This week’s installment is the Podcast Zeitgeist of second chances, and probably the last such post for a good long while. I’ll continue to listen to a few favorites, but a hiatus is in order. This started as an effort to make some notes about what worked for me as a listener. But it became an exhausting and time-consuming exercise, particularly since I sampled many more hours than I ever wrote about. It was cutting into my Twittering time. At some point I may summarize what I have learned, or not.[See all lists.]
Archive for January, 2009
Podcast Zeitgeist, Jan. 26
January 26, 20092 Shots and a Cup of Indian Mysore
January 24, 2009
I’ve decided to expand the sources of beans for my haphazard and probably misguided search for the perfect cup of home-brewed coffee. The other day I stopped by the relatively new Chelsea branch of Joe, the Art of Coffee, a small chain that started in the West Village, routinely turns up on best-of lists, and is sometimes credited with being one of the first movers in New York City’s belated culinary coffee renaissance. Joe offers a pleasant store experience, cuppings and classes (arranged in a curriculum with semesters), podcasts and other signs that say, coffee geeks welcome.
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Sugiyama, a Kaiseki Haven in Midtown
January 20, 2009
Our daughter was on a birthday sleepover, so my wife and I found ourselves with a few hours of freedom on the cold, cold Saturday night of the long holiday weekend. We live in Manhattan’s tourist district, which makes it hard to find a good place nearby or dinner that isn’t crowded, expensive or bad. Or all three. After fiddling around with a few restaurant finders, I came up with Sugiyama, right around the corner. We must have walked by this place hundreds of times since moving here nearly nine years ago, but our focus has always been on child-friendly places. Oh, my, what we have been missing.
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A Shot of Cider Currant Spice From Rwanda
January 19, 2009
High-end culinary coffee tends to be marketed in specifically political ways. The goal may be to make the customer feel virtuous, or at least more at ease. Maybe buying a particular batch of beans will help the environment or a third-world economy. (There is an ideological divide, even in coffee, between free traders and those who advocate fair or direct trade.) When I hear “Rwanda,” I think of the 1990s upheaval and genocide that left that African country in ruins. So I was curious to see this bag of beans and decided to give it a try. Rwanda’s coffee industry was nearly destroyed in that era, but now is undergoing a resurgence, thanks to a chain of cooperative farms and efforts to provide simple economic tools, like bicycles.
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Podcast Zeitgeist, Jan. 19
January 19, 2009Welcome to the Podcast Zeitgeist list: presented in apparently random order, at inconsistent intervals, its purpose obscure, its usefulness in doubt, its taste questionable, its methods and motives suspect. [See all lists.]
Several Shots of Finca Santa Isabel’s Best
January 17, 2009
This felt like a long week. A lot of meetings. My daughter had her first round of standardized testing at school. Two reporters I rely on the most at work took some days off. Then a plane ditched in the Hudson. We blogged, twittered, stayed up late. It was the rare big story with a happy ending. Way back on Sunday I had bought this bag of beans and, even before the crash landing, I was making myself three fast espresso shots with the Jura to jolt myself awake each morning before rushing out the door. That did not allow much time for contemplation of how these beans compared to the others I’ve sampled and written about.
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Be Seeing You, Patrick McGoohan
January 15, 2009
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!
My life is my own!”
From “The Prisoner” (1967)
A few years ago, I bought a boxed DVD set of the old series “The Prisoner” starring Patrick McGoohan, who died at 80 on Tuesday in Los Angeles.
My wife has been obsessed with the show since childhood. We watched the whole thing over that winter. It was a bit dated, but most of it held up. Unlike many series, it actually had a conclusion with a final episode where everything was sort of resolved. It was not set in the future, but was vaguely futuristic, and quite prescient in pointing to some trends in information and control that outlasted the Cold War era.
The themes of identity, torture and mind control echo to this day, in the news and in cultural artifacts like Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” and the Fox series “24.”
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Podcast Zeitgeist, Jan. 10
January 10, 2009The list this week is tech-heavy and later than usual, mainly because of the “last” MacWorld Expo. {See all lists].
- MacBreak Weekly 122: Macworld Expo Live from the floor at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Leo Laporte gathered some of his stalwarts, following the last Apple keynote (the company is pulling out of the convention, a fact that seemed to hang over this event with sadness). The discussion focuses on the high points of the keynote presentation from Phil Schiller of Apple: improvements to iMovie editing; new iPhoto features like facial recognition, geo-tagging, and integration with Flickr; the new 17-inch MacBook Pro; and the end of DRM on iTunes. General agreement that Schiller is no Steve Jobs when it comes to giving a speech. Many of the panelists are camera geeks who don’t use iPhoto, so they are hoping that some of the features will be ported to Aperture, Apple’s high-end photo software. No real picks, though Boxee was plugged; some good show notes are here. I also watched a short 5-minute MacBreak video podcast featuring Merlin Mann pestering people on the convention floor. It was amusing with low information content. Length: 1 hour 9 minutes. Released: Jan. 6.
A Nerd Planet, Gobsmacked by the Reticulum
January 7, 2009
I’m happy to report that I finally finished the 900+ page “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson, just four months (!) after starting it. I have to admit that I took breaks to read a few other things.
I previously posted about the difficult, otherworldly vocabulary that Stephenson made up for this book. (For example, the “Reticulum” is similar to what we call the Web or the Internet, though you have to figure that out based on the description of a narrator who is basically a cloistered monk who never uses technology. “Jeejahs” are smart phones or mobile devices of some sort. Videos are “speelies” recorded with “speelycaptors.” Those are some of the neologisms that feel apt. Not all of them do.)
Others have weighed in about the lexicon, and the book’s need for editing, especially in the early chapters (here’s an example from Slashdot, the bulletin board for geeks). And there’s the question of the title, which looks like a typo and calls to mind Ayn Rand’s completely unrelated polemical novel “Anthem,” which Stephenson says he has never read (see video below).
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