Les Bonnes Choses

I was reading this article on the Globe and Mail this morning to give my eyes something to do as I drank my tea. In it, Warner Bros explains their rationale for withholding new releases from rental companies: they want to provide an incentive for buying the damn things. Their understanding of purchasing behaviour has lead them to conclude that some segment of the population wants very much to see a new release immediately. The only reason they don't satisfy this need by purchasing the movie, WB logic goes, is that the movie is also available as a rental. $5 rental versus $25 purchase? No brainer. By withholding rentals for 28 days, that market segment will be forced to purchase the movie rather than rent it.

Nevermind the obvious workaround that Netflix took, which was to just buy the damn movie at BestBuy -- no doubt a calculated risk as the extra cost of the retail disk might be offset by additional subscriptions gained by being the only rental company providing these new releases. This market segment -- the one comprised of movie aficionados -- let's imagine they're a sizable lot and worth fighting over. The problem is, they're cheap by definition. It's built in to WB's basic assumptions behind their decision to withhold providing rental disks: the only reason they'd buy the movie is that it's not available for rent at a lower price. Now take away the option to rent. Know what's even cheaper than renting? So does this market segment. In fact, if this group so highly values getting a movie the day it's released, imagine how they feel about having a movie the week before it's released.

Well played, WB. I'm going to put a sell rating on Time-Warner (TWX:New York). I'm also going to suggest that its board members get the hell out of the 1% because they clearly have not earned it.

I've been listening to NPR news for the last 2 hours while I worked away in the kitchen, so it was hard to avoid writing such a topical title.

I've picked up a new hobby in the last month or so: running everything in the produce aisle through Lola's (my mother-in-law) abandoned juicer. I had seen a documentary (or perhaps it was a very cleverly-done infomercial) featuring some Aussie driving around the United States on a 60-day juice-only diet. Surely you've experienced television-induced food cravings? I think that's what happened. Good thing I wasn't watching Supersize Me. Or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The next weekend when I was visiting, Lola happened to mention she was planning on getting rid of her juicer, virtually unused because of the trouble required to clean it. Within the week, I was running all kinds of crap through that thing.

I like to go to the Oakton Market for groceries --especially produce -- because it's a very atypical grocery store (and much cheaper than the local grocery store). For one thing, the produce area occupies about a third of the store, and it has all kinds of random stuff you don't see elsewhere. This is related to the other characteristic I find interesting: the interior aisles are are basically organized by ethnicity. Greeks and Russians look on different shelves (and likely different aisles) to find something to spread on toast. The dedication to serving diverse ethnicities means that more obscure foodstuffs are a little more prominent. I don't know how I'd prepare a sheep's head, but I know where to get one. The last time I was there, loading up my cart with produce to run through the juicer, I bought some ground lamb (which I've seen at more conventional grocery stores, but can be harder to find). It was an impulse buy. I don't know if it's necessarily healthier than ground beef, but it seemed like an interesting change of pace. That left me with a problem of cooking it in such a way that didn't mask it.

John suggested shepherd's pie, in which North Americans normally use ground beef, which as he pointed out, doesn't make a damn bit of sense: It's called shepherd's pie, not cowherder's pie. This brings me back to the juicer, which you probably thought was a very convoluted and unnecessary way to introduce the grocery store until this point. When you run stuff through the juicer, you get juice (obviously), and the pulp, from which the juice is separated. The juice you drink, but what do you do with the pulp? I hate wasting stuff. Some types of pulp lend themselves well with recipes: Juice a carrot and use the pulp for carrot cake. Peel and core an apple before you juice it and you're left with applesauce. This evening I decided the leftover beet, tomato, carrot and celery pulp would work well in my shepherd's pie along with some peas and corn. To be extra different, I topped my shepherd's pie with mashed potato/celery root which I cooked in the inaugural use of my new pressure cooker.

I won't go to the trouble of posting a recipe because vegetable pulp from a juicer requires some kitchen equipment that people don't really need (mine was free, after all), nor is mechanical mastication critical to the success of the meal. But if I may provide a quick sketch of a tasty shepherd's pie: 500g of lamb, browned in a skillet with ground rosemary, black pepper and salt, to which you add in a square casserole pan diced (or even splattered) vegetables such as carrots, beets, peas and corn, and which you top with a creamy mash of potatoes and possibly other white mashable vegetables such as celery root, turnip, parsnip or cauliflower. It was tasty, and having a wide assortment of vegetables probably makes it a good way to hit your vitamin quota across the board.

This is for my own benefit, in case I have to do this again. It seems the Facebook blog importer has crapped out again for the last several weeks anyways. See my disclaimer at the bottom. You are excused from reading further.

I got exfat support on my Ubuntu 10.04 PC today by first:

Adding the exfat package from here
Then adding automount support as described here

Why would anyone want to do this? exfat is a filesystem that's increasingly the default on external media. It supports large files, which is more important now than, say, 10 years ago. Consequently, it's supported by Windows 7, OS X and (with a little work) Linux. Since I use all 3 of these OSes, I needed a filesystem for my external hard drives that can be recognized by all of my computers (I found the free NTFS mounter for OS X to be sometimes buggy - I'm pretty sure it was once responsible for the loss of the contents of my external drive).

Anyways, that is all. If you read this far, you must have been googling exfat and linux or something like that. Or else you're Ryan, Marc or John. Or maybe you're just having problems sleeping. Sorry about that. It happens to me too.

I pass by an obscene number of billboards during my commute from Ontario to Illinois. Few are noteworthy or memorable. I mean, there's the Lion's Den ADULT SUPERSTORE at exits 105, 18 and somewhere else. I'm not sure why that series of billboards sticks out. I think it might be a combination of the CAPS LOCK, and that it seems like you're never more than an hour from one of their fine showrooms. I've never been, if that's what you're thinking. Pervert.

There are some individual billboards that stand out, however. More than just navigational landmarks, they've become almost like friends. The round bologna billboard reassures me I didn't miss the turn-off on to the 69 southbound. I'm much more willing to give bologna another try as a result. There's a dental surgeon somewhere near Flint. I can't remember his name, but I sure as hell remember his face. Imagine if Vincent Price had decided to become a dentist. He promises your dental work will be painless. Judging by the mug on the billboard, it's because his dental work is done after you've been killed and served with a side of potatoes, and involves removing your teeth so it will be harder to identify your skeleton.

And finally, today I took in a little more of a billboard for a vasectomy clinic -- I want to say it's near Owosso, or maybe Oshtemo? I think it starts with an 'O'. It's a pretty busy billboard. They get their basic message across despite the clutter with a pretty clear graphic of a sperm cell with a red circle and line running through it. No sperm, see? But if you read more carefully, you're in for a treat. They have a promotion: treat one side and the other side is free! I can see how this maybe makes sense for laser eyesight correction. Many people, myself included, have one eye that's worse than the other. Conceivably, one might have just one eye that needs correction. Or maybe get just one eye corrected and wear a contact in the other eye while they save up for a second round of surgery. Now, I don't want to have to explain this because one or both of us might end up embarrassed, but the idea of maybe treating only one side doesn't translate very well to vasectomies.

"I was wondering, if I come in for a treatment, could my buddy Dan come in for the second treatment?"

I was just thinking how I'm a DIY kind of guy. Part of it has to do with my personality (I like to be self-sufficient), but there's also a pride thing -- or at the very least a storyteller thing to it. It's nice, after all, to say, "yeah, this deck, my brother-in-law and I built it over a couple of weekends two summers ago. It would have been built in one weekend but I stepped on a rusty nail and had to go to emerge' and get a tetanus shot in the arse." If you don't do it yourself, your story is going to be much shorter: "yeah, this deck, I paid a guy named Hank $3500 to build it last summer. I saw his butt crack every day for a week."

So I guess maybe for me DIY means I get to talk about my own butt instead of someone else's. But the look on some people's faces when I do is very telling, so I think it's definitely worth the effort. Plus the pride thing, of course.

The thing about print is that it's often hard to identify irony or sarcasm. That's why emoticons were invented. Unfortunately, The Globe and Mail does not include smileys in its style guide. I am consequently having difficulty with today's question, "Can you get a decent watch for less than $1000?". Is this question being asked with a straight face? There's no :P at the end of the headline. You know, I remember there was this one time when discussions such as this were taken seriously. It was right before a sudden uptick in the production rate of guillotines in France.