Wine Jabber

The "Suck-Meter" is on 11: Worst Wine Site Ever

There are LOADS of sucky wine sites and LOADS of sucky wine blogs, but I have to give the cake to decanter.com. I subscribe to the decanter news feed, a daily email of wine news, and it is impossible to read anything here - the site is overwhelmingly busy, each part clamoring for attention, lots of moving ads and a popup for the print subscription that pops up every time no matter how many times you have clicked the "don't show again" button.

Congratulations, decanter.com, for your success in having the most obnoxious, poorly designed and frankly illegible site. Your race to the bottom shows you have no peers in lack of design couth and you stand alone at the bottom of the heap - or bottom of the page, if you will.

Funny, I subscribe to the print edition and like it, even if it does have a sort of upper-crust snootiness to the writing and editing voice. The articles tend to be well-researched and extensive, and the "travel supplements" are really useful. So the problem is not the writing, per se. I just opened another decanter email with an interesting-looking article on Michel Bettane's opinion (he's a favorite French wine critic and responsible, along with his editorial partner Thierry Desseauve, for making "La Revue du Vin de France" such a great publication until 2004) on the 2009 Sauternes, took one look at the page that popped up, and said "enough."

My solution? Readability. Putting this link in your browser bar and clicking it while at a particularly obnoxious site strips out all the ads, popups and most of the clutter. A Godsend! (Thanks to David Pogue of the NYTimes for pointing this out!)

I survive my first encounter with the Italian Health-Care system.

My knees are hurting so much from all the activity of winemaking – climbing ladders, running up and down stairs, jumping up and off of tractors – that I have begin walking with a noticeable limp. The pain is intense and I am popping Advil like candy corn. Usually, in the States, I see a chiropractor every week or so; I like having good posture and it helps me sleep a lot. Here, chiropractors are unheard of. I try not to complain but Andrea and Rosella, especially, notice that all is not well in Allieland. Unfortunately, they’ve never even heard of chiropractors.

Bustin' Wineglasses!

Amazing what people will do in the name of "science." And an excess of free time.

OK, OK. I ... I have a thinking problem.

An alert reader (yes, we have those at WineJabber) sent this to me. Thanks to S. My degree was philosophy, and I found this hilarious.

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It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then - just to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone - "to relax," I told myself - but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't help myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau, Muir, Confucius and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job."

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking ..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But Honey, surely it's not that serious." "It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver.

"You think as much as college professors and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently.

She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.

"I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors. They didn't open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye, "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked.

You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinkers Anonymous poster.

This is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.

I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.

I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today I took the final step ... I joined the Republican Party.

Stochastic New Yorker Humor

An alert reader sent in this link - hilarious.

From the article, the premise is: "A theory resulted: That the rate of humor found in New Yorker cartoons is the exact same as naturally occurring humor in the world. That is to say, in the case of any decent drawing set-up, one could pair a drawing with any caption and reasonably expect to laugh the same amount."