Variability

Here, Malcolm Gladwell, whose most recent book, Blink, I didn't much care for, gives a talk in the TEDTalks series on the lessons of one food scientist who discovered a long time ago that, in short, one size doesn't fit all.

Watch the video here.

I think it goes a bit beyond this. I think that we're just starting to scratch the surface of what he calls "discovering variability". I think, in fact, that what we're coming back to is what I've come to call "analog warmth". It's what audiophile talk about when they embrace the "warm" sound of an analog amplifier that uses vacuum tubes over a digital one that breaks everything down into ones and zeros, either/or.

Digital makes scalable, but the either/or of the whole thing robs digital of the warm feeling of life on the most basic level. Somewhere between the chaos of randomness and the order of binary code, there's life.

I've been thinking of this concept for a while and would like to start fleshing it out, maybe not even in the food realm, but it seems a good place to start. More later.

Gin Snobs

The New York Times just ran a story which denigrates vodka and celebrates gin. Piffle. They're just mad that they've been overpaying for Grey Goose like the rest of us for years. (Most of those ratings you see that put Smirnoff at the bottom and Grey Goose at the top are sighted, not blind tastings. With blind tastings, vodkas get ranked pretty randomly. It's all marketing... witness the spelling of the first word in "Grey Goose".)

I've found this to be true:
You can't trust a woman who drinks gin after sunset.
This may sound sexist, but the fact is you can't trust a man who drinks gin, period...

Unless it's a Ramos Gin Fizz... or the occasional Salty Dog... and I've always enjoyed a cold G&T on a hot afternoon. The Negroni's not a bad drink, though I'd rather have just the Campari with soda. Oh hell, I guess I'd rather cop to untrustworthiness than ruin the symmetry of the aphorism.