East Coast-West Coast

It seems like there are growing tensions in the bartending world these days.  The cocktail world is getting to be as New York-centric as Put It Up has gotten in the last couple weeks.

The main cocktail convention in the U.S. and probably the world is Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, which just wrapped up on Sunday.  Reports are coming back that San Francisco bartenders got snubbed there. But that’s just the latest example of the tensions between Tales and Frisco.  After SF cocktail week in May, the founders of Tales tweeted, tweeted about their displeasure with there being another big cocktail event.  A few weeks later nominees for the Tales of the Cocktail Spirit Award  for best bar in America were announced.  All three were in NYC.  I’ve been to two out of the three, and let me just say they pale in comparison to an Absinthe or an Alembic.  7×7 SF is reporting that only two out of thirty awards given throughout Tales’ history have gone to anyone in California.

You don’t have to look very hard to see the problems with all this.  And all of this was before New York decided to host it’s own cocktail week on the same dates as San Fran next year.  As if they’re trying to snuff us out.

All of this doesn’t really matter how under-appreciated we are, because the city of San Francisco has the strongest and most vibrant cocktail scene in America.  Just come over for a weekend.

As a bonus, I’ve got a new cocktail, the Creole Sour after the jump.

Jeans “symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche.”

Don’ wear jeans. Or do. This op-ed in the Washington Post really doesn’t like jeans.
UPDATE: even more well known news papers are not down with denim.

Big day for news

CERN scientists discover cell that started the Big Bang

The entire internet is being rebooted

The Guardian switches to Twitter “Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters.”

Google introduces Auto Pilot for Gmail and Google Chat.

Even more news here

Prom Queen Video

Some would say Lil’ Wayne is trying to jump over sharks. I would say they are wrong. Dead wrong. This is absolutely genius. Just watch it.

The NeverEnding Story…indeed.

So, a crappy year in film should inspire those hard working people in Hollywood, right?  I mean, shouldn’t the fact that “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” only took home technical awards tell you that people are smart enough to realize that Fincher took a CGI dump (although, a gorgeous dump) on a Forrest Gump remake?  Hollywood doesn’t think so!  Instead of searching for that great new screenplay, director, or original idea, the execs at the studios find it easier just to hire a couple kids with iphones to scour IMDB and pick out a piece of nostalgia from a generation’s childhood that they can exploit.

A ton of “Coming Soon” blogs report that Warner Bros. is in the works to make a modernized version of “The NeverEnding Story”.  I’m not gonna go overboard and claim that Hollywood is destroying a cinematic classic, but come ON!  I’m just expressing my pre-emptive anger caused by the moment when I see the teaser trailer before Will Smith’s “Karate Kid” (rumored), showing Falkor looking like a CGI composite of all three of the Jonas Brothers and starring Michael Cera, Miley Cyrus, and Dwayne Johnson as the Rock Biter. (Ha…get it?)

Like I said, I am not gonna be one of those people that claims that “The NeverEnding Story” changed my life and blah blah blah, but I will be one of those people that claims that the theme song changed my life.  Once again, I’m pre-pissed off because you know someone at Warner Bros. will screw it up and do something like pay for “six million dollar man” surgery for Travis Barker and get Blink 182 back together to redo it. In a the spirit of a mini nostalgia fest, and to calm me down, here is a video of Kid’s Inc. singing the song that NeverEnds…in your heart.

P.S. I dream of the Flaming Lips using their Warner Bros. contacts to try and take a stab at the theme song.

P.P.S. I feel like I should say both, “I’m sorry” and “You’re welcome” for such a long post on this subject.

Rachel Ray fondles ass and is (apparently) actually sort of cool?

In the spirit of trying to keep this blog with at least one post a day…

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The Swirlies are back!

After a five year hiatus, The Swirlies have reemerged and will be playing a few shows over on this side of the continent. I will be going Friday and posting my thoughts in response to this post if anyone is interested. I believe I turned at least a few of you onto the swirlies, yeah? Anyhow, get their older stuff here for free. The one you want is They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World of Salons. Enjoy!

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David Lynch’s Twitter

His Twitter

I sort of have one…

Jurassic Park 4

Woah, wait a second. One of you had to have known about this because it is old news. Why didn’t you tell me?

“We’re told that the film is about the government which has trained dinosaurs to carry weapons and use them for battle purposes.”

If this gets cancelled I’m jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. This better get made.

Torrenting the New York Times?

Time has a nice piece about how to fund print journalism.  With journalism being an interesting topic for journalists, I’m sure you’ve at least seen a few items on catastrophic failure of print media and how no one can afford bureaus that can adequately cover the news.  I mean the Chronicle might be loosing a million dollars a week, and it’s the only game in town, as far as SF proper.

I’ve heard people say the Goog might feel charitable and buy a paper (Google’s not a charity and a newspaper isn’t a way to make money), or we should let papers fail and have everyone get their news from bloggers…

A real solution hasn’t come out of any of this brainstorming, but Time gets close.  Internet ad revenue is falling. It really wasn’t paying the bills anyways.  The only real solution might be for there to be an iTunes News.

The article points out that even as the audiences are growing, the papers are still bleeding money.  The news is still considered valuable, but now we’re used to getting it for free.  Many of the new readers are young, and have grown up with free access to information.

Micropayments seem to be one of the few viable solutions, but who’s to stop me from going to download today’s paper illegally.  I mean, it’ll take seconds.  Its not an HD rip of Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties or anything.  iTunes did get people to pay for music downloads, but as far as I know, it was people who didn’t know how to use Napster in the first place.  This will be a hard paradigm to shift.

Well, all that ranting and no solutions from me either.  Man, I need to get a job.