Mock Turtle

I bought a bottle of the Hillebrand Winery Trius 2004 Cabernet Franc (VQA Niagara) this evening, partly on the strength of having enjoyed the 2002 version and partly because it was, er, conveniently available where I was buying the wherewithal for dinner.

J. nicely deconstructed (or perhaps reverse-engineered) the label as broadcasting a sort of sort of middle of the road, yuppie-ish, respectable-but-not-too-complicated vibe. Which is essentially what this wine is all about. It has a degree of interest — an attractive Niagara-red smokiness with a bit of greenness which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — but ultimately too much greenness (more raspberry-leaf than raspberry…) and a serious deficit on the palate.

I don’t regret giving this one a spin but at $14.95 and 13% there are better values out there.

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From an interview with Clay Shirky in CJR:

CS: I mean, really, I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on. It’s in part because I grew up in a generation that benefited enormously from not doing that. Right? The baby boomers, when we were young, we had zero, zero patience for the idea that people who are in their fifties in the ’70s and ’80s should somehow be shielded from cultural changes because somehow the stuff that we were doing was upsetting them. So, now it’s our turn and we ought to just suck it up.

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Goodbye, so long, and enjoy your visit to the dark side. Yes, putting us all out of the misery of his whiny, self-referential, tiresomely negative screeds in Toronto Life and elsewhere is Philip Preville as (according to newsletter Inside Queen’s Park, not online) he takes on the role of Director of Public Affairs at the Toronto Board of Trade. Don’t rejoice too long, though – TBOT is a very unhappy place and it may be a round trip. Then again, Preville seems to be so unhappy himself that it may be a place where he thrives.

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Courtesy of McSweeney’s — CRITIQUE OF YOUR POWERPOINT PRESENTATION TITLED “SALES FORECAST, THIRD QUARTER.”

Another highlight was your complete rejection of Tuftean convention through the use of colors without meaning, location without purpose, and position without movement. How daring it was to represent the quarterly shortfalls in revenue with the color purple—the color associated not only with kings but also with the skin of slaves, an obvious yet powerful homage to Alice Walker’s seminal novel. By rejecting the fixed ironic conventions of green and black (colors of mold, death, and despair) for profits and red (blood and lust) for losses, you transcended the common criticism that capitalism is animalistic and decadent. The postmodern color scheme instead offered a fascinating contradiction, one that simultaneously said, “I am master of my destiny,” and “I am trapped by the projections required as a condition of my employment, and am but a slave to outcomes that are way beyond my control,” and “Feel free to have more cinnamon buns, for I seem to have ordered too many.”

Perfect, just perfect. We may as well approach these things as art and take what amusement we can from them, for all the sense they make otherwise…

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After the barrage of happy-happy new year stories on the turnaround that’s no doubt just around the corner, some bracing blasts of common sense from some of the best financial bloggers around.

From the Cassandra Does Tokyo blog, an excellent rant about the “when things get back to normal” school of thought. When massive shifts happen, the old normal isn’t “normal” anymore. Are stocks cheap? How could it ever be possible to tell? The strategists, says Cassandra, seem:

to be implying that is was normal to extend credit as it was during the last eight years; that gains in asset prices (be they a a portrait of Dr Gachet, NYC apartments, Chelsea or Notting Hill pied-a-terres ?) are normal at somewhere nearer to the top of their seemingly almost-exponential three-decade rise; that it is normal that US households continue to live with negative rates of savings or consume en masse beyond their means; or cavalierly burn hydrocarbons at the elevated relative per-capita rates that they do presently; that past income-inequality, now rolled-up into massive eddies of wealth discrepancy that approach those which evoke those prevailing during the enclosures in England are normal, and that their sense of normalcy will swiftly return despite the continued pressure to the contrary upon the financial sector, and households to return to a normalcy of a much different mean than those of the recent past, which in their turn directly the impact the corporate sector with body blows from BOTH the cost and availability of their gearing and the ultimate demand for their products.

The whole thing is worth a read — being based in Japan, “Cassandra” has seen first-hand how significantly economies can change after massive bubbles pop.

On Infectious Greed, Paul Kedrosky puts paid to the idea that there’s any average length of a recession or bear market:

There have been nine recession-induced bear markets in the U.S. since the Depression. They have ranged from just under 100 days long, to a little over 900 days. The average (there’s that dangerous word) is 486 days, with a whopping standard deviation (another dangerous word) of 250 days. In other words, based on this tiny data set — and that is a big part of the problem — we could expect (ahem) recessions to last anywhere from 0 (okay, -12 actually) to 1,000 days. But it’s all crap, from applying averages, to applying standard deviations, to sample sizes, but people pretend it isn’t.

Repeat after me: We have no idea.

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The Financial Times has announced the 2008 winners of “twaddle” awards for ludicrous business phrases and practices — they’re all good, but this one is truly outstanding:

Third is the award for Most Aggravating On Hold Message, which in 2008 was as hotly contested as ever. However, the clear winner was the UK’s Driving Standards Agency for a message that said: “Thank you for your call. The anticipated waiting time for this call is . . . longer than we would expect you to wait. In appreciation of your time, patience and cost implications to yourself, we are terminating this call.” And then it cuts you off.

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A rare moment of candour from an unlikely source:

Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s Government Press Office, said opening the Erez crossing would endanger its staff. But Mr. Seaman also asserted the absence of foreign journalists was good for Israel because the Hamas militants who rule Gaza fabricate coverage to make Israel look bad.

“And they get away with it because of the unprofessional co-operation of the foreign press, which takes questionable reports at face value without checking,” he said.

I’d say an official proponent of Israel’s ever-successful PR efforts is a pretty good authority on how easy it is to manipulate the foreign press…

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Engrossing piece from edge.org below (linked in aldaily, where I found it), with a large number of thinkers answering the question “What will change everything?”  Interesting for the variety of perspectives as much as the content of some of the answers.  Guaranteed to make your brain get bigger, or at least provide some perspective on the world, for good or bad…

http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_print.html

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Welcome to the TinkerBell economy. If we all believe and clap hard enough, the hope is that it will pull through.

- Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism coins a term for the upbeat forecasts that call for an inexplicably quick end to the Great Unwind.

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Occasionally we actually have practical wine suggestions.

Beppi Crosariol recommended Gabbiano Chianti 2007 some months ago in the Globe and Mail as a reliable $14 Chianti, also pointing out that (improbably) the operation was owned by the Australian megawinecorp Beringer Blass, better known for decidedly non-Chianti-like products such as the Wolf Blass line of Aussie reds (mainly) and whites. It’s a general list wine with widespread availability throughout Toronto Central and also (I presume) elsewhere.

As indicated it’s not exactly a Shiraz-y style wine — it’s young, relatively light (really medium-bodied), without a lot of oak (I think maybe a bit of oak). The LCBO says 12.7% alc/vol (the label 13%) which sounds about right. It’s got a pleasant bright fresh cherry/red berry nose — with a bit of air you also get  hints of spice, light cedar, maybe a hint of some kind of floral note. It drinks well immediately after opening but holds up well and (as noted) develops a bit of complexity with airing. Medium/medium+ body, medium acid, medium tannin. A good wine for a wide range of dinner food — pizza, pasta, chicken, sausages, etc. etc.

Definitely worth the money if you’re looking for something along these lines — a reasonably priced young red with some interest and no hint of vegetable patch, carbonic bubblegum, or overwhelming vanilla-oak.

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