Wine advice for the casual sommelier

Dear Friends,

Some of you have come to me asking for advice on wine buying.

Never fear, gentle readers. Cagey JG is here with a simple resolution to your dilemma:

Beyond pairing whites with fowl and fish, and reds with red meats, skip looking at the bottle logo and price - look to the bottles that have reviews and descriptions that lay beneath.

Logophiles will appreciate this: Set out with your favorite adjectives in mind, and scan those reviews for them. Trust your loquacious instincts and buy based on your vocabulary urging you. I suggest words that depict or relate to ladies. Two time-honored examples: 'delicate,' and 'supple.' Since this is a family blog, I regret I can't go into greater detail.

A clue

Tex Murphy's Mean Streets.  Played it on my friend's Amiga PC as a yout.  A noir detective story in the near-future, Tex runs around in a hovercar meeting dames and taking memos.  Something about this was elusive and captivating; Tex's world of eternal night; maybe it was light filtering through the Venetian blinds portending the quintessential detective dank and smoky office; the anti-hero deciding whether he should sleep in his chair and... oh, what's that knock at the door?

Is using a game guide cheating? Interesting arguments.

Confession: I played and finally finished a game called "Final Fantasy XII." Sometimes I had to peek when stuck. There is a lot of "gamespeak" in the following- It was clipped from a gaming forum. Although it's not a debate on "solving world hunger," I found it interesting that there's a gulf of difference between those who favor using hints, and purists who don't. Something about a freaking treasure chest randomizer that lets you get the 'holy grail weapon' 1/100 of the time. So it's geeky, but even out of the context, I enjoy a well-reasoned argument as much (maybe more) than the next guy. What we're saying here is that on these games it's not cheating to cheat under certain circumstances. - Cagey :P
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"There are no clues. I don't consider using a guide cheating, but I can see how someone else might. I think it's all about how you use a guide; if you can't play a game without it, and you've got it at your side for constant reference while pushing through the primary game/plot, I think you can do better for yourself. If you check it out for things like enemy drops, hidden chests, rare enemies and steals, etc., it's hard to consider it cheating. That kind of content has always promoted the use of guides, and not all of us have the time, or are willing to take what free time we have, to experiment with the game until we figure these things out for ourselves - in most cases, particularly post-PSX era, that would take far too much time. Guides aren't cheat codes, they just cut down on time. You still have to win fights, manage your team, etc. If you want to call someone who tries to cut their time spent on a game down a cheater, that's cool - I'll be out working to pay rent, you can stay home all day and steal 100 times from a single enemy and take note of their drop rates in a notebook.

New Romantics and 80s taxonomy

A taxonomy is a break-down of things - e.g. Group - sub-group - element - sub-element ... from large to small. I've been reading so much about 80s music sub-movements on Wikipedia (groan) that my head hurts. I DO think the New Romantic entry is pretty freaking phenomenal, check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Romantic . Imagine, through Wikipedia, I've found out that the best bands of the U.S./U.K. have commonality and - a name! That's one satisfying light bulb going off.

When surfing for info on these bands, I see more and more interrelationships than ever and it's pretty cool - a "six degrees of separation" kind of thing. For example, imagine my surprise when I heard that two awesome 80s bands that I think have a lot in common stylistically - Level 42 and Johnny Hates Jazz - collaborate in the 00s. Or how China Crisis consider Brian Eno (cool) and David Bowie (super-cool) some of their influences. Or how David Sylvian/Japan (Awesome) charted the course for what Duran Duran (Phenomenal) would accomplish. There needs to be somebody with too much time on his hands that's building a big diagram... (I wish)[End rant.]

Mathematicians, we want our word back

Article: At 78, scientist hopes for proof soon that he was right about the Universe
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3701645.ece

Excerpt: The Higgs boson was the professor’s elegant 1964 solution to one of the great problems with the standard model of physics – how matter has mass and thus exists in a form that allows it to make stars, planets and people. He proposed that the universe is pervaded by an invisible field of bosons that consist of mass but little else.

Elegant: (credit - www.dictionary.com)
1. tastefully fine or luxurious in dress, style, design, etc.: elegant furnishings.
2. gracefully refined and dignified, as in tastes, habits, or literary style: an elegant young gentleman; an elegant prosodist.
3. graceful in form or movement: an elegant wave of the hand.
4. appropriate to refined taste: a man devoted to elegant pursuits.
5. excellent; fine; superior: an absolutely elegant wine.
6. (of scientific, technical, or mathematical theories, solutions, etc.) gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct.

I concede that there is a dictionary definition putting the word "elegant" in the context of math and science. To me, the connotation of the word has an entirely artistic aesthetic - of beauty and refinement, not brute force arithmetic and theory. It's a woman in an evening gown. The word should be reserved for definitions 1-5.

It pisses me off when dudes with Vulcan brains steal our s*. Not to say that I don't have dear friends that are math-savvy - some of the greatest folks I know in fact! But I have met the seedy underbelly of the math world and they shouldn't be using this word in context six, because - it just doesn't fit into an equation.

In an Absolut world

This was the rebuttal was made to the offensive ad made by Absolut's marketing firm in Mexico City. I don't have the stomach to post the original ad, I felt physically ill after seeing it. I'd like to mention the notion of 'reconquista' here. Is there really a popular philosophical movement underfoot in Mexico to invade and take the states of the western U.S.?