By James Furbush | November 10th, 2009 | 5:22 am PST
I’m not surprised by any of the breweries on this list, nor am I surprised by their ranking. I don’t really consider Sam Adams (Boston Brewery) a craft brewery anymore. They’re just too big, too national; they’ve traded in their quality of product for the ability to compete with the macro-domestics. But otherwise, you can’t go wrong with any of the breweries on this list. They’re all making great, quality beers.
My 10 favorite from this list would be (in no particular order): Deschutes, Magic Hat, Matt Brewing Co. (Saranac), Stone Brewing, Dogfish Head, Lagunitas, Brooklyn Brewery, Rogue, Abita, and Shipyard.
If any of the companies can’t, at the very least, break even with James Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi extravaganza Avatar then they shouldn’t be in the business of financially backing movies.
This winter, Avatar is the only motion picture event. There is no Harry Potter, no Lord of the Rings, no obvious competition for this type of film.
Especially when you look at all the numbers involved between a $300 million production budget, $150 million marketing/publicity budget, 14 years spend developing the necessary camera technology. Yeah, sure there are no bankable stars, but it’s directed by James “freaking” Cameron?!? I get worried reading between the lines that Fox is already making excuses for the movies perceived failure.
Perhaps most significantly, the meat of the business isn’t particularly good. On Friday, I stopped into an Arby’s for the first time this millennium. It was clean, and I noticed an array of products beyond the bare-bones menu I recall from my Midwestern youth. Moneybox may be a food snob, but he is a nondiscriminating connoisseur of street food and greasy fare who still makes the occasional run for the border at Taco Bell. (Don’t tell Mrs. Moneybox.) But even I had difficulty completing the reporting for this assignment. Forget about salads and vegetables. As I scoured the menu—the gyro, the french dip, the patty melt—I had difficulty identifying anything that had gone through less processing than uranium. A few bites of a roast beef sandwich slathered with goopy cheddar sauce, and I was done. On the food chain, the thinly sliced beef is about as far from Boar’s Head deli meat as Boar’s Head oven-roasted ham is from the vaunted jamón Iberico.
Well, okay, it probably is the roast beef. But the restaurant doesn’t even have anything else to offer customers aside from it’s namesake sandwich. Not a good business decision.
“It’s still a passive activity,” Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, told the New York Times.
Which means that people with DVRs still sit through commercials because they’re too lazy to use a remote. With 1/3 of US households watching television through their DVR, when factored into ratings, many shows are increasing their viewership in the range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent. The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase.
Shocking! But there it is. Only now have networks come to realize that just because people watch television shows on time delay or on the internet doesn’t mean that people aren’t watching shows. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, but I guess it does take a television executive about three years.
I still don’t understand the half of it, but it sounds downright sinister when you read how they sold off their toxic assets and took out insurance, aka “credit default swaps”, to protect against a potential market crash.
We took notice when Google first announced they were going to add a music search function. If you haven’t seen the music search feature yet in your searches, you will; they are rolling it out slowly. However, you can test it out here.
I’m not terribly sold on this, but it’s a step in the right direction. What I’d want is something that searches for Mp3s like the Hype Machine, as well as torrents. But I understand the legality involved with both of those practices and how that functionality isn’t in Google’s best interests.
No worries. Hulu isn’t going to start charging you. They still might add premium content that does cost money, but they aren’t about to change their business model. I wonder how much the uproar over the floated idea had anything to do with this announcement.
I’ve long resisted to switching to Google Voice because I can port my cell number to Google. I’d have to get a new number and give that out to the five people in my life who still care enough to call me. So annoying. But now, they’ve opened a “light” version of the app, which will provide any cellphone user with the robust feature set. FYI.
By James Furbush | October 22nd, 2009 | 12:52 pm PDT
It’s already been neutered, now that you can only watch five episodes of a show at a time, but now Hulu is basically putting their business in jeopardy by charging people to use the website. There isn’t a timeline in place for when this will happen, but News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey hinted it would be sometime in 2010.
Here’s the thing — Hulu’s value is derived almost exclusively because it’s free. The people that watch Hulu, could easily switch to Casttv.com for example, or just Bit Torrent. It’s a risky gamble.
This is exciting news. Redlasso, which was a site that allowed people to search and clip and embed live television and radio clips, went dark in July of 2008 due to a lawsuit from NBC/FOX. Obviously there were copyright issues, but I found the site to always be the first place I would look, when say, searching for highlights from an awards show either while it was still on the air or immediately afterwords. I was a bit sad when it went dark and completely put it out of my mind.
Well, the site has relaunched and though I haven’t given the new version a go, it looks like they’ve managed to license content and keep things on the up and up with the content providers. The layout is a bit different than I remember it being, but nothing radically so.
According to a press release:
The sources within the platform are a bit different than you may remember, but we are very excited to announce that we are launching the platform with licensed content from over 100 TV and Radio sources from around the country. There will be at least one television news source in each one of the top 50 US cities, where the majority of the sources allow you to search, clip and share their broadcast news content.We’re also excited to unveil an entirely new site design. Picking up where we left off, we’ve brought to life many of your suggestions from the beta. The new site will have:
Daily featured clips
The ability to cross search each of our sources simultaneously
The ability to conduct local market or regional searches
The ability to generate instant local or category based RSS feeds
The interactive display of all clip closed caption content for easy quoting for your blog
A new section called “As Seen On” where we will feature your Redlasso blog posts
A brand new Redlasso blog where we will feature great content, our members sites and Redlasso updates
New Facebook and Twitter pages, and much more coming soon!
It’s always difficult to gain traction after losing it, but hopefully Redlasso can do so once again.
“IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”
As an aside, Trillin’s profile of R.W. Apple Jr. is one of the finest examples of profile writing. Right up there with “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” in my humble opinion. [via]
Last week, Lamar Odom and Khloe Kardashian laid off my best friends. They were model employees of Comcast/E! Entertainment and now because Keeping Up With the Kardashians decided it was of the utmost artistic integrity to stage a television “wedding” some of the best people I know are looking for work.
The price for the lavish “wedding” was rumored to be a cool one million dollars — chump change to Odom who just signed a $33 million contract with the Lakers. Pocket cash for Bruce Jenner, a motivational speaker and hero of the 1976 Olympics. A sliver of Khloe’s inheritance money, better known as the Orenthal James Simpson defense fund.
You get the point. These were wealthy people and still they twisted E! Entertainment’s arm, probably not too hard, to pay for the wedding.
The company made a conscious decision to hold a fake non-binding (maybe it was real, I don’t know) wedding and then coincidently hold layoffs a few days afterwards. A total of 36 people were let go just after that magical ceremony. I’m not sure if there was a direct correlation, but I’m assuming all of their yearly incomes add up to just about a million dollars. At the very least a few jobs could have been saved by passing on the charade.
What kind of company can make such a cavalier decision? MORE »
And yup, that was the sound of the French’s gastronomic and cultural street cred going up in a poof of smoke. I honestly find this funny, but in a sad sad way that McDonald’s is opening a restaurant and a McCafe at the most visited museum in the world.
“This is the last straw,” an art historian working at the Louvre, who declined to be named, told the Daily Telegraph. “This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odours in the context of a museum.” He went on to say, “I’m not against eating in a museum but McDonald’s is hardly the height of gastronomy. Today McDonald’s, tomorrow low-cost clothes shops.” The horror!
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