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The next best thing to carrying your guitar around over your shoulder is wearing it on your shirt, and the playable electronic guitar shirt lets you do just that.
This shirt features a special electronic panel that can hook up to a clip-on amp. When you strum the strings on the guitar, it’ll play the actual notes and chords through the amp, so you can jam out wherever you are — no picks required.
Check it out:
The electronic panel is easily removed for when you need to throw your shirt in the wash. But like, rock stars don’t do laundry, okay?
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If you’re having an especially bad day at work or the current political climate Twitter is causing you stress, you might appreciate having a self-destruct button on standby. No, it’s not an actual self-destruct button, but a fun little toy you can have at your desk that can even charge your devices.
The Self-Destruct USB Hub is kinda like a busy board for grownups that has a very extreme aesthetic. It’s got a big red button that can only be activated when the two switches and one big key are flipped and turned in order. Once activated, you can press the big button to set off lights and sounds not unlike something blowing up. It’s a fun deterrent against work piling up on your desk and can even help you indulge your “getting rid of Rob from accounting” fantasies. Screw you, Rob.
Check it out in action:
The hub also features four USB ports to charge up your devices so that even when you flip the switch, at least your phone will be at 100%.
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These outlets are useful for conserving power and saving on energy. Instead of keeping your appliances plugged in all the time and having them use power even when you’re using them, you can plug them into these handy outlets and switch off their energy consumption at the push of a button. According to the product page, the remote also works through walls and doors up to 100 feet away. It’s great for hard-to-reach appliances that you can stand to unplug at the end of the day.
Dante was relaxing at home when he received a FaceTime request from his daughter, who was just upstairs. Apparently, her brother left a little surprise on the carpet of their playroom, and she felt the need to tell him about it.
Mind you, the film’s still got a ways to go before it becomes a reality. As of now, the Black Widow project doesn’t have an official greenlight, let alone a release date.
Still, it’s a promising development for a movie fans have been clamoring for since, oh, about 2008, when the character made her first big-screen appearance in Iron Man 2.
Schaeffer is the writer and director of TiMER, a 2009 sci-fi rom-com that essentially did “Hang the DJ” before Black Mirror did.
She’s also written The Shower, an as-yet-unproduced screenplay that has Anne Hathaway attached to star, and is working on a Dirty Rotten Scoundrels remake titled Nasty Women. She previously worked with Disney on “Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.”
Her involvement makes the Black Widow standalone film the rare Marvel Cinematic Universe project with a female screenwriter. Others include Guardians of the Galaxy (Nicole Perlman) and the forthcoming Captain Marvel (Geneva Robertson-Dworet, who replaced Perlman and Meg LeFauve).
Johansson’s Black Widow has appeared in five MCU films over the past decade, and will return later this year in Avengers: Infinity War. Despite her immense popularity, however, she’s been relegated to a supporting player in the franchise.
Over the years, there’s been a lot of talk about the possibility of a Black Widow movie. Johansson has said repeatedly that she’d like to make one, as has Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. In 2016, Feige even got as far as saying he was “committing” to making it happen.
But until now, talk seemed to be as far as it got. When pressed, Feige would reassure fans that it was in development, but come up with excuses as to why it wasn’t making much progress.
It got to be a bad look, especially as Marvel kept churning out one male-led superhero blockbuster after another. It got to be an even worse look once 20th Century Fox started promoting Red Sparrow, which had fans like us joking that it was the Black Widow movie Marvel wouldn’t make.
For all that the MCU’s done right, they’ve dragged their feet when it comes to female superheroes, letting rival DC beat them to the punch with Wonder Woman. DC’s work paid off – Wonder Woman became the highest-grossing superhero flick of 2017.
Meanwhile, Marvel has been moving ahead with 2019’s Captain Marvel, its 21st movie overall and its first one starring a woman.
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If you’ve ever been curious about flying your own drone, then you need to jump on this Amazon lightning deal and save $30 on the Holy Stone Quadcopter Drone.
This 360-degree drone features a 720p HD camera and comes with an extra battery so you can extend your flight time. Have it hover steadily at any height for still shots, or go ham with flips and tricks. It features a headless security mode with simple directional inputs and orientation so that rookie flyers can operate it with ease, and the one key start allows it to return to you on its own.
The Quadcopter Drone is usually $100, but Amazon has knocked 30% off, so you can get it for $70.
Speaking with CNN’s Christopher Cuomo on Wednesday, the “counselor” to the President said “nobody here talks about Hillary Clinton,” insisting that “we” don’t care about Hillary.
Kellyanne Conway claimed “nobody here talks about Hillary Clinton” despite the fact that President Trump mentioned her at least 3 times earlier today #CuomoPrimeTimehttps://t.co/sGNQfZyNRt
First, while speaking about his commitment to “massive oil and gas,” he compared himself to Hillary Clinton, who he said “was for windmills.” And second, while answering questions in a press conference: he once again insisted that there was “no collusion” with Russia when asked whether he would consent to an interview with special investigator Robert Mueller, and swiftly pivoted to what he said was the FBI’s mishandling of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server (Do you think he knows about Jared and Ivanka?).
Things got worse — or better, if you’re, like, into seeing hypocrisy play out in real time — during one of President Trump’s fun early morning tweetstorms. On Thursday, Trump returned to his “Crooked Hillary Emails” greatest hits, seemingly in response Senator Feinstein’s unilateral release of an interview with the author of a now-infamous dossier on how Russia influenced the US election via the Trump campaign.
Disproven and paid for by Democrats “Dossier used to spy on Trump Campaign. Did FBI use Intel tool to influence the Election?” @foxandfriends Did Dems or Clinton also pay Russians? Where are hidden and smashed DNC servers? Where are Crooked Hillary Emails? What a mess!
Ok Kellyanne, Ok. We’re just gonna put this right here.
Kellyanne Conway told CNN’s @ChrisCuomo: “We don’t care about her. Nobody here talks about Hillary Clinton.”
… in case you were curious, Trump has tweeted Hillary Clinton’s name at least 89 times since election day. Here are some of those tweets.? pic.twitter.com/0lhtoe4thR
There follow mild spoilers for Black Mirror Season 4. Seriously, haven’t you finished it by now?
Here’s a Black Mirror script idea: A 21st century comedy writer in the UK comes up with a series of stories with technological twists. They are, to him, darkly amusing, no more a serious prediction than a SNL sketch would be in the US. Still, it amuses the writer to see his comedy confections play out on screen in a dramatic, rather unsettling manner.
Then comes the twist: the rest of the world loses its goddamn mind.
The writer protests he didn’t mean to foretell anything. In interviews he frames the series as wry amusements, no more. But does his audience listen? The anthology show becomes way more popular than anyone expected. It migrates from Britain’s Channel 4 to the world’s Netflix. In short order, it becomes one of the most iconic TV shows of the internet age.
By the time the comedy writer’s show enters its fourth season, in the darkly dystopian year of 2018, the internet seems to burst with arguments over whether the comedy writer is some kind of dark prophet — or worse, a dangerous idiot who thinks he’s a prophet but doesn’t actually understand how tech works.
This of course is the actual tale of Charlie Brooker, creator of Black Mirror. Unusually prolific by American standards of show running, Brooker has written nearly every episode of the show by himself. (Season 4’s final episode, “Black Museum”, contains its only hint of writerly collaboration; one third of it was based on a story of self-harm by Penn Jillette that was too darkly humorous for his own short story collection.)
But if you step back, take a breath and clear your mind of preconceptions, it’s just as easy (and I would argue, more rewarding) to see “U.S.S. Callister” as a Star Trek parody in which a socially inept guy becomes a bully and gets his comeuppance. “Hang the DJ” is just a sweet and sexy little tale about (spoiler alert!) more virtual reality people, this time playing out dating scenarios inside an app.
“Black Museum” is an anthology within an anthology — three scary ghost stories, one about actual ghosts inside people’s heads, that end with the one character who connects the stories getting his comeuppance.
Scary Ghost Stories
Ghost stories is another appropriate frame to place around Black Mirror. Brooker likes to give good scare. As I’ve noted previously, his hour-long episodes succeed when they spend at least a half hour on the slow, subtle build-up.
As such, his scary stories are somewhat formulaic. I don’t say that like it’s a bad thing; the scare works every time, and there’s an endless variety of genres and dark techno-comic twists to be layered atop the basic formula.
The point is, these are highly suspenseful tales for the digital campfire, not high literature designed to be picked apart for layers of meaning.
As with any bedtime ghost story, the logic of the plot and the motivations of the main characters can fall apart when considered the morning after. (Didn’t you think the protagonists of “Arkangel” and “Crocodile” were just a little too hasty in resorting to deadly violence?)
This is a show governed by nightmare logic. That’s the whole idea, a spooky comic nightmare fueled by tech that only has to be plausible enough to suspend our disbelief. The fact that most of the tech the show mentions plays on our human vanity is what makes it seem more real than anything in the actual design.
A Brief History of Brooker
To fully understand Black Mirror, you have to be familiar with the oeuvre of Charlie Brooker. This is a man whose writing career began when he created a comic strip for a gaming magazine called PC Zone. The strip was called “Cybertwats.” Nuff said.
And then he came up with this surprisingly disturbing page intended to parody people who thought video games were too violent. It caused PC Zone to be pulled from newsagents’ shelves. Black Mirror episode idea ahoy!
The Cruelty Zoo. Coming soon to a Netflix near you.
Image: PC Zone
Shocking sketch comedy soon became Brooker’s stock in trade. He wrote for The 11 O’Clock Show, the same late-night satire that gave birth to Ali G. In 2005 he penned a sitcom called Nathan Barley; the title character was the most sneering hipster parody imaginable. (If Brooker predicted anything, it’s how off-the-charts-annoying hipsters would become in the 2010s.)
Earlier on he had written for a special final episode of Brass Eye, an already envelope-pushing news parody show. This particular episode pranked real politicians and celebs into recording dumb-sounding PSAs for a fake anti-paedophelia campaign. A government minister called it “unspeakably sick.” It became the most complained-about British TV show to date.
That familiar feeling of silly yet harrowing dread you get when watching Black Mirror — this is what this comedy writer has been trying to do to us for years.
That sense of reality being sickeningly inverted, and you’re not sure whether you should be laughing at the joke any more — this is the soul of Charlie Brooker.
The little knife twist of (occasional) joy or (mostly) pain at the end — this is the final flourish of the guy around the campfire, flashlight beneath his face.
Beyond that, when it comes to a deeper meaning or a high-tech prediction … knock yourself out. Go nuts. Plot out the rest of the 21st century using only Black Mirror technology.
Just know you’re bringing all that to the campfire yourself. It’s all you. The jester who told the tale has long since moved on to crafting his next shocking confection.
President Trump has reportedly set the record for the greatest number of lies told in the first year of his administration.
Sir, congratulations.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! celebrated the president’s achievement by publishing a mini-doc about his first year of deceit, titled Pants Of Fire: The Road To 2000 Lies.
It’s like Facebook’s year in review, only somehow more depressing. Enjoy!
Between accusations of being a liar, liar, pants on fire and Michael Wolff’s new bestseller Fire and Fury, which looks at the mayhem in the White House, it seems fitting that President Donald Trump’s latest appearance on Time magazine’s cover is, quite literally, a fiery one.
While Time has certainly gotten creative as to how it portrays Trump on its cover, the simplicity of the new cover, created by Edel Rodriguez, is masterful, especially in how it gets across its central message: the first year of the Trump administration has been an epic, chaotic fire.
The story that accompanies the cover is a thorough overview of the most recent chaos in the White House as well as a look at Wolff’s book through the lens of revisiting the president’s first year (though it’s hard to cram all of that tumult into one magazine feature).
But Time does us one better by chatting with the cover’s creator, Edel Rodriguez, who’s done a number of Trump-related covers for Time and other publications.
In the chat, Rodriguez confirms that the flames refer both to Wolff’s book and Trump’s infamous threat towards North Korea (“fire and fury like the world has never seen”). But Rodriquez says the flames also represent the never-ending chaos coming from the White House on a daily basis.
“We used to live where the United States was a pretty steady country, and now you wake up every day and try to figure out where’s the next fire, where do we have to go, what do we have to try to contain,” Rodriguez says. “It’s sort of this President that you’re always trying to contain, like a wildfire that’s moving from one place to the other at all times.”
Fair enough. You have to wonder what Trump’s reaction will be given the kerfuffle over his claims he was going to be the magazine’s Person of the Year in 2017 — but turned the honor down — and that time Steve Bannon made the cover, landing him in hot water with Trump.
For what it’s worth, the flames show no sign of being smothered any time soon.
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Let’s be honest, the power strip you’ve been using for years could use a bit of an upgrade, and having a power strip with USB ports is exactly what we had in mind.
This power strip features two standard outlets for your appliances and bigger chargers, but what it lacks in traditional outlets it makes up for with its four USB ports. You’ll be able to worry less about the brick for your USB wires and plug straight into the power strip itself to charge any of your USB devices. It also features four separate docks so you can shelve your phone right on the strip as it charges.
This $24.95 power strip is currently on Amazon’s lightning deal, so you can get one for only $18.96 right now.
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William Shakespeare once wrote, “If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it; that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.” Translation? “Music is life, man.”
That’s why we shake it whenever we hear music, sing obnoxiously in the shower, and drum a beat with our silverware at the dinner table. If you want to up the anté on your drum solo or teach yourself a new talent, the Touchbeat Smart Drum Kit can turn your phone or tablet screen into a digital drum set.
A far cry from aimlessly tapping your hands on the table, this successfully-funded Kickstarter project lets you jam out to your favorite songs and teaches you how to drum.
Just clip the touch emulator onto your tablet and open the free, corresponding app. From there, you can use the complimentary sticks to participate in a handful of interactive games. Once you have the basics down, you can play along to a number of songs. The Touchbeat Smart Drum Kit even comes with a kick pedal, leg strap, and foot strap to make you feel like you’re playing the real thing.
Check it out:
Not everyone wants to hear you rock and roll all night (and party everyday), which is why you can plug in your headphones and jam out quietly. A win-win, if you ask us — your neighbors will be thankful, too.
A physical drum kit can set you back a couple of hundred bucks, but you can pick up the Touchbeat Smart Drum Kit for $69. Whether your New Year’s resolution is to pick up an instrument or you’re looking for a present for music-addicted friends, this set has you covered.
I never cease to be amazed at how frequently the interesting things I merely imagine turn out to be real. For instance, my relentless research in the field of goblets and challenges led me to wonder whether there might be some special type of goblet used in drinking games. I turned as usual to the sacred oracle, the source of all wisdom in the universe, for guidance. And what Google told me, after a fashion, was that such goblets do indeed exist. In fact, depending on one’s willingness to stretch the definition of goblet, which in my case is boundless, there may be several very different sorts of goblets that figure in drinking games.
For example, there’s a dice game played in Bolivia called Alalay. It’s quite similar to Yahtzee, in that it involves rolling five dice, with scoring based on the values of various number combinations. As in Yahtzee, the dice are placed in a small container and shaken before being thrown. In Alalay, this container, which is made of stiff leather, is called a goblet. Alalay is sometimes played as a drinking game, though the goblet itself is never used for alcohol; it wouldn’t do to get the dice wet.
I’ll Drink to That
But I found an even closer and more literal match for drinking-game-related goblets: something called a passglas (sometimes spelled pasglas)—a design that was popular in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, and Sweden during the 16th through 18th centuries. A passglas is a tall glass—sometimes cylindrical but more often having six or eight sides—that looks suspiciously like a chemist’s graduated cylinder. It is tapered and stemless but, like all goblets, has a foot. And not unlike a graduated cylinder, it’s marked with glass rings or bands at regular intervals.
Etymologically sophisticated readers will guess, correctly, that passglas means “pass glass,” and the name accurately describes its use. The glass was filled with beer (or, depending on the locale and the desired depth of inebriation, schnapps). The first participant drank down to the first mark and passed it on, but if he—naturally, it would be a “he”—drank too much and the liquid level dropped below the line, he would be obligated to drink all the way to the next line, and so on. Presumably one’s precision decreased as the liquid drained, increasing the rate of consumption. Depending on the number of participants and the type of alcohol used, several refillings could be required in order for all parties to reach a suitable state of intoxication.
The Art of Drinking
Despite the apparent ubiquity and popularity of the passglas in its heyday, it’s rarely mentioned in literature or depicted in artwork—but there are some examples. Seventeenth-century Dutch artist Adriaen van Ostade specialized in paintings and sketches involving peasants, drinking, and drinking peasants. One of his more obscure paintings, called Het dansende paar (“The Dancing Couple”), painted some time between 1680 and 1685, shows a man drinking from a passglas while the next drinker eagerly waits his turn.
Nowadays passglases are sold as antiques or found in museums, and are little known outside the parts of Europe where they were once popular. This is too bad, because although modern drinking games may be more sophisticated in some ways, they rarely if ever involve a test of how skillfully one can actually drink. Precision drinking competitions could add an entirely new dimension to, say, New Year’s Eve celebrations—but a modern Pyrex measuring cup doesn’t match the simple elegance of the passglas. —Joe Kissell
An article titled “Can You Tell Red From White?” in the online edition of Wine Spectator Magazine a couple of years ago began with this line:
The New Yorker threw down the gauntlet. Wine Spectator rose to the challenge.
Whatever else you may say about the two magazines in question or the qualifications of the authors they hire to write about wine, this much is clear: Wine Spectator missed a critical opportunity for an excellent pun. In fact, so blatant was their oversight that it casts grave doubts on the magazine’s editorial sensibilities.
The Red and White Blues
But linguistic flexibility is a much less serious matter than that which concerned humorist Calvin Trillin, who wrote an article titled “The Red and the White. Is it possible that wine connoisseurs can’t tell them apart?” in the August 19 & 26, 2002, edition of The New Yorker. Trillin claimed to have heard from multiple sources that wine experts—even those with degrees in enology from the University of California, Davis—routinely failed a blind taste test in which participants were asked simply to pick which wines (served at room temperature in black glasses) were red and which were white. If true, this suggests that the whole enterprise of tasting and judging wines rests on a shaky foundation at best.
In the course of Trillin’s research, he discovered that the test he had heard of was most likely an urban myth, or at least a significant embellishment of a test where wines are judged by smell rather than taste. Nevertheless, he himself couldn’t reliably tell the difference. In an effort to show just how ridiculous it should be even to ask such a question, an enology professor subjected Trillin to an impromptu experiment with a pair of wines—one white, one red—and he guessed wrong. Volunteers on the staff of Wine Spectator fared much better in their own version of the test, correctly guessing color 40 out of 42 times.
Fruity, with a Note of Imagination
But the fact that anyone could fail such a test suggests that wines’ aromas and flavors are not as distinctive as experts have led us to believe. It also reminds us that the experience of taste and smell—tightly connected as they are—may be quite subjective. Psychologists say that one’s perception of smell is strongly affected by one’s expectations—more often than not, we smell what we think we’re going to smell, or what someone tells us we’ll smell. So it’s entirely plausible that the smells and tastes we perceive in a glass of wine can be colored (so to speak) by the wine’s appearance. Meanwhile, experts ranging from Wine Spectator editors to UC Davis enologists admit that some wines have flavors that belie their colors—typically reds with an unusually low level of tannin or whites with an unusually high level. Without the standard cues of color and temperature, even a seasoned pro could plausibly suffer from a confused palate.
Although I’ve been to several wine tastings, I have not developed the sophisticated palate or vocabulary necessary for describing the taste of a wine meaningfully. But then, if even such a basic distinction as a wine’s being red or white can be missed, I don’t feel so bad for not being able to detect that hint of raspberry, that faint aroma of vanilla, or even those strong oak overtones the labels declare so boldly. My test is much simpler: what color are your cheeks after drinking the wine? Red: good. White: not so much. —Joe Kissell
You’d be surprised how few literary examples of goblet-throwing there are. I mean, sure, this sort of thing shows up every now and then in your basic fantasy novel, but history isn’t exactly littered with the shards of goblets broken dramatically at the climax of some great epic tale. Except for one, of course: the Hymiskviða (The Lay of Hymir), a poem that tells the story of Thor’s heroic acquisition of Hymir’s Cauldron. This is the sort of story you read to your kids at bedtime—if you happen to live in Iceland in the year 1300 or thereabouts. For those not familiar with the story, here is an extremely abbreviated and very slightly accurate retelling.
Give Me a Cauldron Large Enough, and a Place to Stand…
The gods of Asgard were looking for an eternal source of mead, and they demanded that Ægir, god of the sea, provide it for them. Ægir, unhappy with the tone of their request, said he’d only do it if the gods could supply him with a cauldron large enough, such enormous vessels being rather scarce. Tyr, the god of war and justice, knew just where to obtain such an item: his father, the giant Hymir, had one that was “a league deep” (that would be about three and a half miles—certainly large enough to keep the gods drunk for a few millennia). But Tyr knew his father wouldn’t acquiesce easily, so he enlisted the aid of Thor, the god of thunder, to trick Hymir into parting with the giant cauldron.
Thor and Tyr went together to visit the bellicose Hymir. After braving their way through a variety of adventures, including a fishing trip during which Thor managed to catch two whales, Hymir still was not warming to his guests. He taunted Thor by saying, “Sure, you may be able to row a boat well, but if you’re really strong you should be able to prove it by breaking this glass goblet.” Thor threw the goblet against a stone pillar, but the goblet remained intact while the pillar shattered. Hymir’s wife whispered a word of advice to Thor: “Try again; this time, throw it at Hymir’s head, which is much harder than any goblet.” Thor did as he was told, and the goblet broke.
Hymir was upset that his goblet was broken, but nevertheless conceded that Thor had outwitted him, and offered him the great cauldron as his reward—provided, naturally, that he could carry it. Although Tyr couldn’t budge the cauldron, Thor handily carried it away. But the two gods had not gotten far when they turned to see Hymir following them with a band of his multi-headed henchmen; apparently he’d had second thoughts about letting go of his prized possession after all. Thor set down the cauldron, dispatched the pursuers with his trusty hammer, and then resumed the journey home.
All’s Well that Ends with Infinite Quantities of Mead
The gods were greatly impressed when Thor and Tyr returned with Hymir’s cauldron. Even Ægir changed his tune and began cheerfully brewing up mead to last Asgard through the winter. The mead flowed freely, the gods were happy, and they all lived happily ever after, except for those who didn’t. (We are not told how Hymir and his wife got along after that “hard-headed” remark cost him his cauldron, but one imagines the incident led to marital discord, if not worse. Such matters are, of course, of a more delicate nature than is generally addressed in Norse mythology.) —Joe Kissell
When I was in high school, I had a darkroom in the basement. Because I didn’t do a large quantity of film processing, one of my biggest concerns was that the expensive chemicals would go bad before I had a chance to use them. Since it is primarily exposure to oxygen that damages photographic chemicals, I stored them in air-evacuation containers, which are basically plastic bags inside boxes. As you drain out the chemical through a special spout that sticks through the box, the bag shrinks, thus making sure no air gets in. This solution is simple, elegant, and effective.
The very same laws of chemistry apply to wines, and that is why wine is sometimes sold “by the box” in air-evacuation containers. It keeps wine fresher longer, and is even less expensive, in many cases, than bottled wine. What’s not to like? And yet, boxed wine is routinely ridiculed as low-class. Everyone knows that any decent wine will be stored in a corked bottle. It’s just The Way Things Are. It’s not about oxidation, it’s about perception. You have to do things right. Buying wine in a box is tantamount to buying wine with a screw cap. It’s an indication of poor quality. Or is it?
Recently I’ve been seeing an increasing number of wine bottles stoppered with a “cork” made out of plastic. And I confess that my initial reaction is invariably one of embarrassment. (“I should know better than to choose such a cheap wine.”) This is of course irrational; I know intellectually that the important thing is simply to keep air away from the wine. But I’ve discovered that there is in fact an intense debate raging in the wine industry over the best method of sealing a wine bottle, and the pros and cons of each approach are much different from what I would have thought. Here for your enlightenment and entertainment is a summary of the major positions in the debate.
Cork: the traditional approach
Pros: Cork has a long history; it has been used as the sealing method of choice for over 400 years. Cork stoppers, because they are such a pain to remove, implicitly signal quality. When they work, they work well. They’re a renewable resource (the trees are not killed when the bark is stripped to make cork). They make a satisfying “pop” when removed from the bottle. They’re readily biodegradable. And they support an entire industry of corkscrews and other cork-removal products.
Cons: Corks often go bad. Estimates vary widely, but many bottles of wine are ruined due to corks that are tainted, ill-fitting, or deteriorated. (Depending on which figures you believe, as little as 1% or as much as 20% of all wine sold is “corked,” which is to say, damaged by a problematic cork.) Corks can be difficult to remove, and sometimes break off into the bottle. The world’s cork supplies are nearly maxed out, so cork prices are increasing.
Plastic: the new cork
Pros: Plastic is immune to cork taint, so wine is much less likely to spoil. Plastic corks can be made more cheaply, and with much more precision, than cork stoppers. Depending on the vintner’s tastes, plastic corks can be made to look very similar to natural corks, or be molded in any imaginable designer color. They’re recyclable. And the same cork-removal equipment (along with its obligatory “pop” sound) can be used.
Cons: If the trees used to produce cork are no longer used for that purpose, they may be cut down to make space for more lucrative crops, thus endangering the habitat of various kinds of wildlife and altering the local ecosystem in unpredictable ways. If not recycled, plastic corks also pose a more direct threat to the environment. Some wine experts claim plastic corks unfavorably affect the flavor of wine. On the other hand, they don’t hold the aroma of wine well, making the ritual of cork-sniffing unsatisfying. The plastic may not retain its elasticity well over time, making it unsuitable for wines meant to age for decades. And most importantly, it’s just not right.
Screw caps: a strange twist
Pros: Screw caps, like plastic corks, avoid problems of cork taint, and yet unlike plastic are much less likely to affect wine’s flavor or lose their effectiveness over time. They are less expensive than natural or plastic corks. And they can be removed without any special equipment.
Cons: As with plastic corks, screw caps imply environmental issues associated with the loss of cork farming. Cork sniffing, of course, is right out. And again, most importantly, it’s just not right. You shouldn’t be able to get at your wine as easily as you get at your cola.
Crown seals: good enough for beer
Pros: Crown seals (the type of bottle cap used on most beer bottles) are basically screw caps without the screw part, so they have all the same advantages except ease of removal.
Cons: The downsides of crown seals are the same as for screw caps, with the additional issue of needing a bottle opener.
Of these, crown seals came on the scene most recently and so far appear with the least frequency. Meanwhile, air-evacuation containers, which were previously used only for the cheapest wines, now sometimes hold fancier varieties. (No one seriously proposes distributing high-end wines in air-evacuation containers, since bottles are more durable and less likely to leak over a period of many years.) There are, I’m sure, any number of other equally sensible alternatives out there. But the habit of associating cork with quality is very hard to break. —Joe Kissell
One day Morgen and I were having a brainstorming session, as we frequently do, about interesting things that might fit in with certain weeks’ themes. The expression “hit or miss” came up, and we began talking about things that involve hits and misses. Morgen said, “Do you know what the national sport in Bhutan is?” I was embarrassed to admit I did not even know exactly where Bhutan is located; it’s simply not a place I’ve ever spent much time thinking about. Morgen told me that Bhutan is between China and India. Although this didn’t give me any strong clues, I made what I thought was a safe guess: “Soccer.” That turned out to be a particularly bad guess, because in 2002, Bhutan’s national soccer team was ranked 202 out of 203 worldwide; FIFA sanctioned a special match that year, at the same time as the World Cup finals, between Bhutan and 203rd-ranked Montserrat; the match was covered in a documentary film called “The Other Final.”
In fact, Bhutan’s national sport is archery. That fact alone, I think, qualifies as an Interesting Thing, but there’s more to the story.
Weapons of Play
Bhutan is a Buddhist nation, and one of the central precepts of Buddhism is a reverence for all life. So it seems somewhat incongruous that the nation’s favorite game involves a hunting instrument (or, depending on how you look at it, a weapon of war). But in Bhutan, the bow and arrow can only be used for play. In fact, when making arrows, one can use only feathers that were found on the ground; to kill a bird to obtain its feathers would be considered wrong.
Each village has its own archery range, making them as common as curling rinks in Canada. (That is to say, extremely common.) Although modern, high-tech equipment is making some headway, most competitors use traditional, hand-carved bamboo bows. Village teams compete against each other in rowdy, elaborate, multi-day tournaments that are as much about spectacle as they are about hitting a target. Archers can use almost any means at their disposal to distract or demoralize their opponents, including dancing in front of the targets. A major part of the sport goes on behind the scenes, as teams conspire to throw off their opponents’ game. It is this, rather than what I typically think of as team interaction, that gives Bhutanese archery such popularity.
The Wide World of Archery
You might imagine that since archery is the national pastime, Bhutanese archers would be world-renowned for their skills. So far, however, the country has not distinguished itself in international competition beyond Asia. Archery is the only Olympic sport in which Bhutan participates, and they have been sending their best archers to the Olympics since 1984. In the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens, Bhutan’s two archers made it only to the second qualifying round, but this was still a better showing than in previous years. This is largely due to the fact that traditional Bhutanese archery is much different in both equipment and style from Olympic archery—insulting your opponent during Olympic competition is, shall we say, bad form. But Bhutan remains optimistic that their athletes will eventually earn recognition as the world’s finest archers.
I’ve only tried archery a couple of times, and I found it a lot harder than I’d imagined. And in America, at least, I would consider it rather unsafe to taunt someone who’s pointing a deadly weapon in my general direction. All the same, I think I could get behind a national sport that is as much about fun and mischief as about skill. —Joe Kissell
My wife kept her name when we got married. This being the 21st century, I wouldn’t have thought that would be in any way surprising or problematic. But in the modern English-speaking world, linguistic habits haven’t quite caught up with changing social conventions—many people (and computers) still assume that when a man and woman get married, the woman will take on the man’s surname. As a result, we get mail addressed to “Mrs. Morgen Kissell” and even, bafflingly, “Mrs. Liz Kissell”—Morgen’s given first name is Elizabeth, but she has gone by her middle name since birth, and has never, ever been called Liz. At least no one, to my knowledge, has called her “Mrs. Joseph Kissell,” which I think both of us would find rather offensive.
As annoying as such mistakes can be, I do sympathize with folks who no longer feel they have a proper, respectful, and appropriate title to use when addressing women. The title “Miss,” which used to refer to an unmarried woman of any age, has fallen into disfavor, except for young girls. And “Mrs.” is supposed to refer to a married woman, but only when using her husband’s last name. (Morgen certainly is neither “Miss Jahnke” nor “Mrs. Kissell,” but she can’t be “Mrs. Jahnke” either, because that would imply my last name is Jahnke.) So that leaves “Ms.,” which virtually every style guide now proclaims as the only reasonable choice, but which many people hesitate to use because it feels like an odd, newfangled, non-word.
Stress and Mistress
The basic distinction between “Miss” and “Mrs.” harks back to earlier times when a woman’s marital status was an important indicator of her position—and when, more to the point, a woman was considered a subservient entity with respect to her husband. Interestingly, though, both “Miss” and “Mrs.” were originally shortened forms of the word “mistress.” The modern sense of “mistress” implies an illicit relationship, but before about 1600, a mistress was simply a female head of a household—married or unmarried. As a result, the abbreviation “Mrs.” would originally have been pronounced “mistress,” and would not have been used exclusively to refer to someone’s wife. The pronunciation “misses” was simply a contracted form of “mistress.”
Meanwhile, when “miss” was first used as an abbreviation for “mistress” in the mid-1600s, it referred to a concubine or someone in a role more like what we would today consider a mistress. In other words, a few centuries ago, the meanings of “Miss” and “Mrs.” were, at least in some cases, roughly the opposite of what they are today! Only in the 19th century did “Mrs.” (with the pronunciation “misses” firmly established) come to refer exclusively to a married woman.
There is also, of course, the title “Ma’am,” which was short for “madam.” Although few people refer to a woman as either “ma’am” or “madam” these days, the situation is parallel to “Mrs./mistress” in that the shortened form is considered respectful whereas the longer form sometimes denotes a woman of questionable character.
The Long and the Short of It
One of the things about “Mrs.” that has always bothered me is that it can really only ever be used in its abbreviated form. No one would spell it out as “mistress” anymore, and yet there is also no agreed spelling for the full word as it is pronounced; “misses,” “missus,” “missis,” and “missez” all seem wrong. The title “Ms.,” which came into use in the middle of the 20th century, has an even worse problem—it appears to be an abbreviation, but it isn’t short for anything. As with “Mrs.,” no one would know how to spell it out. “Mizz”?
And yet, despite the fact that “Ms.” is clearly a modern, artificial conflation of “Miss” and “Mrs.,” it now serves the useful purpose “Mrs.” once did: it provides a respectful title that does not require the speaker to have any knowledge of the woman’s marital status or age. This is a good thing, because such distinctions, even if known, serve only to perpetuate the long-outmoded belief that adult women who are married are somehow socially superior to those who are not. In this respect, “Ms.” is actually a better title than “Mr.,” which says nothing about marital status but does presume the addressee to be an adult. A young girl could be a “Ms.,” but a young boy would not normally be called “Mr.”
But then, perhaps such social titles have outlived their usefulness altogether. On Christmas cards, for example, since we can’t be “Mr. and Mrs. Kissell,” and since “Ms. Jahnke and Mr. Kissell” sounds awkward, most people simply use our first and last names and leave it at that. This, I think, is the best solution of all—personal, yet respectful. It’s a hit among Mrs./misses/miss-es. —Joe Kissell
