Georges Duboeuf's Fifth Beaujolais Harvest!

I got a press release today whose subject line was “Georges Duboeuf Sees His Fifth Harvest in Beaujolais.” That threw me for a second: Duboeuf is the guy who single-handedly created Beaujolais Nouveau as a media event, and I’m pretty sure he’s been in the region for a long time.

The body of the email held the corrected text in the subheading: “Georges Duboeuf Sees Fifth August Harvest In Beaujolais.” Normally, the Beaujolais harvest happens later, but this year excessive heat brought the grapes to the winery in August.

I might make fun, but the erroneous subject line did get me to open the email. Maybe it’s a subtle ploy.

A New Grow Game

There’s a new Grow game out right now. If you missed the first one, the goal is to click the buttons in the correct order so that you end up with each item at a maximum level. After you place an item, it may or may not grow when you place the next item.

The best part is that no matter what you do, different things happen in the little universe. There's no real rhyme or reason about why you should place one item before another, but there is an odd logic that you can discover. I still haven’t solved this latest installment, but I’ve gotten frustratingly close with all but two items maxed out.

The Winer/Calcanis Brouhaha

There was a kerfuffle among some Internet giants a couple months back, but the vast majority of the Internet’s users didn’t know about it, and they wouldn’t have cared if they did. It popped up on a few of the sites I read, but I lacked the context to do more than read the back-and-forth. Thanks to a Twitter conversation, I finally found a video that captured the spark that set off the flame war.

At a technology conference called Gnomedex, Jason Calcanis, an Internet bigwig you’ve probably never heard of, got up to talk about the infestation of spam in our Internet lives: Email, blogs, comments, ads, etc. He thinks it’s destroying the Internet, and who can disagree? After that preamble, he started to talk about his search engine Mahalo, a human-edited search engine that I have yet to explore. From what I’ve read, Calcanis uses every opportunity to push his new business: I suppose I would too in his shoes.

Quickly, Dave Winer, another Internet giant you’ve probably never heard of, yelled out that he didn’t want to look at conference spam right then. (I think that’s what he said; the audio was focused on Calcanis.) Winer, rightly, viewed Calcanis’ abrupt switch from interesting topic to sales pitch as an example of the very thing Calcanis said we should fight.

From the video, it sounds as if half the audience shouted Winer down. Calcanis pulls an “oooookay” as the audience erupts and then proceeds as before. For days afterwards, the high-profile bloggers in attendance went back and forth about what happened. There were slams and hurt feelings and “he said, he said” blog posts all around.

I’ve met Dave, 15 years or so ago when I was a big fish in the small pond of Mac scripting. At the time, I found him to be aggressively opinionated. A lot of people, including me, found him hard to get along with. He says on his blog that he’s mellowed since our last face-to-face (or phone-to-phone, if I recall correctly), and he probably has.

But here’s the thing: He’s smart, he has interesting thoughts, and he’s often right. He’s developed many of the technologies that drive the modern Internet — blogs and RSS, to name a couple. And I get the sense that, mellowed or not, he doesn’t like conferences that waste his and the audience’s time by having some guy or gal get up on stage and just sell something. He wants to have a conversation. I don’t think he shouted out at Calcanis — whom I’ve never met — to heckle him; I think he was pointing out the obvious.

We all know people who annoy us, and we automatically tune them out when they start talking. Maybe they ramble. Maybe they’re aggressive. Maybe they’re just wacko. We never hear what they’re saying, because we erect our not-listening shields the moment they open their mouths. I wonder if the audience members, who have probably all faced Winer in various stages of being opinionated, just shut him down without listening to what he was saying. How many were thinking something similar, but acted out of habit?

I know all this is human nature, but the video got me thinking: How often do we miss important things because we tune people out?

Using A Real Outliner

I’ve finally purchased and started to use a real outliner to organize my various projects. I made do with text documents and Word’s POS outliner for years, but after reading Scott Rosenberg’s thoughts on why outliners work for him, I started looking into them a bit more. When I bought OmniPlan recently, I decided to pony up the cash for OmniOutliner as well.

I’ve barely scratched its wealth of features, and I’m already asking myself why I haven’t done this before. Take, as one example, the “Writing Ideas” outline I started, a parallel to the text file I kept for years where I stored ideas for stories and their progress. Once I successfully pitched one to a publication, it got its own folder for all the material I collected, which I rarely organized beyond that.

But OmniOutliner allows you to add objects into an outline. So I have one idea I’m pondering, and my friend Sean mentioned an article that I thought might be relevant. I went to the site and dragged the URL into the outline. Now one of the list items under the story idea is the URL that I’ll want to review when I’m working on a draft. For a story that I’ve just started working on, I dragged in the text file where I typed up an interview. (I assume the program uses an alias to link to the file.) Had I had an audio file, I could have dragged that in.

As I move forward, I’ll have a one-glance view into all my writing projects and the tasks I have to do for each. When I go to write, I’ll have everything I need in one place.

Adios, Word’s outliner.

George And The Santa Claus Machine

My friend George Miller is the guy who hooked me on mechanical puzzles, lo those many years ago. When he retired, he set up a puzzle design workshop that was the envy of everyone in our little community. It even had a laser cutter.

Then he started working with Oskar van Deventer. Oskar, who is also my friend, is my favorite puzzle designer. The two of them — George with his workshop and his own substantial design skills and Oskar with his prodigious design capability — sparked off each other and flew into the stratosphere of puzzle concepts.

And when George bought a 3-D Printer, well, they were on the moon. I just learned that George’s story about his 3-D Printer, “The Santa Claus Machine,” has won a competition run by the company who makes the printer. It’s a cute video, though I think the audio is actually George’s son; he has many of the same speech patterns, but he’s clearly not George.

Dan Savage’s Writing Shoots And Scores

Given my normal inclination to rant about writing mistakes, I thought I’d shake it up and give a nod to the latest Savage Love. Responding to a guy who likes to dress up in little-girl dresses, Dan writes, “And looking down his nose at you in your little-girl dresses and me in my big fag relationship allows him to feel morally superior at absolutely no cost to himself. ”

That “you in your little-girl dresses and me in my big fag relationship” is a charming pair of parallel phrases. The opposites little and big are like salt on caramel: a perfect contrast to the samness of the sentence structure.

Take One Part Pregnancy Comedy . . .

I got a press release the other day about the DVD launch of Knocked Up, the Judd Apatow movie about a one-night stand that becomes a pregnancy.

I’ve heard good things about the movie, but I had to wonder about a PR event that has people going to select bars and ordering hard liquor. I’m not in the “pregnant women must never even look at booze” camp, but this campaign seems ill-conceived. Does it have some connection to the movie that I don’t know about?

From the press release:

Check out a bar party in your city by visiting the official “Knocked Up” website: http://www.knockedupmovie.com. Have fun, get wild! … A few drinks have been created in support of the night.

Update: Duh, right. She gets drunk and sleeps with Seth Rogen. That’s how she gets pregnant. Still, the idea seems odd. “Make your own Knocked Up movie in just nine months!”

Explaining Cliches

The lede in this article about the Fed’s rate drop caught my eye.

They say the best cure for a hangover is a little hair of the dog that bit you, meaning a nip of whatever you were drinking the night before.

Isn’t the whole point of a cliche that you don’t need to define it? (Incidentally, the writer did keep up the hangover thread beyond the intro; bravo for that.)

Yubnub Bookmarklet

I've just switched back to Safari for a while, and I want to use Yubnub as a search engine. But Safari doesn't let me add my own search engines, so I'm using this entry to make a bookmarklet that I can use to do the search. I just need a web page that I can access from Safari so that I can drag the link into the bookmarks bar. If none of this makes sense, don't worry. It's just a personal project.

Bookmarklet: Yubnub

Yo, PR Folks: Get It Right

I get lots of press releases, and I think I tolerate their grammatical oddities well. Typos and gobbledy-gook set me off — read the bloody thing once more before you press Send — but if you’ve got dangling modifiers, run-on sentences, or whom instead of who, I’ll survive. I read blogs, after all.

But if you’re going to tout your client’s writing staff as an “all-star roster of contributors” and “journalists with impeccable credentials,&rdquo push that press release through a tamis before you send it to me. Writing mistakes in a press release about great writers hurt your client, even if s/he didn’t write it.

I just got a note about the new writers who have joined Wine Review Online. I’ve written for that publication, I know several of the other writers, and I bear the site no ill will. But let’s look at some choice sentences in the press release sent out in their name.

“She is the author of 2005 World Gourmand Cookbook Award and James Beard IACP-nominated The Emperor of Wine, on the life of wine critic Robert M. Parker, Jr.” — When did the James Beard Foundation and the IACP merge?

“She is the wine & spirits columnist for Bloomberg News, where she writes a monthly column for Markets magazine, several columns a month for the Bloomberg newswire, and appears on Bloomberg TV.” — You can’t make two items in the list objects (“a monthly column” and “several columns”) and the third item a predicate (“appears on Bloomberg TV”).

“She is also the columnist for Shattered, a new global publication for executive women, and is a former contributing wine editor for Food & Wine.” — Do you really need the second “is”?

“[Michael Apstein] was a regular contributor to The Boston Globe, is a frequent contributor to The San Francisco Chronicle, is a wine educator for more than 20 years, freelance contributor to many national magazines, James Beard Award winner for wine writing, and regular judge for national and international wine competitions.” — This list is a mishmash of predicates and verb-less predicate nominatives: Break the list apart and you find that “Michael Apstein is a frequent contributor to The San Francisco Chronicle” but also that “Michael Apstein freelance contributor to many national magazines.” At least it’s consistent once it changes over. I would opt for “has been” in “is a wine educator for more than 20 years,” and I question the decision to start the list with a past status instead of the present-day statuses that follow.

“ He is the former editor of Wine Spectator and staff wine writer for The San Francisco Chronicle,” — Technically, this isn’t wrong, but doesn’t it sound like he’s still the staff wine writer for the Chronicle? And who knew they only had one?

“He is a regular columnist with Wine Review Online, and is also a regular contributor to the Food Section of the Los Angeles Times, has contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Wine section, and appears regularly in Food & Wine, Bon Appetit and the Robb Report.” — How about: “He is a regular columnist with Wine Review Online and a regular contributor to the Food Section of the Los Angeles Times. He has contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Wine Section and appears regularly in …”

“ Editor and columnist Michael Franz is editor of Wine Review Online, and is the former wine columnist for The Washington Post (1994-2005), columnist for FRANCE magazine, freelance contributor to several international wine magazines, instructor for Washington Wine Academy and L'Academie de Cuisine, and consultant to 11 restaurants.” — Take out the reminder that “Editor Michael Franz” is, in fact, the editor of Wine Review Online, and you fix the whole sentence.

“Columnist Ed McCarthy is author of Champagne for Dummies and co-author of Wine For Dummies, White Wine For Dummies, Red Wine For Dummies, Wine Buying Companion For Dummies, French Wine For Dummies and Italian Wine For Dummies, as well as regular contributor to QRW magazine, and columnist for Nation’s Restaurant News and Beverage Media.” — Articles are okay, folks. The author. A regular contributor. A columnist.

“She also contributes to Food & Wine magazine, epicurious.com and the San Francisco Chronicle, where she was the wine editor from 2003 to 2006 she won two James Beard Awards for best food/wine section.” — Something is missing between “2006” and “she.” Or maybe it should just say “2006, garnering two … ”

“Columnist Marguerite Thomas is travel editor for The Wine News, and author of monthly column, ‘The Intrepid Gastronome,’ for The Los Angeles Times International Syndicate. She is the author of a cookbook and of two books about wines in the Eastern U.S., and is a frequent contributor to national wine magazines.” — They don’t need a comma after “The Wine News,” but they do need an article before “monthly column.”