procter & Gamble
generally had MBAs from Penn, Columbia or Dartmouth. We were white and
generally male. We bought our (white) shirts at one of three places:
Brooks Brothers, J.Press ("of New Haven"), or Paul Stuart. There were
no other acceptable choices. I remember one black person, a messenger.
I remember firing a female account executive who was not quite cutting
it, and my peers giving me a wink over drinks.

Now I am become Death

Today, July 16, marks the anniversary of the first successful atomic bomb test near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Wired has an article here. Robert Oppenheimer's famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds", while site director Kenneth Bainbridge put it, "Now we are all sons-of-bitches." Money quote:

With gallows humor, the Los Alamos physicists got up a betting pool on
the possible yield of the bomb. Estimates ranged from zero to as high
as 45,000 tons of TNT. Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on
the bomb destroying all life on the planet.

Summer blogging

It's become clear that I'm not able to keep up my regular pace of blogging these days, what with work, travel and the occasional need for sleep. There's apparently a way to set up regular blog feeds, which I will work on in the near future, but for now I'll try and get at least a couple of posts up each week. Expect less-than-regular posts for the next couple of months.

McSweeney's Twofer

I was just reminded of the existence of McSweeney's, the hipster/literati blog that I don't read particularly often but usually enjoy when I do. Today, within 5 mins of browsing, I had found two funny posts, one with a variety of Lit 101 books reduced to three lines apiece, and another with made-up jokes about Lacan. Both are funny, see excerpts below.

1984

WINSTON: Don't tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We're the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats.

Q: How is a Lacanian psychoanalytic session like a penis?

A: They are both of variable length.