American Madness

Wine has always been a drink that folks bought in big bottles that served a couple of drinks. Every now and then a company would produce a small bottle which had only 2 or 3 glasses worth of wine in it and some companies even produced miniature bottles (though mostly champagne as I recall) for single servings.

Well this is on the verge of changing. Over the last few years wine companies have been working to lose the stuffed-shirt image that wine has developed and tried to appeal to a younger market, producing single serving wines ranging from small bottles to individual glasses to cans and “juice box” packaging. Sofia, by Francis Ford Copolla was one of the first to make this jump selling 4 packs of wine in pop top cans.

According to the article, the appeal of these single serving wines is that “by downsizing —offering wine in smaller portions that can be easily served at events or popped open without having to worry that the rest of the bottle will go to waste— winemakers are reaching a new segment of the market.” Actually, a really great though, and it isn’t just the makers of crap wine who are doing this, the single serving concept is stretching across the wine market, even champagne makers like Moet & Chandon have picked up on the trend.

When the first mini bottles came out a little more then a decade ago, the company producing them, Pommery, was accused of diluting the wine market by selling mediocre wine to the masses in small sizes. While other companies followed slowly, it hasn’t been until now that the mini- single serving wine trend has hit its full stride and found a viable market. As more companies follow suit producing single servings of wine you can expect the quality of the these wines to increase. The market already has a number of quite good ones.

Sorry for such a late start to the posting today, but let’s get right into it:

I am oh so tempted to start this one discussing the urban legend of Alligators in the NYC sewer system, but that just seems like way to obvious of a choice.

We get this from 1010 Wins: A man taking an early morning stroll along the beach out in Babylon this past weekend came across a wriggling pillow case with this message printed on it: “Live Gator, Please find him a home.”

Fortunately this story does not turn into the blood bath it could have been if he opened the bag and gotten chomped. Instead, he called the SPCA who came and took the 30 inch alligator away. Seriously, who leaves an alligator tied in a pillow case on the beach and expects that some one will just come along thinking “Gee, I’ve always wanted an alligator, maybe I could give it a nice home.” Of course being NY, if the person who found the pillow case had not been an off duty police officer there is a good chance they probably would have taken it and given it a nice home.

Are you in to picnic-ing and meeting new people? If so this could be the website for you to check out: Picnicmob.org.

PicnicMob is just that, a network that connects people who like to picnic and meet new folks can sign up for “flash mob” type picnics. To try and make things work a little better and connect you with like minded folks, PicnicMob has a 30 question survey you fill out and then they feed it through their computers to figure out where you’ll fit in best at the picnic and the type of people who should be seated around you.

Basically it is social networking in real time. Instead of signing onto something like MySpace or Friendster or Facebook and looking for groups to join and meet new people they arrange the groups and you just show up and meet these folks.

According tot he explanation of how it works on the website:

Once enough people have signed up in a given city we’ll announce an official “picnicmob” day! Our goal is a thousand people per town. That’s a lot of people, but that’s how many we think are needed for this idea to *really* start getting interesting… We need your help- Tell you friends about our site if you really want this to happen! Once the date comes close you will be emailed a customized map of the neighborhood park (sample) that shows exactly where you should sit and fun stats on the various “neighborhoods” in the park.

Sounds pretty interesting and could be pretty fun, especially if you are looking to meet new people who share your interests.

Sitting in your cubicle all day, especially down in a basement, you don’t exactly get the best reception on the radio. This is kind of what makes internet radio such a joy. However, when you hear that new Avril Levine song for the 900th time and just can’t take it any more you can’t just spin the radio dial to find a new station, you either need to locate another station you want to hear, guessing what might be on based on the name of the station or jump to another website and see what is playing, there is no simple searching to hear what is on like on your tradition radio, well, there wasn’t until now.

Tun3r is just that, a tuner for internet radio. Don’t like what you are listening to just jump to a different channel with a simple click of your mouse. Looking for a particular artist or song? Use the search and it will take you to a channel most likely to have it on and highlight other stations that just might. When you click and drag the tuner around it even sounds like an old radio tuner. You are even shown a sample playlist from the radio. After playing a sample of the music you’ll hear you can tune in to the actual station with a simple click of the button.

Definitely a nice way to listen to internet radio making it easier to sort through everything out there

Have you seen the NY Lotto commercial with bundles of money just falling from the sky? Well, apparently that is what is happening in Japan- well, kind of.

Yahoo News reports that at an apartment building in Tokyo a number of people have discovered unmarked envelopes in their mailboxes each containing about 1.81 million yen (almost $16,000).

In an example of how different the Japanese are from Americans, they phoned the police to report the money, thinking it was fake. When it turned out to be real, they still handed it over to the police. In another apartment building in Kob, a woman received a similar gift in her mail of 1 million yen.

Continuing on the theme of money randomly appearing, a bunch of envelopes have been reported found in the restrooms of public building around Tokyo containing large sums of money and last week “bills worth 960,000 yen were inexplicably seen ‘falling’ in front of a convenience store… ‘We can just say the money came from the skies,’ a puzzled police official said. ‘There were other passers-by outside and customers in the store but the incident caused no confusion’ he said. ‘People thought it was too eerie to touch.’” Clearly not Americans, I am guessing this would have caused a riot here.

Although there is some speculation that the money may be from a public servant or new-age religious group, there is no real evidence one way or another and there really is no harm being done.

There have been other incidents reported as well. This all just makes me even more excited for my upcoming trip to Tokyo at the end of the month. I am definitely going to make sure to exam the men’s rooms in public buildings ever so closely.

So, 10 x 10 is a pretty interesting website/blog.

Basically they trawl the web and find the most popular and newest news content represented by a single word and image. It is all then displayed in a 10 x 10 grid of thumbnailed images. When you click on one of the images the top head lines related to the word pop up. It is all refreshed hourly so you can actually track stories and words and see if the gain in popularity or lose it from one hour to the next. It is a a nice visual representation of the news in an easy to use interface. The site defines it self as:

10×10™ (’ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

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I just discovered Speak Up due to an interesting write up they did on movie posters and their color schemes.

Here is the basis of their post- they looked at the movie posters for the top 5 grossing movies by rating (top 5 NC-17, top 5 R, top 5 PG-13, etc.) and then broke these posters down by colors. What they found, although scientifically problematic was pretty interesting. At the top, with the NC-17 rated movies, they found lots of dark colors and, not surprise here, flesh tones. Moving down the rating slide, they start to get more and more colorful until they hit G with bright posters with lots of colors.

It is a relatively interesting analysis of film posters and ratings. My biggest problem being that most movies have multiple posters. These multiple posters usually employ different color schemes to attract different people to the movies. Regardless though this is a pretty interesting look at the role color plays in relation to rating.

Okay, stick with me here, my Japanese isn’t that good so I am stealing my information from another site, but this was pretty cool so I wanted to post it.

Inakadate, Japan is the home to about 8,000 residents who have worked together since 1993 to produce intricate art in their rice field.

Each year they have a different theme for the fields and use different varieties of rice to create pictures of black, green and yellow. The images stretch over multiple fields and are planted to show their images at different times during the season.

This year the farmers are using the green phase of the rice cultivation to depict motifs of Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji.

You can see more of the pictures of the fields (and brush up on your Japanese) at their website (or at ;east a website devoted to their work) here.

“Kameraflage is display technology specifically designed for the camera-phone generation.”

Or at least that is what the website touts it as.

As we all know the human eye can only see a limited array of colors. We hit the UV or IR marks and we don’t see a thing. Digital Camera’s and displays on the other hand pick up a lot more colors then the human eye and can translate them into viewable colors and images for us. Kemeraflage plays off of this concept.

Basically the Kameraflage technology adds a layer to things that is only visible when viewed through the camera. Some of the applications that they suggest are within movies, for subtitles or hidden messages, secret advertisements or messages at historic locations, rather then obstruct the view of the location, have messages on the walls around it that only show in pictures (of course the argument could be made that it then ruins the picture…) and on clothing, which I think is kind of the neatest application.

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Have you heard of “America’s Army?”

It’s a video game designed by the Army that serves a couple of functions. It previously was only available for download, so right off the bat, they could identify you as some one with an interest in the army. The it got you used to the armies language, tools, machines, and mind set. if you downloaded enough episodes of the game you could even play with teams online, building a nice dynamic group of folks interested in the army who had the most basic of basic training in an effort to indoctrinate them into the army.

There have been a number of iterations of “America’s Army” (your tax dollars at work to build a bigger and better video game). Now, due to its popularity, you can not only download the game for free, but as Arcade Heroes reports to us, you can pay $.25 (okay, well the last time I paid to play an arcade game it was $.25 I am sure it will cost you at least $.50 if not more) to play it. Global VR is working with the U.S. Army to design and release an coin-op arcade game based on “America’s Army.”

There are a few questions to be to be asked in relation to this game, both supporting it and bashing it, like why is the military paying to develop video games is the military that strapped for cash that they need to resort to video games? and- this can’t be serious, can it? (apparently I can only think of negative questions, but I am sure there are some positive ones out there). This just seems like a total misappropriation of my tax dollars to me.