Day: September 8, 2004

Too Many Chefs

I don’t know how I missed this, but Hooblogger Todd Price, from A Frolic of My Own, is also a contributor to the great group blog Too Many Chefs, which features the natural tagline “Spoiling the Broth Since February 2004.” Todd spilled the beans with his post about cooking an elephant, which showed up in the Hooblogs Kinja page today. Good stuff. Maybe someday I’ll start writing enough food related posts that I’ll be worthy of appearing in that company.

QTN™: Rapscallion Premier

This particular quick tasting note is a new one on me. Coming from the Concord Brewery in Lowell, MA, the Rapscallion Premier sounds like it should be a golden Belgian-style strong ale along the lines of Duvel or its imitators (Delerium Tremens, Lucifer, etc.). Instead the color is a gorgeous reddish-blonde, the nose is complex with fruit fragrances (apricot predominates), the up front impression is crisp and vibrant, the body is part-malt, part bitter (maybe a little too bitter) and the finish is lingering. If any note is discordant it’s the hops. I don’t know what they’re using but I would guess Cascade, or else they just have a very heavy hand with the hops, and the bitterness comes close to overwhelming the rest of it. But in the end it kind of balances out in the finish and the overall impression is very strong. I think I’ll have to make a visit.

Free music links

I highly recommend Salon’s Wednesday Morning Download column, which is essentially an MP3 blog in weekly column form. This week Thomas Bartlett is pointing to new songs from John Cale, Mono, Rilo Kiley, Sainte Chapelle, the Mendoza Line, and Sam Amidon.

Last week’s column, a roundup of freely downloadable protest songs, was kind of a gimme by comparison, especially since I seem to recall Salon offering a collection of protest song downloads as a premium benefit a year ago. Occasionally Bartlett slips, as when talking about Sonic Youth’s freely downloadable “Youth Against Fascism” as a protest song aimed at W (the song, from the group’s Dirty album, was really aiming against Bush I and maybe even Reagan), but the column is still worth reading.

Photo sharing goes mainstream

I’ve written about PhotoPeer, a peer-to-peer photo sharing app, before, but this is a whole new ballgame: AOL’s next version of their instant messenger client will include picture-sharing features. That’s an interesting way to approach the main challenge that I saw with a pure peer-to-peer approach, which is how to build a compelling network of participants that’s larger than your immediate friends and family. The AIM approach avoids that problem by piggybacking photo sharing as a feature on top of an existing social network.

Two small pieces of my childhood

Daily Press: Longtime business prepares to sell out. Wellworth Cleaners was pretty much the only dry cleaner around when I grew up, and I don’t think we had any wire hangers at all that didn’t have their advertising on them. Now, after 62 years of operation, they’re being sold off for defaulting on their bankruptcy agreements.

I also saw but didn’t bookmark a piece on the death of the last living founder of Pierce’s Pitt Bar-B-Que, Dot Pierce, a while back; unfortunately I can’t find the link. Fortunately Pierce’s is still open for business and now even sells its sauce (though sadly not its barbecue) on line—though through a slow-as-molasses storefront.

CD ripping morality flowchart

London News Review: Should I rip this? A mostly well thought out flowchart indicating the legal and moral questions that go through most consumers’ minds when contemplating getting music by means other than purchasing it. When it says “Should I rip this,” I assume the unspoken corollary is “from a CD other than one I own,” and that “should I download this from a peer-to-peer service” could really be answered with the same flowchart. (Via BoingBoing.)

Commodity downloads, round 2

As I believe I was saying… take a look at the Register’s article on the newest entrant into the music downloads space: Woolworth’s. Yep, department stores are now getting into the music downloads business. And needless to say, with a Windows-only offering that has not been integrated with their other download service, they’re doing a typically mediocre job with it.

Ah well. With commodity service offerings, someone has to be the low end player, I suppose.