Barry's Life in Napa Blog

In lieu of anything generated from my own tired synapses and fingertips, today I direct you to some interesting reading elsewhere; namely, a recent column in Wired on the "are bloggers really journalists" topic. In the column by Tony Long there is a reference to a new book: The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture bemoans the rise of amateurism in all spheres of professional life, specifically as facilitated by the internet's long reach. Nice to see somebody standing up for the craft of journalism. I don't know too many people (who ought to know the difference, meaning they have worked as a journalist) who think the average blogger is a journalist. Long makes a nice contrast between between being a reporter and being an eyewitness. Just because you can get yourself on the floor of a convention, or act like paparazzi, doesn't mean you can also tell the story in any meaningful way. On the other hand, the Wired column generated this ...

The latest tally: not enough bees, WAY too many crows. You may have seen any number of news stories worrying over the decline of bees. No one has a definitive reason, but there is a problem they call "colony collapse disorder" that either is or isn't a serious problem, caused or not caused by pesticides, genetically modified crops, or malnutrition. Some people think the dwindling of the bees is caused by cell phones. In this scenario, the young worker bees fail to produce food for the hive because they spend all their time texting each other. Anyway, it's a big problem if the bees poop out, because that means no strawberries, unless we find some other way to get all the plants pollinated, which I'm sure we would do because who wants to live in a world without strawberries? So on the one hand, we have too few of something we really need - bees - and at least in my neighborhood, an enormous oversupply of something we could probably do without - crows. I don't k...

"Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’Twas mine, ’tis his..." - Othello That's the way Shakespeare said it. Who steals my purse steals trash, but the bastard that robbed our house two nights ago got more than trash. We're all still on edge a little after some thief came in an unlocked window downstairs while we were all sleeping upstairs. With two laptops and a couple of iPods under his arm, I'm sure he was thinking it was a good night. So we are out a fair bit of coin to replace the stuff stolen, but what's far worse is the creepy feeling you get that some stranger (I hope it was a stranger) has been in your house with the intent of taking advantage of you. Who was it? How did they know we had anything worth taking? How did they know coming in that particular window was the shortest path to the high ticket, mobile items? Let the festival of paranoia begin! It's not a tragedy of profound dimensions to lose some of your stuff, but you...

In the news... VP Dick Cheney will have a procedure to replace the battery in his pacemaker. While he's in the shop they also plan to polish his glass eye, tune up his bionic legs and give him a complete sneer adjustment. A hundred foot-deep lake in the Andes just up and disappeared. Not the first time this has happened - same story last year in Russia , and in 2004 it happened in Missouri . Apparently Michael Moore gets mighty thirsty after eating a boxcar or two of salted peanuts. It's good to see we're all still interested in getting the hard news and keeping up with the challenging issues. Here are the sfgate.com most read stories today: Stolen 1956 Thunderbird recovered -- 31 years later SF Gate: Entertainment: Horoscope Should You Get A Bad Tattoo? Why not? It's easier than ever to get it... No copping out allowed Yes, 'Die Hard 4' is rated PG-13, but the action is... BART'S NEW VISION: MORE, BIGGER, FASTER Readers clicking on #5 are generally disapp...

I surely do get tired of seeing the news stories about how dumb we all are. Hardly a week goes by without some story about test scores, how our kids aren't learning enough math and science, how we aren't turning out enough engineers. Of course, they never mention that we continue to lead the world in many categories - throwaway pop music, freestyle snowboarding, movies with predictable endings, and obesity, just to name a few. So I don't need another story that highlights our numbskullosity. And yet, I get this: America 'baffled' by screwcaps Come on, people! Grip it and rip it! If you take time to read this story, you'll learn that the wine bidness needs to do a better job of educating consumers on why cork is crap and screw caps are better. But there are a lot of knuckle-draggers who cling to the cork, not because of quality but purely because of image concerns. How can you present a hundred dollar bottle to restaurant patrons and then just unscrew it? People ...

I'm feeling a little down today. It's Father's Day and it's beautiful outside, and I should be in a great mood. But I'm a little down because it's the first post- Sopranos Sunday in many, many years. I know there were those long breaks between seasons a few times, and I know there were some long spells when the show seemed to lose its mojo, but all the same. You knew it would be back, and you knew it would get good again. Now it's all just a memory. I felt the same way when Deadwood ended, and Six Feet Under ended, and especially when Rome ended. Almost like losing a friend, in a sad TV-addict kind of way. I've always been susceptible to the blue mood on a Sunday evening - "and so this is Sunday, and what have I done? Another week over and a new one just begun." So having those great HBO shows waiting there at the end of the weekend, taking the edge off the Sunday evening letdown, was always a saving grace. So I'm keeping my hopes up fo...

I love golf because it is a simple game. It's just you out there, competing against yourself. Sometimes you win, sometimes you get beat. All by yourself. But above all, it's a simple game. All you have to go is keep your head down and make a simple swing. Head down, left arm straight, and a simple swing, that's all there is to it. Back and through, with a nice tempo, and there you go. Head down, left arm straight, and a nice shoulder turn, and hit through the ball. Simple. Nice full turn, shoulder under the chin, back and through, with a nice tempo. It's easy, really, and that's what makes it such a beautiful and pure game. It's just you out there with your head down, left arm straight, and a good full turn of the shoulders. Don't even need to think about your hands. Just as long as you keep that right elbow tucked in, hands up behind your right ear, and pull through with the left arm, don't come over the top. Back and through, nice and easy. One piece t...

I am tickled pink to believe that there is at least one human being in this silly world we've created who will, just for once at least, do the right thing. Today, that simple right thing is to make the offensively spoiled brat Paris Hilton do her time. Perhaps we were not quite on the verge of a Rodney King trial riot, but I could sense a disturbance in the force when the news came out that she had whined her way out of jail. We all know that money talks, the few and the famous get their special treatment, a rich man's crime is nothing like a poor man's crime, but we do not need to have it all thrown in our faces. And any outcome that involves Paris doing less than her full stay in graybar hotel is a travesty. She doesn't like it in jail? It upsets her? Shocking. I'm sure all the rest of us regular folks would love it there. And we would do our 18 days (that's all she'll end up serving, most likely) for the multiple "driving without a license" offe...

I know I have mentioned this book The Wisdom of Crowds several times, but it is one of those "ah-hah moment" books for me, so I am mentioning it again today. Here's why. The chapter I've just been reading talks about the importance of dissent when groups are making decisions, and the tendency that dissent is not voiced. People who disagree with the dominant opinion may be deterred by lack of status in the group, and that is reinforced when they do speak up but are marginalized or ignored within the group. This is unfortunate because the dissenting person may have information the rest of the group doesn't have and if they were heard the group's decision making would be enhanced. Here's why this is resonant to me today. I have been thinking about the case of Mike Griffin , the head guy from NASA, who made the news a week or so back when he expressed doubt about how freaky we should get over global warming. Here's the quote that started it all: "I ...

Immigration debate is always on the front burner these days. In the USandA, and here in California particularly, the conversation is all about Latino immigrants, mostly Mexican. At the bottom line I think everybody should have to immigrate legally, but we are such hypocrites about this - needing and wanting cheap labor while chastising the people who come here to provide it - that I can't get very worked up about it. So much of our cushy lifestyle is based on somebody else doing the dirty work somewhere so maybe we should shut up and let people try to make their lives better. No matter how you feel about immigration policy, it's undeniable that Latino culture and Anglo culture have been mingling for a couple of centuries here, and we have a lot more in common that we have differences. In that sense, I'm not too worried about how many Latinos come into the country anymore than I am concerned about how many Canadians or Italians or Irish come in. Wait, let me think about the...

As if the way my back hurts lately, and the fact that I not only can't but don't want to stay up past 10pm, and the sounds I make when I get up out of my chair ("uuuhh!" and "ohuuuhmmm!" and "aaahhhrrrrrmmm!") are not enough evidence that I am getting really rather old, then there is the simple fact that my 30 year high school reunion is coming up this summer. A 20-year reunion is one thing - kind of a nice milepost, and people are still on the near side of 40 - but there's no faking it at high-school-plus-30 years. We're all just really damn old in the larger sense, and there's no denying. Oh sure, people want to say "50 is the new 40!" Sounds swell, but tell it to my arthritic thumb, my spare tire, and my blood pressure meds. I don't care if you call it 50, or 90, or 7 in dog years, it sucks. Oh sure, I know I'm still young by many standards. In other words, there are a lot of people older than me who will say, ...

Kind of an exciting day for me. I got a letter from the Council on Foreign Relations, and they're recruiting me. I know that some people think the CFR is a nefarious, secretive cabal. In truth, it's not all that secretive. And bottom line, everybody who is anybody is in it - even Angelina Jolie, as reported here in this space back in March. This seems like a great time for me to get involved on foreign affairs. These days, everybody is interested in what's going on in Burkina Faso and Myanmar and Ativan. Wait, I think that last one is a medicine, not a country. But anyway, you get the idea. We're all thinking globally and acting provincially, as the saying goes, and we care about where our cast-off computers full of heavy metals are going to be recycled, and we care about blood diamonds because we saw that movie, and we still care about the rain forests, don't we? I mean, I think about the rain forests every time I walk past a Ben and Jerry's. So like I said,...