Archive for June, 2008

I needed a drink Friday night, and despite the best efforts of the MBTA, I made my way to Casablanca restaurant in Harvard Square for small plates and wine. I spied a familiar name on the list and ordered up a 2006 Napa Fume Blanc from Grgich Hills. It hit the spot, crisp and dry, pineapply and cold, and took me back on a peculiar journey of oenophilic synchronicity.

Back In 2004, I took a summer vacation to Italy and Croatia. Two weeks of incredible eating and drinking. Towards the end of the trip, I was in Split, from where I took a ferry trip to several Dalmatian islands, including Vis, which was billed as, “vineyard island Vis.” How cool an idea is that? On Vis, I tasted several local wines with names I could neither pronounce or remember, which is a shame. Back in Split, I popped into a wine shop to find something to bring back. The shopkeeper pointed me towards a bottle of Grgić Pošip 2002 with the instruction that it was good with fish. It was from Korčula, an island I did not visit, but it was dry and delicious. With fish.

Flash forward a couple of years, and I’m in San Francisco on business. Which of course means I’m dragging my hapless but not unwilling colleague to Napa for an afternoon. We visited a handful of wineries, large and small, and then happened upon Grgich Hills. Could it be the same as Grgić? How could it be, but on the other hand, how could it not? (I didn’t notice it then, but the red and white checkered shield of Croatia is on the Grgich HIlls label) They didn’t have any Pošip, but my colleague brought back some of their famous Chardonnay. It turns out that the two winemakers are connected, but not in the way I would have guessed.

The Grgic(h) story starts in Croatia (Yugoslavia, actually), with Miljenko Grgich born into a winemaking family and fleeing communism in the ’50s for West Germany, Canada and then California. Later known as Mike, Grgich worked with several illustrious California winemakers and eventually partnered with Austin Hills to form Grgich Hills Cellar in 1977. It’s not a place, it’s two names. The story returns to Croatia only in 1996 when Mike goes back to set up Grgić Vina to combine local Croatian grapes (which Mike has proven are the ancestors of modern California Zinfandel) and high-tech techniques learned in Napa. You can read the full story at the Grgich Hills Estate web site, it’s quite a capsule history of California Chardonnay.

I still don’t know much about the spelling disparity or where to get more Grgić Pošip, but I’m happy to be reconnected with the Grgich family, and will definitely be stocking more Grgich Fume Blanc if I can get my hands on it.

Until the phone carriers and MBTA collude to spoil it, my daily subway commute is the only time that I’m completely unavailable to the outside world. No phone calls, no email, no social networks. At only three stops, the journey is too brief to really get into a novel or do serious work, so I’m happy when I find an abandoned newspaper on a seat, usually one of those free papers designed to be read in the span of a typical commute.

Why don’t I just take one of those papers from the box or the people handing them out? Well, that’s where it gets complicated. I don’t want to take a paper because I know I’m going to use it only ever so briefly and then I’ll feel responsible for either leaving it behind – arguably littering – or recycling it right away – which seems wasteful. Throwing it in the trash or using it in some art project don’t even make the list.

The free paper publishers know that litter is a big issue – they are banned for distributing on MBTA property and made a donation of hundreds of recycling bins (bags, really) to try and appease the transit people. So back to my eco-neurotic quandary: Is it littering to leave a newspaper on the subway so that others might read it, and does it make a difference if you originally picked up that paper or just found it on the seat?

If lots of people regularly left free papers on the seats, maybe some people would stop taking papers and the total amount of paper would go down. But if nobody ever took those papers off the train, there would be an awful lot of litter at the end of the day. Like a car that loses value when you drive it off the lot, a daily newspaper gets worthless fast.

I’m sure the law is clear: leaving stuff on the T, even nice clean stuff, even leaving it on the seat, is still littering. I’d also say that once you pick something up, you’re responsible for it, so leaving found stuff is littering again. But I still recoil at the waste of reading matter. Like many people (of the Book) I have a hard time throwing away or defacing books.

So here’s my wacky utopian proposal for the morning commute and reading time:

• If you were born on an even numbered day, you take papers on even numbered days, odd birthdays, odd paper days, and you leave those papers on the seat when you get off the train
• If its not your odd/even day, you pick up a left paper and are responsible for taking it off the train and recycling it
• After the main morning commute time, say 9:30am, alternate rules are off and any everybody is responsible for taking papers off the train

If everybody did this, we’d use only half as much paper for disposable free morning reading.  Fat chance of that.  The free paper people certainly don’t want to cut their circulation in half, and typical Americans aren’ t going to be interested in second-hand papers.

So until everybody switches to a more ecologically sound morning read, I will continue to be quietly grateful for minor littering, and will do my best to take my found paper with me on both odd and even days.

Last week, I posted a bit of my side of Tangyslice’s story of Firstgiving’s selection of a new PR firm, and promised to talk about the thing we did that caused the most trauma to the folks pitching us. It’s hardly unique to PR that the people who pitch you and sell you and win your business are not always the ones who actually deliver the service.

We had already had a preliminary meeting with each candidate agency, generally meeting a principal and a lead member of our team to be. So my idea was to ask each PR agency to send us the full actual team that would be working on our account, and to leave the principal behind. Tangy talked me out of the last bit at least in part because he thought the firms would just tell us to get lost. He might well have been right, but what happened instead was actually more revealing than meeting the team alone would have been.

We told each agency that we wanted to meet the full team and wanted the principal to keep her mouth shut as much as possible. After all, we had already heard the big pitch from the head honchos. We know that we won’t get that much time from the top dog and most of the daily work will be done by the mid-level and junior folks. We wanted to meet those people and hear what they have to say.

As it turns out, what we got to see was to what extent the principal really trusted the team in front of a client, or even more frighteningly, a prospective client. We threw out questions to individuals and to the group and watched when principals interrupted or corrected the junior people and when they let them speak. One principal spent much of the meeting talking about how she would be doing lots and lots of work for us and by implication calling her team amateurs. Not cool.

I suppose it might have been more traumatic for the junior people to get put on the spot by a client in front of the boss than for the boss to let them talk, but some of those junior people are going to run their own agencies some day, why not give them a shot now? Maybe someday I’ll be able to say that I believed in them back when they were just associates.

Walking home after dark, I meandered through Porter square along White street, and there it was, a store I hadn’t noticed before. It was closed, with no visible signage, but brightly lit within. Some kind of furniture store with lots of shelving, closet organizers…

…and if I’m not mistaken, a Murphy Bed! A what, you ask? Wikipedia explains it all:

A Murphy Bed or Wallbed is a bed that flips up at the head end for storage inside a closet. … William L. Murphy applied for a patent for the Murphy bed on April 1, 1916 and was granted Design Patent D49,273 on June 27, 1916. Murphy started the Murphy Wall Bed Company and began production in San Francisco. In January 1990, the company changed its name to the “Murphy Bed Co. Inc.”

As you may know, I have a pretty small apartment, so this sort of gizmo appeals to me. And ya gotta love a patented bed. Especially one with built-in comedy value. Again, from Wikipedia. And I’m pretty sure there’s a good Murphy bed accident in one of the Pink Panther movies, too.

These beds make appearances in movies as they lend themselves to slapstick humor in which people are trapped when the bed folds into the upright position, carrying the person on the bed inside. For example, in Stanley Kramer’s famous comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the smarmy Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers) gets thrown from the fire truck ladder, through a window and onto a Murphy bed, which prompty retracts into the wall. In Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, a hotel’s neon sign advertises “Murphy Beds — Charming to the Unsophisticated”. Modern murphy beds utilize a counterbalance system making it near impossible to get trapped.

I was kinda looking forward to getting trapped in there. It’s a killer excuse for being late to work. But the Murphy bed story gets better, there’s trademark abandonment, the downside of too successful a brand name:

In 1989, an appellate court held that the term “Murphy bed” is no longer entitled to trademark cover because a substantial majority of the public perceive the term as a generic term for a bed that folds into a wall rather than the specific model made by the Murphy Bed Co.

So what is this store called and what’s the deal with the Murphy bed in the window? Well, I searched around and found not one but three websites for this shop. I’ll share one called Closet Solutions, which now that I type it, is actually visible in the photo above. Duh. Will have to check this place out sometime when they’re open.

If you’ve been following Tangyslice’s desperate quest for social media coolness, you know that he’s going on a social media bender, trying to join 100 social sites in 30 days. Back in art school, I worried about the people who seemed to be more interested in cameras and lenses than in the photos they produced. Content is king, I say. If you’ve got nothing to say, you’ve got nothing to tweet, nothing to blog, nothing to shout, and ultimately, nobody to friend.  [I suppose it's possible that in social media terms you can reverse that last bit to "if you've got no friends, it doesn't matter what you have to say." See my recent attempt to explain Twitter for more mulling on that.]

That said, I took up Tangy’s gauntlet and took stock of my social media memberships, and then joined a few more to see what’s what.  After all, his misguided Spurlockian stunt comes in part from my declaration that I’ll join almost anything just to secure the limeduck name against poachers. (Yes, I flatter myself to imagine that they might exist. Allow me some self-indulgence here, it’s my blog after all.)

It turns out that I have accounts on at least 29 social media and networking sites: (and even as I type this, I realize there are a few more…)

Social networks I actually use. There is original and timely content or information here because I log in frequently and maintain information.

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter

Marginal social networks. I log into these once in a while because they’re very specific or because I have a few important contacts unique to them.

• Technorati
• Plaxo
• Flickr

Insurance social networks. I maintain membership here because I believe its important to have updated information there just in case, or because I know some people search there or have contacts there.

• Spock
• Myspace
• Gather

Vertical social networks. These are very specific, maybe too specific, but I joined them to check them out and they seem to have some useful effect in keeping connected with topics of interest.

• Cork’d
• 9 Neighbors
• Foodbuzz
• Tripadvisor
• Stylefeeder

Social bookmarking sites. I just don’t use them much except occasionally to try and promote my site or a friend’s site.

• Digg
• Newsvine
• Stumbleupon
• Reddit

Repeater and aggergator sites. These are places where I have a profile that does nothing other than repeat or consolidate the RSS feed(s) from some of the sites I actually use and from limeduck.com. I’m here just in case one of these gets big and to protect the limeduck brand.

• Friendfeed
• HelloTXT
• Utterz
• Tumblr
• Pownce

OK, I admit it, I have no idea what these sites are for. I just joined them to try and stay ahead of Tangyslice.

• Plurk
• Humble Voice
• Trig
• Bebo
• Xanga
• Virb

Do I feel 29 times better?  Do I  have 29 times more to say?  Does this get me 29 times more traffic and search awareness?  Hardly.  Are there useful sites I haven’t discovered?  Almost certainly.  I’ll be disappointed if there are no comments alerting me to sites I’ve cruelly omitted.

Watch this space for updates.  Or any of the other 29 spaces.