Barry's Life in Napa Blog

It's a form of "mission creep" I suppose. ( Mission creep is "the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals, often after initial successes." Thank you, Mr. Wikipedia.) I'm talking about the Holiday Slowdown here. The initial success a few years back was the adoption of the day after Thanksgiving as a standard holiday, and the general agreement that the day before or the day after Christmas should also be time off work. So now most people don't work on these days. That's all good, but the mission creep began when people started saying "Oh, since I'm already off two days of that week I'll just take the rest of that week off, too." And that was followed by "Nobody else is working those days between Christmas and New Years Day so I'm taking that week off." All of a sudden we went from having a day off in November and a day off in December, to a five-week period when there aren't enough people on the...

76,800,000. That's how many hits you get when you Google "black Friday." I am a little agog at how this Black Friday insanity has taken root. We all know that the day after Thanksgiving has been big for shopping for many years. I remember the first Cabbage Patch doll riot, back in the early 80s - I think that happened on the Friday after Thanksgiving. But I don't think it had this name Black Friday until recently. (It refers to the idea that this the day when retailers go into the black. Imagine that, you have to go 47 weeks into the year to get to profitability? Remind me not to buy stock in a company like that.) And so once it had a name, it's become another American holidays, with ritual observances and the required pressure, tension, frustration, and exhaustion that make our holidays the treasured occasions that they are. Let's get real here, people. You're getting up at 3am so you can stand in line to buy some crap that will still be on the shelves th...

This is really random, but I ran across this most amazing photo while wasting my life on the internet. Look closely. You can get the story behind this here from Snopes. The description makes the photo even more amazing. Then you should go here to the Carl Hammer Gallery and see another 20 or so like this. Colossal. Astonishing. A real honest "wow."

"It's a terrible thing to waste a mind," said our President once, in an attempt to relate the line from that notable ad for the United Negro (yes, that's their word) College Fund. (Or was it Dan Quayle who said that? Yes, it was Dan Quayle, and the exact quote was What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is. Whatever happened to Dan Quayle? Wait, I realize I don't care.) I was using my mind a little yesterday, happily multitasking, and out of the blue the phrase "screw the pooch" popped in. There was no context, no conversation, no reason - just a curious phrase come a'visiting. I treasure these little ADD moments when I am engaged in something "serious" but gleefully follow the mental pied piper as he passes by. So off I went, in pursuit of the origins and true meaning of "screw the pooch." As is the case with so many of our most vigorous and useful phrases, "scr...

By Kimi Yoshino, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer November 9, 2007 The annoyingly catchy song at Disneyland's "It's a Small World" attraction reminds riders that "the oceans are wide." Whether they're deep enough is another story. Forty-one years after the whimsical ride debuted at the Anaheim park,Disneyland plans to shutter the attraction in January to give it a much-needed face-lift -- and deal with the delicate problem of bottoming-out boats. Heavier-than-anticipated loads have been causing the boats to come to a standstill in two different spots... Perhaps in an effort to protect visitors' egos, the park insists that fat tourists aren't to blame. The boats get stuck because "layers and layers" of fiberglass have built up where maintenance teams have patched and re-patched problem areas, said Disneyland Resort spokesman Bob Tucker. (Whole story here. ) Oh yeah. that's why my pants are so tight, too -...

The pigeon is one of the lowliest of creatures. I think it was the great Herb Caen who first called them "rats with wings." Rats themselves are pretty despicable. And not being much of an animal guy, I can think of lots of other critters that gross me out - frogs get no love from me, and if I never see another possum that will be fine. No matter what I think about these beasts, it doesn't seem to bother them to be what they are. You don't notice any pigeons being annoyed by all the other freaking pigeons swarming around. You don't see rats going off about how crowded the rat den has become. They just climb all over each other and keep doing whatever rats do. So what is it with is home sapiens that makes us hate on our own species so much? I pondered this issue at a meeting last night where people were up in arms because some more houses are going to be built in their neighborhood. If there's one thing we can generally agree on here in Northern California, it...

I'm in a meeting the other day and this guy is describing a part of town as "a historically a blue-collar neighborhood." He went on to make remarks about the people who used to live in that part of town and used words like "genuine." His overall tone was that to be blue collar, which equates to working class, which equates to making less money, is somehow a more honest state of being than to be white collar. (I don't know what other kinds of collar descriptions should be accounted for in today's work world, since there is a lot of diversity these days. There must be more than just blue and white, right? Are there workers with collars of other colors? What about people who work from home in their bathrobes, are they robe collar workers? Are there people who only work in t-shirts who would be "no collar" workers? Dog collar? Shock collar? I need to do more research.) I've run into this type of thinking before, the "people who work with t...