Used in a sentence…

The 7 line extension

The 7 train connects Times Square and Flushing via 42nd street, Grand Central Station, Queensboro Plaza, Jackson Heights, and Shea Stadium, to name just a few of the stations and neighborhoods.  But anybody who’s ever had the misfortune to attend a convention at the Javits Center can tell you where the 7 does not go.  But this will change.  Sometime in the next ten years or so, the 7 train will have a new Western terminus at 34th street and 11th avenue.  You can see a bit of the area in question here, via google maps:

What’s even more interesting to me are two additional factoids about the 7 extension, gleaned from the estimable Transitblogger and the ever-turgid wikipedia.

• It *might* eventually get extended to 23rd street and 11th avenue, further revitalizing Chelsea.  More on Chelsea in a bit.
• A planned station at 41st street and 10th avenue (”Hell’s Kitchen”) has been canceled or postponed.  I for one would be totally excited to have a station called “Hell’s Kitchen” but it appears that the plan would label it “10th Avenue.”

The high line

Way out at the other end of the transit lifecycle is the High Line, a new park created from the skeleton of a long-abandoned 1930’s elevated freight rail line near 10th avenue.  The first section of the High Line, which opened on June 9, runs from Gansevoort street in the appetizingly-named meatpacking district up to 20th street.  Eventually the park will run all the way to 30th street, then West around the rail yards, ending up pretty close to the Javtis Center and the new 7 line terminus.  You can see the tracks more clearly in Google’s map view, and the satellite view doesn’t yet show the High Line’s current state.

I’m very much in favor of walkable urban space, urban green space and imaginative recycling or urban relics, but I found the High Line a little unfinished.  Actually, it is unfinished, not just because not all the old track has been opened as a park, but also because as a park, it has yet to grow and develop.  The plantings are young, the wooden parts have yet to weather, and yes, the taggers haven’t made their mark yet.

The High Line has some great beats making imaginative use of the materials at hand, such as the chaise lounges on wheels set into the old tracks and a sunken ampetheater that ends in glass windows looking up 10th avenue.  It also passes under or through some buildings along the way, notably the Standard Hotel, which straddles it between Little West 12th and 13th streets.  The vistas are impresive and there’s a good amount of green for the space available, which is maybe 20 feet wide in most parts.  There’s an elevator at 16th street (also the location of the only restrooms), so the line is pretty acessible.

What’s missing for me - and I hope this is just temporary - is shelter.  None of the plants are tall enough for shade yet, and there seems hardly anything to break the wind that comes off the river and down the avenues.  I wonder what the park will be like in the winer.  But these are small nits, and I’m very happy to see such an interesting new space come up.  And of course, some of the gritty side is still visible from the line, if not at yet on it.

It wasn’t the original source of the method, but here’s a link to a pretty exhaustive and visual rundown on cleaning your Apple keyboard.  This model is no longer made, but I’m sure there are plenty out there.  I cannot overstate the importance of having a photo or diagram of the arrangement of keys before  you start the process. You can use the before/after shot above in a pinch.  Since they letters on the keys are oblique (not italic, mind you), once they’re off, there’s some confusion between the L and the 7, and the I and the /, among others.  Beware and stay clean.

I thought I knew a thing or two about the interwebs, but in an effort to make things easy, T-Mobile has wrapped the web in a very confusing little phone package.  For starters, there’s no button or menu item for “surf the web” or even “mobile internet” - you have to know that the operative term is “T-Zones” which I always thought was the oily bit on your nose and forehead.  How is anybody supposed to figure that out?  Plus, when configuring “shortcuts” which are accessible with one click, you can’t add a URL or even a link to these “T-Zones”

Since “typing” on a phone with T9 “predictive” text entry is a chore for the most skilled and a terrible challenge for the newbie oldster, I figured the least I could do would be to set up Dad’s phone with eBay as a bookmark and enter his username and password for him.  After some poking around, I found that eBay has a special T-Mobile mobile portal, tmo.ebay.com, pre-configured in the phone.  I added it to the homepage bookmarks and thought I was pretty cool.

Then I clicked the “sign in” button and got a weird error.  The phone can’t display that page, it claimed.  Checked everything, tried again.  Same.  Rebooted, moved to a different location, same.  I even tried the same operation on my own T-Mobile phone. Fail. What good is special t-mobile eBay if you can’t log in?  Well, I suppose it could be good for one’s paypal balance.  Then, on a total lark, I tried the regular mobile eBay URL, m.ebay.com, and what do you know, everything worked fine.  let’s compare the two pages:

vs.

I can’t really be bothered to view the source, but it’s pretty clear that the T-Mobile version adds the “t-zones home” link and somehow subtracts the actual “sign in” functionality.  (Both seem to work fine on a full-blown PC browser) Rather a poor deal, if you ask me.  Now that I finally have the phone logged into eBay, it’s looking pretty good.  It remembers the login, and defaults to a nice compact “my eBay” view showing items you’re selling, buying, watching, etc.

The final step that almost defeated me was adding this non-standard eBay page to the phone’s little web homepage link list.  I was instructed to “enter a URL, such as msn.com” but apparently “ebay.com” or “m.ebay.com” didn’t count, so I ended up tortuously entering the “http://” in T9, and when I finally did, the page showed up in the menu under the full URL, not just “eBay”

So where does this all leave us?  Well, I’m pretty sure Dad will be able to check the status of his bids and sales on the go, but between the T9 text entry and the imperfect experience of the mobile versions of most websites, I doubt he’ll be doing much more.  Perhaps he’ll list this phone on eBay by next Fathers’ day.

The Flatiron Building is an iconic landmark in New York City.  When I chanced to walk by this week, I saw many people taking pictures of the building, some tourists snapping themselves next to it, some more serious looking photographers looking for a new angle on the building.

I called up Stieglitz’s classic 1903 image of the building and tried to find the vantage point from which he took it, probably somewhere in Madison Square Park.  I thought I could find the great Y-shaped tree and work from there.  The difference in camera equipment would make it impossible to really get the “same” shot even if I could find the tree, but I looked around.

How much does a tree grow in 100 years?  None of the living trees looked right, but of course they had leaves which made things tough.  There was a huge section of a dead tree still standing for some reason, and I decided that it was Stieglitz’s tree, preserved as a landmark of some sort, so I took this admittedly poor approximation.

Not exactly a unique contribution to the canon.  And I still put the tree too far toward the center.  You can compare Stieglitz’s image with mine and with a 1904 Flatiron Building picture by Edward Steichen in this bit from Slate magazine.

Both the individual and the corporate buyer want to get the best deal they can, and the definition of “best” is seldom a clear thing.  I believe people buy when they feel they have a good deal. Even the stereotypical government procurement officer doesn’t automatically choose the lowest bid, he or she must be satisfied that the lowest acceptable bid is accepted, and that the bidder can in fact deliver.  Likewise, the individual buyer makes many purchases that involve others, either directly (as in buying groceries for your family) or indirectly (as in buying a fashion item to impress a mate or a peer.)  Unless you’re a hermit, relatively few of your individual purchases are free from others’ notice, and that can affect your choice.

Some won’t buy unless they have what they think is the best deal (Barry Schwartz calls them “maximizers” in his book, The Paradox of Choice) and some will buy when they have what they think is a good enough deal (”satisficers”) but my point is that both have emotional needs that are not always clearly explained by dollars and product features.  A person’s status in a work or social group is often on the line when buying things for work or for home.

The goal of all marketing is to understand on a deep emotional level the needs of your target buyers and their influencers.  If you start with this premise, you will find your way to the right marketing solution for your target, whether they are “businesses” or “consumers.”  Learn their secret aspirations and hidden worries, and the path will become clear.

I was browsing the aisles at a local big box store and spied something I had never seen before: mini Clif bars.  I’d been an occasional consumer of the full-sized article for some time, so I bought some.

As you can see, the regular Clif is 2.4 ounces and the mins are just one ounce, 42% of the size and therefore 42% of the calories (240 vs 100) and other contents, both good and bad. But as I’m sure you’ve guessed, the minis cost more (as per the Clif website, you may find different prices in the wild) per unit of Clif - $0.72 each (in a box of 18) or $11.55/lb for minis vs $1.25 each (in a box of 12) or $8.33/lb for regulars.

Big ripoff for a little energy bar?  Actually, I think it’s a decent deal.  Sure, I’d rather pay less for my chosen size, and I’d rather reduce packaging waste than increase it, but the folks at Clif are onto something - some people don’t want a 240 calorie snack, and they don’t much feel like eating half of a bigger bar and working out how to keep the other half fresh in the midst of a busy workday or workout.

People trying to lose weight (or just avoid overeating and feeling icky) are often challenged by portion control.  If the serving is too big, it’s easy to overeat unless you have great restraint; if it’s too small, it’s easy to eat two, or more.  Perhaps in a perfect world, you could buy Clif like bread, in large loafs from which you’d cut whatever amount you wanted (like a muffaleta?), but that has its pitfalls too.  What I like about Clif’s math here is that if you eat two minis, you’ve spent more but still eaten less than if you’d had a standard bar.

Sure, the marketing peeps at Clif have done a good job of pitching the mini as a good thing, and a very good job of obscuring the price differential by selling the different sizes in different count packages.  But for me, it’s down to convenience and to the right size of snack.  And in the land of supersizing, a little downsizing is worth the premium.

More on this soon, but for now, suffice to say I’m enjoying monochrome again.  Happy Bloomsday.

First up, Bread and Lily in Newton, where owner Ben Cutler put on an impressive spread for some food bloggers.  Bread & Lily offers a full range of edibles from the usual cafe stuff to some impressive house-made sandwiches, catering and even ice cream made on site.  They smoke their own salmon and make their own whitefish salad too.  Cutler (brother of non-cheese blogger @jeffcutler) explained his “practical approach to doing the right thing” wherein he buys organic and sustainable products unless that would make the resulting menu items unaffordable.  Bread and Lily also makes in-house whatever they can at the highest quality, but buys elsewhere from the leading suppliers what they can’t (yet?) perfect themselves.

At left, oven roasted turkey sandwich with cranberry relish, applewood bacon and thyme mayo.  At right, a very generous broccoli quiche.

Slightly closer to HQ but somehwat less convenient to the Green line is Ana Sortun’s Sofra Bakery.  You may remember Sortun as the brains behind Oleana, the birthplace of Random Apps of Kindness.

Sofra is awash in the cuisine of Turkey, Lebanon and Greece, with lots of yogurts, sweets and pastries, mezze, sandwiches and baklava.  I had orange blossom lemonade and a za’atar croissant,and was unable to leave without buying a bag of sugar smoke pecans.

Those sugar smoke pecans are quite impressive, by the way.  Steep at $12 per bag, but they go a long way.

Which reminds me in a tangential way.. . I returned to Wrapro with Prof. M and among other tastiness, we enjoyed pistachio ma’amoul:

Greg Paul and his family recipes are more than welcome to scoff (as long as they bring samples) but these were awfully delicious.  Ma’amoul come in different shapes and different fillings.  These were sort of oval and filled with delicious pistachio and dusted with powdered sugar.  There are some great cafes byond the usual waddle range, but also some undiscovered desserts at the usual haunts.

A recipe is a small tasty morsel of intellectual property, like a poem or a song, or maybe more like a chemical formula or computer program.  People have paid for songs one at a time from sheet music to single 45’s to itunes, and there’s a healthy trade in small software programs like plugins and skins, but the record for written matter is less clear.

A published recipe is protected by copyright as long as it has some content beyond a simple list of ingredients.  But of course most of us the change recipes that we get anyway, either because we’re missing some ingredient or because we’re tinkerers by nature.  A recipe’s improvisational nature is sort of like that of a jazz standard - different with every performance but always recognizable as the same.

I asked the same question at the Public Radio Kitchen food blogger confab last week and the consensus was that nobody’s buying single recipes, but people do buy cookbooks and subscribe to cooking magazines, both online and off.  It still seems odd to me.

You only need one or a handful of recipes at any given time, to make a meal for yourself and your family, but people consistently overbuy books of hundreds of recipes that they never use, and there must be millions of cooks and chefs with great recipes who have only limited ways to monetize or publicize them.  Sure, we love to leaf through books and we probably don’t want to expose our computers to kitchen conditions, but the internet has a lot to offer the recipe market - search, ratings, recommendation, social and affinity marketing, bundling, mass customization…

So here’s a rundown of some recipe business models.  I’m sure you can think of more, but which one - if any - will bear fruit?

The itunes model: pay as you go, one at a time or a few at a time for a price per. There are plenty of places where you can buy songs for about a dollar each.  Could somebody set up a recipe store where you could download recipes for a small sum each?  The first listing on Amazon.com for “cookbook” is a Rachel Ray number that boasts 365 recipes for $19.95, discounted to $13.57, an implied per-recipe price of 3.7 cents.  Not a lot of joy there for the recipe makers, but I figure the average cookbook buyer actually uses a fraction of the recipes in a book (who hasn’t bought an album to get one great song, at least before itunes?), so maybe 25 or 50 cents could make this model go?

The youtube model: it’s all free, but there are ads, and Google is making serious book on your behavorial data, too.  Alhough there’s no overwhelming single destination for recipes, there is a lot of free content out there, which is generally ad-supported or provided to build other businesses.  More on the latter later, but as far as ad-support goes, it doesn’t necessarily value quality over quantity.  Youtube has feedback systems and ratings that help you decide if a video is good or not before viewing it, so that might make a recipe portal more useful.  Even in published cookbooks, too many recipes are untested and may not really come together as you think.

The netflix model: all you can eat for a fixed monthly price.  This might actually be the magazine model in disguise, but even if you subscribe to Martha Stewart Living, you only get one issue a month, and anybody can read a lot of it free on the website.  Since you need to eat every day, you presumably have a regular and ongoing need for new recipes, so a subscription seems to make sense. Wouldn’t people pay to get a daily, weekly or monthly digest (sig) of fresh recipes?

The corporate tool model: it’s all free, but it’s provided by companies with an interest in your cooking.  Honestly, I think this is where the action is.  People who make food or cooking equipment have an interest in helping us cook more food, or at least in cooking more of their food using their equipment.  If your CSA shipment comes with one of Julia’s cookbooks, doesn’t that serve everybody well?  I’ve been making the cookie recipe from under the lid of the Quaker oatmeal for years.  I still use the tiny cookbook that came with my rice cooker.

I was surprised that at my recent visit to the Davis Square Farmers market, only one of the six or eight fresh food vendors had any recipes available at all, and that one missed the critical point of including their own farm’s name and contact information on the recipe cards!  Anyway, free recipes for the consumer and publicity and complementary assets for the vendor seems like a win-win to me.

I know I probably shouldn’t do this, but while I’m on the recipe topic, I’m going to reveal most of the secret of my peanut butter oatmeal cookies, adapted from the Quaker oats recipe under the lid of the box. The base recipe is free, but it’ll cost you to learn the secret ingredient.

Professor M’s Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies. Makes about 3 dozen.

1 stick organic butter, softened
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 cage-free organic eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1-1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
3 cups Quaker oats
2/3 cups [redacted secret ingredient]
1/3 cup chopped dark chocolate or chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 F
2. Combine butter, peanut butter and sugars in a bowl
3. Add eggs and vanilla, beat well
4. Add flour and baking soda
5. Add oats, [redacted secret ingredient] and chocolate, stir in
6. Drop generous rounded tablespoons onto cookie sheets
7. Bake for about 12 minutes, cool at least a minute before devouring

We took seats inside the middle deck, plopping down at a table thoughtfully decked out with sick bags. Pretty much immediately after departure, the announcements of the availability of Dramamine started.  Well, the professor and I got the message and took the pills.  The hour-long trip to the whale zone was choppy, with 3-4 foot swells in the wine-dark sea.

I won’t dwell on this at length, but I will say that not in any given year of my college career, possibly not even in all four years, did I witness as much reverse peristalsis as I did on this cruise. Seriously, people - the concession stand sells just three things: soft drinks, hot dogs, and Dramamine - how could you all have picked the wrong two?

When we arrived at the Stellwagen Bank Marine Sanctuary and cut the engines, the ride became a lot more comfortable, if a little chilly.  After some slow circles, we started to spot whales.  At first, a pair of relatively rare and fast-moving fin whales, and then later a couple of groups of humpbacks which came pretty close to the boat, or at least allowed the boat to approach them.

The light green area visible above next to the whale is actually its flipper, which is a much lighter color than the bulk of the animal, and often the first part you see through the water before its back and blowhole break the surface. The previously queasy were roused and inspired by even these fleeting glimpses.

The trip back was smoother, owing to the direction of current, but unfortunately a couple more lunches were lost before we returned to port.  Undeterred, we headed off around the corner to Sel de la Terre for dinner.

After warming ourselves with tea and coffee, we had an excellent roasted tomato soup with a taleggio crostini (crostino?) which was a highbrow version of the classic tomato soup and grilled cheese.  It doesn’t hold a candle to that available at Garden at the Cellar, but that’s probably now what Sel set out to do.

For an entree, I enjoyed the sautéed gnocchi with asparagus, foraged mushrooms and piave vecchio.  The rustic hand-cut gnocchi were almost smooth in texture, complemented by meaty mushrooms, sharp cheese and fresh asparagus.  Somehow the transition from the wild windy ocean to a cozy french table wasn’t jarring at all.

OK, they’re not actually on a rampage, and they don’t look like that illustration.  But still, how embarrassing would it be to be so slow or unwary that you could be devoured by a snail?

A little surfing came up with this turgid notice from the Division of Marine Fisheries which outlines what critters are off-limits due to toxins produced by the algae that comprise red tide. I consider myself a somewhat adventurous eater, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen “carnivorous snail” on a menu.

Under authority of Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 130, Section 74A and 75, the status of the below-defined areas have been changed to CLOSED TO THE TAKING OF BLUE MUSSELS, SURF CLAMS, CARNIVOROUS SNAILS AND WHOLE SEA SCALLOPS WITH THE EXCEPTION OF SEA SCALLOP ADDUCTOR MUSCLE effective immediately. Digging, harvesting or collecting and/or attempting to dig, harvest or collect shellfish and the possession of shellfish, including carnivorous snails, from the below- defined areas is prohibited.

By June 3, the red tide had at least partially subsided, as reported under the possibly punny headline, clam beds partially open but alas, (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) carnivorous snails are still off-limits.

The Division of Marine Fisheries has reopened clam beds in Essex Bay and the Annisquam River for softshell clams and razor clams … The beds remain closed to taking other shellfish including blue mussels, surf clams, carnivorous snails and whole sea scallops …

Answering my earlier question about just what a carnivorous snail might eat, I’ve learned that carnivorous snails have some sort of drill-like attachment that they use to bore holes in the shells of other shellfish in order to devour them.  Eek.  More horrifying mollusc-on-mollusc predation here, including, and I kid you not, “The cone snail: the bearer of flying venom-filled needle teeth.”  Not for the faint of heart.

The event had four tracks - food blogging 101, food photography, monetizing a food blog, and blogging and the food media.  I had planned to float, but once things got going in the monetization group, I had to stay.  Here are links to some of the blogs of the discussants:

• Boston Food Mom Examiner
• Cake and Commerce (I love that name), “one girl’s salt is another girl’s fleur de sel”
• Carrots N Cake, who believes that “…’bad’ foods can be part of an overall healthy diet.”
• Cave Cibum (”beware the food”)
• The Conscious Kitchen, about “cultural, environmental, historical and social aspects of food, and a dedication to ethical consumption.”
• Curcumari, “…the blog recreates that landscape of color, flavors and aromas through my ongoing conversation with people who produce, make and savor food.”
• Kosher Camembert, where I not that long ago got some great info about vegetarian chorizo, modestly described as “A want-to-be cook who reads cookbooks like novels.”
• North Shore Dish, “a guide to noshing north of Boston”
• Value the Meal, “your online spot for news, analysis, and action on the abuses of global fast food corporations” operated by Corporate Accountability International.
• I’m missing many more, but too few had cards and I was a lousy note-taker.  My apologies.

Some quick notes on the discussion of monetization of food blogs:

A blog is not a business model. Many at the table were engaging in labors of love and trying to figure out a way to “at least pay for the dinners we eat” or cover hosting costs.  Most did not aspire to make a living blogging and few if any could imagine how that might come to pass.

The primary route to money for a food blogger seems to be advertising, usually from ad networks like Google’s or specialists like BlogHer and FoodBuzz.  Success seemed mixed in this group, and there were issues with the suitability of the ads, especially in blogs with particular geographies or restricted dietary focus.  I have to say, I expect the ad market to get worse, not better as more and more passionate content providers chase fewer and fewer actual buyers, and going door to door to sell local merchants your ad space doesn’t look too good either.

A secondary method that got only a little airtime was the use of affiliate programs like that at Amazon.com to make referral fees on purchases made via clicks on the blog.  This seems to have more potential upside to me, but it still remains to be seen if people in the mood to read reviews or recipes are also in the mood to buy books or gadgets.

Direct selling was also low on the list, as most bloggers want their content widely read and don’t see a lot of potential in subscription revenue.  I think they’d be wise to build a huge readership before trying to charge for anything, but there might be room for some freemium services if the blog is specialized enough or the information is valuable enough.  Those offering real scientifically based nutritional information or recipes geared for various dietary restrictions seem to have the best shot here.

Nobody seemed to think that individual recipes could be sold, but there was some faith (I’m skeptical) that cookbooks could be sold as ebooks or possibly print-on-demand.  I already see a glut of cookbooks and food magazines on top of a huge volume of free recipes online and off coming from the food blogosphere itself, and also from food vendors from farm markets to upscale restaurants.

Even those not seeking riches from food blogging admitted to getting product or perks once in a while from manufacturers or restaurants, but nobody would cop to this being a real motivator, and some felt conflicted about accepting gifts or writing about them while maintaining independence.

In short, I’m not bullish on most food bloggers even covering their costs (I sure don’t, and I run this joint on the cheap to say the least), but I still believe that food blogs can be great marketing vehicles for real food businesses.  It’s a crowded market with little cost to enter or compete, and there’s pressure from mainstream media and larger online players too.  I hope I’m wrong on this, because I’d hate to lose this rich soup of blogs, but in case I’m right, I’d advise food bloggers to find out what besides a blog you have to offer.

1. Move the @#$% in if you’re not getting off at the next stop.  If you’re standing in the door and it’s not your stop, you are part of the problem.  If you find yourself unavoidably in this position, the right thing to do is to get out of the way, even if that means temporarily exiting the vehicle.

2. Let people the @#$% off before you try to get the @#$% on.  Isn’t this one of the laws of thermodynamcs?  Do you try to get into taxis or airplanes before the last passengers get out?  There’s more room outside the train than inside it.  Stand aside, the train will not leave without you.

3. If there is one, use the back door to @#$%ing exit so people can get the @#$% on through the front door.  If we do this one right, #2 becomes moot, at least where back doors are present.

All of these things cause a buildup of delay in an already fragile system.  Next time you wait twice as long for a bus, get on a bus that’s packed like a sardine can, and see two more empty buses tagging along behind it, you’ll be looking at the imapct of the accumulation of small delays caused by lousy public transit manners.

A correspondingly west-coast and cool-headed critique of public transit etiquette is authored by the SFMUNI ladies here.

After attending a meeting of Boston Media Makers, I set out to estimate the market value of my twitter stream.  You can read the gory details here, but the upshot is that the Magpie service seemed to value my twitterish at about $15 CPM. I wonder if that figure has gone up or down, and why.

Here’s the formula: I used magpie to get an estimate of what they’d pay me, then using followcost and some guesstimation, I figured out what my audience was, and derived the CPM.  Back in November, Magpie offered me 69 Euros a month, and I was tweeting about 5 times per day to 252 followers.  Interestingly, today Magpie quoted me only EU 23.49, but I now have 632 followers and tweet about 3 times a day.  These figures suggest a CPM of about $3.75, quite a drop.  What’s changed?

Well, I am tweeting less - to the relief of many - and that might make me less attractive to advertisers.  But I have more than double the followers (so my total theoretical impressions are up), and my twitter grade is up and my percentile rank is up, too.  (In November I was #10,546 out of 255,406 for the 4th percentile, and now I’m #44,613 of 2,276,191 which is the 2nd percentile)  So why is my Magipe CPM a quarter of what it was half a year ago?

Well, gentle readers, as  you may have noticed, I didn’t really buy the ad valuation last time out (my estimate was a lot closer to diddly) so the fact that it’s gone down should please me.  But here’s the thing - it’s still too high by a huge factor.  Back when I had 250 twitter followers, I could tweet a link and around 20 people would click on it.  Pretty sweet.  Today, with over 600 followers, I can tweet a link and about 20 people click on it.  Based on grader’s estimates, the twitterverse is about 10x larger in terms of number of users now, but the results that I get - and by extension, what I figure an advertiser would get - in terms of clicks is pretty much the same.

I suspect that this bottoming out of the Twitter ad economy (which, by the way comes from a whopping sample size of one) is partly a coming around to reality and deflation of hype, and partly a change in the way people use Twitter. Follower and following numbers are up, and use of applications such at Tweetdeck to manage these larger streams is also way up.  These applications let users group and manage their Twitter friends, and thereby reduce the number of tweets that are actualy read.  This, and the fact that the applications remove from view the actual Twitter UI, suggests to me that the prospects of anybody making money with Twitter advertising - including Twitter - are dwindling.

Usually, when I think of summer cold noodles, I think of zaru soba as often craved by @yobtot and others, but this example with ramen also has a lot going for it, such as the array of vegetables and not least the abesnce of dark sauce that tends to stain one’s shirt as one slurps.  Either way, cold noodles are refrshing on a(n almost) summer day.

As it was early in the season, there wasn’t a lot of ready-to-eat fruits and veggies, but there was a great deal of potted plants, herbs, lettuces, some rhubarb, and a good collection of meats, cheeses, and breads, plus some fish, chocolate and even soap. A chalkboard at the entrance lists what’s on each day. I picked up some smoked sable (the fish, not the rodent!) from Nantucket Wild Gourmet & Smokehouse, and then got a lime-poppy cake and something called a cheddar snail at an unmarked bakery stand.

Since I’ve eaten all these goodies before having a chance to photograph them, I’ll take a moment to offer up some unasked-for advice to people running farm market stalls: it’s a marketing opportunity.  Compare these two experiences…

1. Hi Rise Bread Co.

This is a pretty well-known bakery cafe in West Cambridge, but that shouldn’t let them off the hook for having no website (that I could find), no signage at their farm stand, and no takeaway material at all - no brochures, no business cards, no paper bags with their logo and address on them, nothing.  Bummer.

2. Nantucket Wild Gourmet & Smokehouse

These folks have their act together, which is important because their farm stand is just about their only retail outlet beyond Nantucket.  They had clear signage, business cards with their website on them, and packaging with all the vital info on it.

I don’t expect farmers and small producers to have fancy marketing - although many do - but I want them to succeed, and that takes some attention to the basics.  So next time you buy some local produce or something at a farm market, ask for a business card or brochure to share with your friends and see what happens.  And if you get one, be sure to actually share it.

Of course, I can’t stop here.  I remember seeing a nice world map pillow cover on display at IKEA but couldn’t find the actual article in the bins.  It’s called Ketty Värld and it comes in three colors for $15.  The picture on the IKEA site was lousy so I found this shot at Plurielles.

I also figured Etsy would have some cool mappy stuff but was largely disappointed with the exception of this this cool pillow, Topography in Blue, in felt made from recycled plastic bottles from seller diffractionfiber.  It reminds me of a Wayne Pommnitz photo I have.  I also dig their state pillows, which you can adorn with a star on the city of your choice.

Further searches came up with this amazing patchwork quilt of Africa.  Note the hands along the top to get a sense of scale.  Those are 3″ squares.  Wow.

Some of these map textiles are more literal and some more abstracted, but all are fascinating to me because of their use of the visual language of maps.  It brought to mind the drawings of Daniel Zeller which I saw not too long ago at the DeCordova’s drawing show, and the paintings of David Palmquist, which were on view at Somerville Open Studios at the Vernon Street Studios.  Zeller’s drawings are abstract but look like maps; Palmquist’s paintings are of satellite views of the world, but are somewhat abstracted.

Much more on the fine art side than the bedspread side is the textile art of Leah Evans which is inspiring for the level of detail and work, but also for compositional beauty.  I like how the irregular shapes recall both the process of quilting and the collages of satellite pictures that create flat views of the round world.

It didn’t say it was refillable, but the clear plastic design made me suspect it, and for $2, the same price as a bottle of Charles Shaw wine, including a full load of sea salt, I figured it was worth a try.  And sure enough, the grinder cap screws right off, ready to be filled or refilled with anything you care to grind.  And grind I shall, as long as the plastic teeth hold out…

Maybe just slightly undercooked, moist and doughy in the middle (like many of my best friends), this scone scores high for spinach content and crusty cheese flavor.  It had several pockets of green and a good chewy outside.  Needless to say, it could be improved with the addition of bacon, but at the same time, I think just a touch of sea salt would so almost as much good.

I also picked up a sourdough round and gazed fondly at the quiche and pizza.  Be sure to stop in before or after your next visit to EVOO, Dali, and/or the Wine & Cheese Cask.