Stay Tuned....

I've been remiss in my blogging duties here, but I promise with good reason. I'm in the process of wrapping up a couple of projects, and excited for new ones. Stick around, we'll be back at it in a couple of weeks or so.

:-)

Catfish burrito

Yes, that's me walking the aisles of Wegmans talking excitedly to myself. "Two skinless catfish filets, $4.25? Hellz yes!"

Enter, weekend dinner: drunken catfish burritos. You'll need:

1 catfish filet, cut into bite-size pieces
1 cup rice
1 small can black beans
1 cup salsa
2 jalapeño peppers, chopped
4 oz. beer
lettuce
cheese, shredded
butter
burrito wraps

Put the rice on. In a saucepan, combine the beans, half the salsa, and one of the peppers. Bring beans & salsa to a simmer.

In a small fry pan, melt the butter. Add the other pepper. Add the catfish and beer, cover.

On a wrap, place some rice, some beans, lettuce, cheese, catfish and some more salsa. Wrap and eat.

Enjoyed with Anthony Road White Table Wine (which, I have to admit, was a little weak for the spicier version, but went well when I cut back on the peppers).

Jay Bennett died this weekend

That dude could rip. That's him with the hair and the guitar.

Friday morning singalong

Busy week behind me and a busy weekend ahead. Call this a nice break.

Thought Review: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller

This isn't really a book review. It's more a look at thought and inspiration.

First off, read up on Bucky Fuller. He's best known for the geodesic dome, the architectural style that uses the least amount of material to maximize space.

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), Fuller launches some great ideas as instructions for maximizing human survival. Some of his predictions have not come true, and there's no way he could have predicted the rise of the Internet at that point, but two really inspirational ideas are what brought me back for a second read.

Great Pirates. In the old days, there were kings. They ruled over small kingdoms thanks to their wealth and their guards. But how did they come by this wealth and power?

Pirates. The guys who figured out how to sail around in big boats, bring money, and put these people in power, on promises that if the guys in the boats needed warriors, slaves or whatever else, the kings would cough up some people.

Awesome.

Synergy. This is the big thing I needed to read again. We have become increasingly specialized as we've "progressed" in industrialization. You need your pipes fixed? Call a plumber. You need your wires fixed? Call an electrician. You need a tooth fixed? Don't call an orthopedist.

We have so many people with narrow focuses, we aren't achieving much in the way of innovation because no one is looking at the big picture. To illustrate this, Fuller cites a conference that took place in the 1960s. A biologist and a physicist were among the presenters, and each had written essentially the same paper, tackling the same problem and reaching the same conclusion from entirely different angles.

It was purely by accident they wound up at the same conference – the physicist was accepted by physics reviewers, the biologist by experts in his field. If anybody was studying overlapping disciplines, the problem solved would have been evident a lot earlier.

Fuller's idea is that while it's nice to have people around who know their fields really well, we need more people who can dabble in a variety of industries, and who can bring together specialists if and when needed.

This is how innovation grows. Who wants to talk synergy this summer? Find me on Twitter, and let's kick around some ideas.

New dining experience: Speedy Greens, Cicero

Before seeing the new Star Trek film this weekend, my buddy brought me to a restaurant he and his wife had recently discovered.

Speedy Greens (8169 Brewerton Road, Cicero) is all organic, primarily veggie/vegan. We were the only people in the place at 12:45 on a Saturday afternoon, so we got good personal service.

We both opted for a combo ($10.29), which included an entree, a side, and a dessert.

I had the spinach and cheese ravioli, a quinoa salad and ayurveda apple chutney. He had a turkey burger, tomato soup, and the apple chutney.

The food is good, the portions a good size, and the price is excellent.

It sounds like what they do most, however, is meal plans – they do three entrees and three sides for the week for $27.69; three salads, a soup and a wrap for $26.69, or three entrees and three salads for $36.69.

It's a takeout package so you have lunch for a few days.

I'd highly recommend the place, if you're up that way. Look for the Holistic Horizons sign.

Movie Review: Star Trek

I've never heard of these guys before, but that's a pretty cool review.

Yeah, I saw the new Star Trek movie on opening weekend. So?

I was never what you'd call a fan. I enjoyed reruns on TV of the original series (which, famous as it was, only ran from 1966-1969), hated the following series. I never saw the original movies.

What I enjoyed most were William Shatner's over-acting (I'm also a Bruce Campbell fan), and the cheesy effects.

JJ Abram's prequel had neither – he definitely would not have gotten away with skimping on the effects, and rather than over-acting, they made Chris Pine's Kirk a jackass (a role which Pine handled well).

Zachary Quinto (of "Heroes" fame) plays a fantastic Spock, and Leonard Nimoy reprises his role as (a much older) Spock to perfection.

I went with a fan of the original series and movies, so it was good to be able to get his perspective. His favorite parts were seeing how Captain-cum-Admiral Pike wound up in a wheelchair, as he was shown in the TV series, and the interplay between Pine and Quinto, since the Shatner-Nimoy on-screen rapport was so important in the original (the video above describes it as the first bromance.

What I enjoyed were the political commentary (Pike was waterboarded) and the hot chicks with douchebags F-U that had Spock and Uhura as an item, rather than Kirk getting the girls.

See it? Definitely. It's fun, and it totally didn't feel like it was two hours long.

Book review: Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor

Back in college, I was active in a group called Anti-Racist Action. ARA stemmed from the punk/ska and photocopied zine scenes – these people were (and it appears they still are) the good skinheads

I've mellowed out since, but haven't so much backed down on my anti-racist stance. And one day in my local bookstore, Einstein on Race and Racism caught my eye.

This is a well-sourced (23 pages of end-notes), footnoted, documented tome – not for an afternoon on the hammock. It's interesting, but not amazing.

Like good fiction (this doesn't approximate fiction, by the way), the book is done in roughly three acts. The first is a look at Albert Einstein in racist Princeton, NJ. The authors, Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, set the town up as essentially the deep south dropped in the north, and Einstein as a new immigrant who just can't understand racism in general.

Act 2, if you will, is about Einstein's relationship with singer and actor Paul Robeson (see video of him below singing his signature "Ol' Man River"). Robeson is an activist as well.

Act 3 is about Einstein during McCarthyism, including his blacklisting, and his increasingly activist writings – including his assistance of W.E.B. DuBois during his legal troubles after he was kicked out of the NAACP as a communist sympathizer.

The FBI, by the way, has 927 pages on DuBois, 1,427 pages on Einstein and 2,680 pages on Robeson and his wife Eslanda.

The most interesting section of the book, though, is Einstein's own words. A portion (about 25 pages) is dedicated to documents like Einstein's correspondence with DuBois, which explain some of the great scientist's views.

This book is not for everybody. It's a very dense (though short) book, and very academic in its research. If you're interested in racism as a topic, biography as a genre, and you're up for a mental exercise, give it a read.

I'll be donating my copy at some point, by the way, so if you want it, let me know, and I'll put it aside for you.

Oh, and here's that Paul Robeson I promised you:

CD Review: "Propaganda" by The Icon And The Axe

As I get older, I'm getting a better handle on what I truly enjoy in music. "What I truly enjoy" is frequently different from what I choose to listen to, and from what I play when I play music.

When I'm listening to music, I tend to do so with some purpose or other in mind, whether I'm trying to pump myself up for a workout or some work around the house, putting on some gentle background stuff just as an aural foundation, something to sing along with while I cook, you get the point.

But when I'm truly enjoying music, it's something to envelop me, something I can lay around the house and feel like I'm somewhere inside it. I don't have to be able to pick out the words, and to tell you the truth, I frequently won't learn them. It's about being lost in the sound.

I find that I enjoy minimalist tendencies with huge sound. That's a fairly tough order – it's a balance between doing only the minimum necessary to get your musical point across one minute and filling a universe with sound the next. And I still have to like your vocalist.

The Icon And The Axe (web site - MySpace) fill this role for me with their debut album "Propaganda."

Jamie Glisson's voice has all the stuff I liked of Dolores Mary O'Riordan Burton's voice (you'll remember her from the Cranberries), with none of the stuff I didn't – it's breathy without being harsh, it's aggressive but not angry.

The accompaniment is sometimes just picked guitar and sometimes full-on chord play with driving drum line. It's the sort of thing that could play well on an acoustic stage or as a symphonic arrangement.

And this is what I'm enjoying these days.

See also Mark Bialczak's review.

A look at Mine magazine from Time and Amex

I got my first issue of Mine magazine recently. This is an experiment in user-customizable content, an attempt to bring something the web offers to the print magazine format.

There are a lot of web portals along with some news sites that allow you to do a fair bit of customizing of the information you get. Sites like My Yahoo let you put what's important to you – email, scores, weather, stock updates, selected news topics and even your favorite RSS feeds – on one page, and you (more or less) pick the layout, within certain parameters.

On the news site, outlets like the BBC let you pick what you want to see on the home page, and move boxes around to order them however you want. If you visit a site like MLive.com, which has several newspaper affiliates, lets you pick what region of the state you want to see news from, or if you just want the general state-wide version.

Mine is an attempt to give readers the same sort of information customization, – along with some personalized advertising. They're starting small with this (31,000 people get a free, 5-issue print subscription; 200,000 more will get an online-only publication), and I don't see this going large-scale.

For the trial period, you go to the Mine web site, enter your contact information, and select five of eight magazines published by Time Inc or American Express. You get to choose from Real Simple, Food & Wine, InStyle, Time, Money, Sports Illustrated, Golf Magazine and Travel+Leisure (F&W and T+L are American Express-owned publiscations). You answer a couple of lifestyle questions that may or may not apply to you, hit send, and wait for your first issue to arrive.

The magazine options didn't impress me, but I understand that they're starting small with an experiment. Still, Time and Sports Illustrated were no-brainers for me, Food & Wine holds mild interest for me, and then I added Money and Travel+Leisure because I had to pick five. The thing is, Time Inc. owns some much more interesting to me stuff (all their brands), and their subsidiaries own even more.

The magazine is complimentary thanks to an advertising partnership with Lexus. And by "advertising partnership" I mean there is a one-page ad from Lexus, along with the inside covers and the back cover advertising from Lexus (read: no other advertising), all customized to me – two ads mention the town I live in and another mentions my name.

The magazine weighs in at 36 pages (really light) and has one to three articles from each publication. Each article previously appeared in one of the magazines between 2007 and 2009, but it doesn't tell me which appeared when, so I couldn't even order the proper back issue if I wanted to see what each was coupled with.


Here is what was in my magazine.

From Travel+Leisure: Two stories, one about making flying more interesting and one about luxury camping. The first was fantastic, suggesting you get a window seat, offered tips for mapping your flight path and understanding what you might be flying over. The second was a waste of print for me – if they had bothered to read the lifestyle questionnaire they asked, they would have known that.

From Food&Wine: One story, and it wasn't actually about food or wine. It was about how to take a winery tour on your next vacation to South Africa. As someone who likes to eat food and drink wine, I would have wanted less of a travel story.

From Time: A story about how to keep my kids active (another sign they hadn't read my lifestyle questionnaire), a profile on the Tibetan monk who might just be the next Dalai Lama, and a trend piece on people bringing solar power into their homes via financing.

From Sports Illustrated: A piece by a guy in his 20s who goes on a five-day soccer binge to purge his hatred of the sport, which might be interesting if you (a) hate soccer or (b) are a crazed soccer fan. I fall into neither category. I kinda like soccer, but would much rather watch a baseball game. There was also a profile on a women's basketball player at a community college in Washington state who suffered a concussion and wound up with a fair bit of amnesia.

From Money: Two stories, one on what to do with your basement if you have a lot of cash laying around, the other about keeping the tax obligations on your retirement savings low. I would have rather learned how to have $195,000 laying around for a basement make-over as opposed to what I could do with the money, and the second was actually mildly useful for a mass audience.

Here's the deal: This magazine wasn't at all customized to me (outside of the ads, which really are more creepy than anything – see the two I included pictures of). If I had these choices on a web portal, I wouldn't use the portal. If it's a sales vehicle for the included titles, it fails miserably. I am already an occasional subscriber to Time and Sports Illustrated, but while I might have at one time decided to try a F&W subscription, if this was a representative sample of what's usually in it, well, keep your magazine, thanks.

For a publication that's being billed as a printed RSS feed, this failed in both customizability and recency.

And it's a good thing they started with such a small initial run: even though they only offered 31,000 print subscriptions, they bungled a block of them.

I'm not the only one who thought this was a lousy debut. I have four more issues coming; I wonder if they'll listen to feedback and improve them, or if they'll just struggle through and say, "well, we tried" after the run.

At this point, I can't imagine paying for a subscription to this. I also worry that if they messed up a large chunk of 31,000 subscriptions, there's no way they'd be able to handle 2 million. The kind of data they can get for advertisers might be invaluable, but you still have to make consumers happy before advertisers will start paying for it.