Some things get better with age

It's true - some things get better with age. Cheese. Wine. Rookie Baseball Cards. But other things do not. Moldy Cheese. Opened Wine. Dead squirrels. Dead rats. Pretty much anything dead. Like this blog.

I just had a friend point out that my blog was a bit inactive. Inactive being a polite word for dead. Dead things are about as inactive as things get. Except for MOSTLY dead things - they still have a chance. So, on the premise that I'm only mostly dead, here goes, let's kick off some cobwebs.

First off, I can reassure you that I haven't been dead. (I'll assume you've figured that out by now.) I haven't even been dead digitally - I've just been woefully neglecting this blog. I've been neglecting other digital assets off and on, but I've been less neglectful of them than this blog, so if you're dying to catch up, you can head over to these places. (I know, there are ways to add these as links over on the right, like I already did for Twitter, but if I made you wait for me to do that, it might be December before this post gets published.)

Follow me on Twitter

Catch up with me on Facebook

Read my (also ignored) Running Blog

Check out my company's website

Check out my company's new product, X1 Social

Follow X1Social on Twitter

Like X1Social on Facebook

Like X1 on Facebook

So, why the sudden decision to start posting again after 10 months? Well, it turns out that my new position at my job actually involves some web stuff, some infrastructure stuff, some HTML research. All of which can either feed into this, or, more likely, I can use this blog as a testing ground for my real work. So, expect to see broken widgets, screwed up HTML and other shenanigans.

Oh, and also because for some strange reason visitor started coming to my site in April. Traffic is up 20% and I feel bad for those folks.

French Appreciation Month - Day 14

Day 14 - French Wine

The more astute of the readers may notice that some days have been summarily skipped. That's fine - that's the reward for being an astute reader. My hope is that the less than astute readers will not notice this at all and will say something to the effect of "but wait, the posts run seemlessly from Day 9 to Day 14." That is good - that means that my back-filling plan worked. How exactly I expect to catch up on a four-day gap is not entirely clear to me. Right now, my plan involves "off-shoring", "crowd-sourcing" and "building up traction." You might object and think, "Hey, that's nothing but buzz words." How I hate to burst your bubble. The internet is nothing but buzzwords. String enough of them together and you can create an entire industry. Don't believe me? Just watch. Start with text messaging. A completely useless phenomenon where teens and tweens devote over 40% of their brain cells to remembering that the "s" character is formed by pushing the "7" key 4 times. Then, that spawns all the time saving abbreviations which have actually made their way into the Merriam Webster dictionary, like lol and omg and ttyl and brb and then further onto kthxbye and zomg and rolflmao and whatever the crowd of Bieber-cut wearing youths have invented to make me feel old. But then that spawned Twitter. How much better to just send your text message to the entire world. How else is everyone going to know that that burrito is so good, lol! But, wait, we're only getting started. Why wouldn't we want to know where you are when you find that really good burrito? And that spawned Foursquare. Before you decide that this is all completely ridiculous, sit down and ask yourself what you said about Google six years ago. You probably said, "That company doesn't do anything - they just give me search results. They don't even have a web portal like Yahoo or Microsoft." Extra points if you ended that sentence with "LOLZ." And double extra points if you ended that sentence six years ago with "FTW." In fact, if you were saying "FTW" six years ago, please email me your stock picks. But the point is, Foursquare just raised $20 million dollars and is valued at almost $100 million dollars. All based on telling everyone that you just "checked in" to a TGIF (or heaven forbid you actually admitted to being at Applebee's). WTF? And Twitter hit the $1 billion mark LAST YEAR. WTF, indeed?

Now, the most astute of you will be thinking "wasn't he supposed to be talking about French wine? I am pretty sure he was supposed to talk about something French!" Well, as a ground rule, you shouldn't assume that labels mean anything. And you shouldn't think that focusing on form over content should mean anything either. Wait a second...maybe I am talking about French wine.

I am a big fan of California wines. And California wines would not be anything if not for the French. Indeed, almost all of the varietals in production in California are French and were stolen, snuck from, or otherwise removed from France and grown in California. I used to feel guilty about this, but not after learning how wine is treated in France and Italy - it is not the overly pretentious high-falluting (yes, I just said that...feel free to mark this down to torment me later) affair we often make it out to be in the U.S. It is more often a general appreciation of the artisanship and creativity of the local vintners. There is nothing any less (or any more) special to a bottle of wine than a good bottle of beer. Are there great bottles of wine? Undoubtedly so. But the point is that the French (and other European countries) can also enjoy the good bottles of wine as well, and do not feel it necessary to over-emphasize the great bottles at the expense of those good bottles. More recently, this has been changing in the U.S. and you can get a lot of good wines under (sometimes well under) the $20 price point, and that is good for everyone.

OK, so here's the tie-in for those of you whom I have lost. Don't feel like you have to understand or make sense of everything. Sometimes a good bottle of wine is just a good bottle of wine (and sometimes checking in on Foursquare or micro-blogging on Twitter is just that - good, not great). But, sometimes, just striking out to make something good that you love that is a riff on something that went before you can create a whole new niche that might be meaningful and world changing. I think that applies to both California wine and some of the new things that are just now emerging on the Internet. And I embrace both of them.

So, thank you France, for letting us borrow (steal) some of your grapes and continue in the grand tradition of wine-making and building on the tradition of those that went before us.

French Appreciation Month - Day 9

Day 9 - Statue of Liberty

There are some gifts that I have to assume are given with a little bit of a twist behind them. Sometimes it is a hidden message, like getting a pair of running shoes from your wife or a new phone from your mom. But sometimes, I have to believe that the twist is a little perverse sense of glee when the gifter knows you are suddenly saddled with the maintenance. An Englishman might give a silver teapot knowing that he has doomed you to a lifelong battle with tarnish. A German might give you a cuckoo clock knowing that the noises might start to drive you crazy, but the battle to keep it running will likely commit you. An Italian might give you a Fiat Spider, but if he had any real interest in you getting anywhere, he would have just given you the aforementioned running shoes.

But the French gave us the Statue of Liberty. Sure, it is a beautiful depiction of Liberty Enlightening the World, and it represents a great friendship between two young groups of idealists that threw off the shackles of monarchy and strode free into the ideals of democracy. But it's also 62,000 pounds of copper. That's a lot of polishing.

Sure, it was intended to develop a nice coating of verdigris, but I still have to wonder if the designers secretly hoped that we might spend a bit of time polishing it. Fortunately, Americans are lazy. Inventive, but lazy. The disposable razor? 50% inventiveness and 50% lazy. I remember as a kid watching a TV show with a scene from an old fashioned barber shop. I had no idea why the barber was so busy shaving a leather strap when there was obviously a man waiting patiently to get a shave. I only really knew of two reasons for straight razors - to scrape of of my radio station's stickers off the window of my mom's car ("But Mom, people will think you're cool if they're driving behind you and know you listen to cool music.") and hysterically believed to be hiding in one if not several of the candy bars obtained while trick-or-treating.

So, it is actually with a little bit of sadness that I realize that laziness is currently winning out in the American dynamic when it comes to the Statue of Liberty. We have put men on the moon. We created hamburgers where the cold side stayed cold and the hot side stayed hot. Heck, we put both hot and cold together and figured out how to deep fry ice cream. I am pretty sure we know of a coating that can be applied to copper to keep it bright and shiny forever without any actual need to polish it. Inventive and lazy.

So, thank you France! And I apologize on behalf of my country for taking such bad care of it.

Oh, and if you want to see something inventive, see the shot of what the Statue of Liberty looks like in the alternate universe on the TV show Fringe. Very inventive. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd provide a link for you.

French Appreciation Month - Day 8

Day 8 - ?

One of the great things that the French language has to offer is some very good phrases that can be used where other words don't quite fit, where you want to give a little extra oomph to what you are trying to say, or you are intentionally (or unintentionally) trying to sound learnéd (or pretentious). Some of these might be a la carte, au jus, bon apetit, carte blanche, creme de la creme, and the list goes on. (It is a touch surprising how many of them have to do with food.)

But there is one phrase that stands out from all the others. This phrase just has that extra something; it has an ineffable quality; it has that factor, some might call it an x-factor or the it-factor; it captures the uncapturable; it expresses that which is difficult or impossible to express; an elusive quality; an indefinable quality; a spark; a... well, frankly, I don't know quite what. It just has that je ne sais quoi.

Thank you, France, for making me sound cool when all I'm really saying is "I don't have a clue"

French Appreciation Month - Day 7

Day 7 - Invading Britain

I know that Britain is our staunch ally now. But we all know that it was not always so. The American Revolution, of course, comes immediately to mind, and there is something just wrong about having foreign invaders on your home soil. America has had the luxury, due to Manifest Destiny, to not have to suffer that atrocity (while still getting to subject other countries to an American invasion). So, it is easy to have a fuzzy memory about our early history and think that the American Revolution was the last time we were invaded, but let's not forget the War of 1812, when the British forced President James Madison out of the White House. And then they did it again. Sure they weren't too much of a threat, but armed with mop haircuts and radical ideas and sounds, but The Beatles, Dusty Springfield, Herman's Hermits, and the Rolling Stones took America by storm. In the eyes of our grandparents, it was a full-on British Invasion threatening the very way of life in America.

So, the French have done something that Americans could only dream of - they actually invaded Britain - during the Norman Conquest. Sure, we have that event to thank for the screwed up spelling of restaurant, casserole, and résumé. But I'll gladly pay that price just knowing that someone stuffed it the stuffy British.

Thank you, France! You did what we have yet to dare to do. But watch out Wales! When we make our move, we're coming right through you.

French Appreciation Month - Day 6 - Bastille Day

Day 6 - Bastille Day

Hey, everyone! Happy Bastille Day! The French definitely have something on the Americans with this holiday. This is a passionate event celebrated passionately. The event, the storming of the Bastille, a fortress-prison, was the flashpoint of the French Revolution and the uprising of the modern nation of France and the beginnings of the overthrow of a monarchy. Almost a hundred people died in this event that threw all of Paris into a chaos of barricades and armed demonstrators and ended with the beheading of the governor of the Bastille and led to an epidemic of beheadings over the next few years.

Contrast that with America's celebration of Independence. We celebrate on July 4th. This date commemorates, effectively, a bunch of rich old white dudes putting quill to parchment. Now, don't get me wrong. The document itself is a passionate document that has world-wide significance and repercussions that are still feeling felt today. But the event of sitting down to sign a piece of paper kind of pales in comparison to mobbing a garrison while cannon fire is blowing through the crowd around you. And the actual date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is not exactly clear - it could have been as early as July 2nd and as late as August 2nd.

In fact, most of America's holidays could learn a bit from Bastille Day. We celebrate passionate ideas and passionate people, but we don't really celebrate passionate events. Memorial Day originated with our Civil War, but the date was specifically chosen to avoid an anniversary of any battle. President Grover Cleveland picked a day for Labor Day to specifically avoid the more internationally accepted date for Labor Day of May 1st. May 1st? A good day to riot. 1st Monday in September? A good day to barbeque or get a last trip to the beach in before school starts. Even Veterans Day celebrates the signing of paperwork rather than a key battle.

It would be really hard to change the dates of American holidays at this point, but I suppose we could all learn something from the French and perhaps we could celebrate those dates a little more passionately.

Thank you, France.

French Appreciation Month - Day 5

Day 5 - Avez-vous du beurre?

Those of us who have taken a foreign language class, particularly the first year class in high school have somewhat mixed emotions about some of the phrases we were made to learn. I suppose if you believe the theory that the most important part of learning is actually learning how to learn, then it is not so important what foreign vocabulary you learn so much that you practice memorizing it. And it is not so important which verb you are conjugating, so long as you are learning about gerunds, past participles, present indicatives, and imperfect subjunctives. Somehow we got through 8 years of English classes without hearing most (or any) of these terms, but yet we are expected to pick them all up in the first semester of a foreign language. And, yet, through all of this, there are a few phrases that can lodge firmly in our minds, much like corn on the cob sticks in our teeth. Such as:

• Mi aerodeslizador está aparcado fuera. (My hovercraft is parked outside.)
• Los cactus púrpura necesidades de agua. (The purple cacti need water.)
• Welche Farbe hat der Bleistift (What color is the pencil?)
• Der Bleistift ist blau, nicht war? (The pencil is blue, isn't it?)
• Avez-vous du beurre? (Do you have butter?)

The last one stands out the most for me because of the story that went with it. Apparently, my brother didn't pronounce it quite right when he was asked to recite it in front of class. The original attempt to pronounce beurre as rhyming somewhere between 'sir' and 'fur' was dubbed as sub-par. By the time my brother was telling the story that night, the 'u' sound had been stretched out to about two seconds and the 'r' sound had been mostly swallowed and replaced with a weird sound that was somehow a combination of a gargle, a gulp, and a phlegmy throat clear. It was hysterical. So hysterical that about half the conversation that ensued between my brother and I in the next two days consisted of asking each other about the availability of butter. Every time it got annoying for our parents, we were able to say, "But we're learning French."

Flash forward twenty-odd years. We were at the beginning of a family vacation and my nephew was asking for butter for corn on the cob. Seemed like a great time to teach some French. Apparently what I think of as funny translates very well to the three-to-five year age group. We had my two daughters, my nephew and my niece all suddenly very interested in whether they might be any butter. Repeatedly. For the rest of the week. Hilarious for me. Not so much for the rest of the adults.

Thank you, France.