The best part is to overlay that brilliant recent post about how unrealistic (read: unlikely) WWII is onto these kinds of Hitler comparisons. It’s not just that it’s ridiculous to use such an extreme example of evil; it’s ridiculous to use such an unlikely example of evil.

It’s unfortunate that comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis are so massively overused, because it means that the lessons we should be have learned from that time–economic desperation can lead to horrible events, the destruction that blind patriotism can bring–get lost in the hysterics.

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It’s this last bit that gets us both bothered by the advice that seemingly anyone offering financial advice offers first and foremost: stop eating out (and, related, stop going to Starbucks). It seems sensible on the surface. The amount of money that mint.com tells me I’m spending a month on eating out is…well, it would make most people gasp. And while Starbucks is more of a monthly treat than a daily dose for me, I know that there are people who probably drop close to a thousand dollars a year on Starbucks.

And while I totally get why it’s first advice (especially given the number of people for whom this advice comes as news) it completely overlooks one major point: people often do these things because they enjoy them. There’s an assumption that people only go out to dinner because they just don’t feel like cooking, or get their morning lattes out of habit, but that’s usually not the case. It’s usually the case that they just look forward to it.

I can’t think of a single time where I went out to dinner solely because I didn’t feel like cooking. I like going out to dinner. In fact, it’s one of my most favorite things to do in the world. And yeah, I do a heavy gulp at the end of each month when I see that I’ve once again gone over my already-generous restaurant budget, but you know what? It’s so worth it.

What I think the sticklers miss is that no one’s ever really trying to add scale to “unique”: they want to emphasize it. They’re trying to say, “I’ve looked it over and done my research, and I want you to know that this thing is…wait for it…one of a kind.”

That “wait for it” is the same thing that people using the modifiers “literally” or “legitimately” are trying to do: emphasize.

So to keep everyone happy (note: this will not keep everyone happy), I propose that we just use the word “syllablely”. It accomplishes the point of emphasis by adding more syllables in front of it, using a word wrong, since it’s not a real word. See? I told you it would all work out in the end.

• Told Google to quit indexing me so I stop getting traffic looking for things that they will never, ever find here.
• Changed the template to something crazy basic. Because there was no need for any of that other stuff. It’s like cleaning out the garage. Kind of.
• Written a couple dozen posts that I never published.
• Added in a Like button that has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook. Because if I ever get around to writing stuff here again, it’s nice to have a single-click way of registering that you give a shit. Oh, and hey: thanks for giving a shit.

A list of things that I will not do:

• Make any sort of promises or prediction about ever posting here ever again.

Whether it’s people cheering for snow or the snots who look down at everyone else with “calm down…it’s just water” (including, incredibly, a friend of mine from Canada), it’s more than  just snow. Four or five inches means that it’s going to be a little messy for a while. More than 20 inches and you’re looking at a natural disaster. Massive power outages, crippled transportation, back roads that won’t be usable for weeks, and untold dollars of tax money for cleanup and lost business dollars. I’ve been amazed at how people have been reacting to this storm the same way they would to any old forecast of snow. It would be like reacting to an impending tropical storm by saying, “It’s supposed to rain the next couple of days”.

2. When people are going to be shut into their houses for the next couple of days, they can and should go shopping. It’s not panic; it’s common sense.

This is a favorite one for the snobs. “Calm down, everyone. You’re not going to starve.” No one thinks they’re going to starve, and very few people I saw at the grocery store were anywhere near panic. Sure, everyone was annoyed, because the store was packed, but it doesn’t mean that everyone in the store the day before a storm hits think that we’re on the doorstep of Katrina II. Hell, my shopping bag was filled with chips and salsa, BBQ and coleslaw and some chili seasoning so Katie could make chili for us. Why did I buy all of these things right before the storm? Because we weren’t going to be able to go to the store for at least a couple days. It’s not a difficult connection to make.

3. The “French Toast Effect” is a myth.

Another one that people like to trot out to feel superior: that everyone runs to the store in the store in a panic just to buy milk, eggs and bread. Wrong. People are going to the store anyway (see #2), and what do people tend to buy more often than not when they go to the store at any time? Milk. Eggs. Bread.

Fine dining is a lot like sushi: when you know that you only get a few bites of something, you make the effort to savor it. And when it’s as rare and dear as a dinner at Komi, you make every effort to concentrate on every bite. And one of the fascinating things about Komi is that they use many of the heavily salty, fatty and sweet tastes of modern food in focused and painstaking ways.  Most of the dishes were a heightened, perfect version of something we’d had many times before, but in ways that would ruin the familiar version forever.

It was an incredible meal, and one that I wanted to make sure I remembered. I wanted to take pictures of each course, but we were asked not to (understandable) and were given a list of the dishes we were given. We made an effort to write down as many details as we could recall. It was a meal that we’ll be talking about and remembering for a long time as the Best Meal Ever (tied for me with a perfect dinner in Chicago, but the time and company had as much to do with that as the meal).

The full meal goes like this…

First courses:

• Kampachi sashimi with chives.
• Fluke sashimi w/ cured olives. These first two dishes were tiny, and while both good and incredibly fresh, there wasn’t any huge taste to either of them. Which is maybe part of the plan.
• Steamed brioche with creme freche and salmon roe. A single bite that was the first taste explosion of the night. They called this “taromasalata”, and I guess it’s deconstructed taromasalata, because it was unlike any I’ve had before. Fantastic.
• Oysters with some kind of creamy sauce. The oysters were absolutely perfect, but the sauces themselves were really good, but not the best part of the meal.
• Scallops two ways: one was in a spoon with some sort of broth, and the other way had a slice of scallop with a black truffle and mustard.
• King salmon (belly?) with smoked pine nuts and something that we couldn’t identify, but was avocado-like. A tiny dish of about 4-5 bites that had impossibly great flavor. A highlight.
• Caesar salad. Or it was called Caesar Salad, but it was a single, breaded piece that tasted like Caesar salad. I don’t know how it worked, but it did.
• “Hoagie”: tiny bite-sized mortadella sandwich between two pieces of extremely soft bread. It seemed unfair to call this a hoagie, since it set me up to be disappointed by every hoagie I have from here on out.
• Octopus with peppers and crispy capers. Phenomenal. The octopus was impossibly tender, and like so many of the other dishes, will spoil me on the common versions forever after.
• Prosciutto with mini cubes of haloumi and picked melon. At this point, Katie said, “This is so good, I think I’m going to cry.” This was when it started getting really amazing. Every taste of this was perfect.
• Huge, steamed dates with mascarpone and coarse salt. I can’t emphasize this enough: Heaven. This was one of the greatest things I’ve ever tasted in my life. No lie, I actually teared up at one point and came very close to blacking out from euphoria.

Two pastas:

• “Boulettas”: gnocci-like pasta with chantarelle mushrooms and blueberries. Very smooth and creamy and got better with each bite.
• Pappardelle with rabbit and black olive puree. It actually was a lot like lasagne, but there was a slight curry taste. Really interesting and delicious (of course), but not my favorite.

Main course:

• Suckling pig with large squares of the crispy skin with homemade, pillow-like pita and served with five sauces: salt with some other herb that we didn’t catch and couldn’t identify, a delicious habanero sauce, a pureed eggplant (like baba ganoush), pickled cabbage (fantastic), tzaziki with mint. The pita was so soft we wanted to use it as pillows…pillows that we could take a bite of.

Pre-dessert:

• Toma Brusca cheese, a little blob of honey, raisins on the vine, and homemade bread, which was fantastic. The cheese was indescribably delicious, and bites made up of all four things were perfect. Even the bread by itself was amazingly flavorful.
• Frozen Greek coffee with sundried cherries
• Birthday treat: something frozen with candied pumpkin on shortbread. It was nice that they brought out a little something extra for my birthday. They even had a little card signed by the whole staff!  A little ridiculous, but still kind of nice.

Dessert:

• Mint semifreddo: the best ice cream cake ever: curried caramel sauce, mint ice cream, cookie base. The curried sauce was a fascinating delicious taste.
• Loukoumades: Greek doughnuts served with a spicy chocolate milkshake. The spiciness of the milkshake was really fun.  The Loukoumades were really tasty, and not as dripping with honey like I’ve had them at other places.
• Lemon lollipops that came with the bill. Perfect sweet and sour combination to end the meal.

Wines:

• Two semi-bitter starter wines, one that was bubbly, one not. Perfect appertifs.
• Two different red wines paired with the pasta dishes, both from Greece. The one that came with Katie’s dish had one of the best smells I’ve ever come across in a wine.
• A pinot noir with the pig. A perfect wine.
• Easily the BEST dessert wine I’ve ever had, and one of the best tastes of anything I’ve ever had. From Samos, said on the label “nectar”. Amazing. I would love to find out what this wine is…it’s incredible.

This level of dining is worth the money every now and then for the memories you get from it. I like vacationing and travel, but it’s almost more worth it to me to spend that money (or, to be honest, a lot less money) on something like that if you know it’s going to be as perfect and memorable as this meal was.

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The main argument in favor is, of course, Google. They’ve made tons of money on advertising alone, leaving them open to offer free services whether others are charging thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.

But Google’s an anomaly, and all other talk is really just wishful thinking. Computer geeks are comfortable with Bittorrent or learning how to look for reputable sources for free stuff, both things that average users don’t know the first thing about. Music geeks devote the time to devouring music, something most casual fans won’t do.  And so to these people, because free is comfortable and convenient for them, it seems inevitable, but many users need a reputable source for their software and music and movies, and so are willing to pay.  And willing to pay means likely to charge.

What Arrington and Anderson really miss, though, is free’s effect on creativity. Anyone who’s ever used open source software or free widgets or applications knows that these things require one very important thing: enthusiasm. The second the developer loses interest in updating or improving it, it dies, and there’s absolutely no obligation or incentive to keep up production. There’s no reason to think that exactly the same thing won’t happen with music. Yes, free gives us quality in the short term, but in the long term, it gets rid of an important incentive to find reasons to continue when the enthusiasm dies down.

There’s many times when I think that our world is changing in ways we can’t grasp, and I think there’s lots of ways where we’ll need to completely rethink our approaches to making money and marketing. But I think that to think that products will eventually free is too convenient and too easy to really be true, or even desirable.

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This is a big mistake. The fact that they follow Beck (using Beck here only as a four-letter stand-in for any one of the thoughtless conservative leaders) has nothing to do with intelligence. He’s not convincing unbelievers: he’s preaching to the choir. Every one of the millions of his followers isn’t looking for answers, but for justification. They feel that their way of living and thinking is the right way to be, they want to believe that everyone else is completely wrong, and so they look to the people who will tell them exactly that: your way, your kind and your people are right, and everyone else is wrong and standing in your way.

Likewise, I don’t think that racism is guiding the thought or opinions. Of course, racism is as much of a part of American “conservativism” as it always has been, but that’s not the decider. Those furious people on the Mall and in town halls are bitter. They consider themselves conservatives and Republicans, and voted Republican and a Democrat was elected and Democrats made gains in congress. They’re going to find something wrong with everything that Obama does and says. This anger isn’t based on policy at all; it’s simply contrariness.

Blaming things on stupidity is too easy. Stupidity is the inability to grasp a clear truth or path after considering all options. That’s not (usually) what’s at play here, and attributing it to stupidity is an impediment to debate, and God knows we don’t need any more of those.

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ahem

WWII veteran and author Paul Fussell has an oft-quoted list of states of mind that soldiers go through as they spend more time in combat; a “slow dawning and dreadful realization” of the inevitability of death. Simplified (specifics here), they are:

1. It can’t happen to me
2. It can happen to me and I’d better be more careful
3. It is going to happen to me, and only my not being there is going to prevent it

Kept in the context of war, it illuminates the effects that combat has on a person, and how they can go from gung ho to guarded to broken. This is the ultimate point of both the book and miniseries of Band of Brothers.

But I’ve started thinking of those three points in terms of even the sheltered lives that most of us lead far from the horrors of war, and how we slowly go through these steps as our lives move on. They’re often over-simplified as things like “folly of youth” and “wisdom of age”, but really it’s a kind of combat that leads to the worried caution that increases with age. It’s because of this that people get more scared as they get older: because they’ve seen it happen again and again, and it seems more and more inevitable.

I say this to remind myself to not let the stories of horrible things make me worry more. God knows I don’t need to worry more than I already do, but I can’t let stories add on to my guardedness. I was never exactly the soldier charging the front lines with reckless abandon, but I don’t want to be the one cowering the back either.

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This happens among those of us working with the web as well. At my workplace–a really insular place–the older people love telling stories of how their kids use Facebook instead of email, which is supposed to signal the impending death of email.

What both these people and the tech writers always miss is that people of any group are going to use the modes of communication that will put them in touch with the people they need to be in touch with. Okay, maybe a 16-year-old will get in touch with their friends through Facebook because their friends are all on Facebook, but put them in an office for a summer internship and tell them to get in touch with the boss. They’ll be using email for that.

If I want to share a thought or article, there’s multiple places I can do it (Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, this blog), and where I share the thought (or article) depends entirely on who I want to see on, not on the platform I feel is the coolest or the most relevant to the kids. And all those people who try to claim that they’ve hopped off of Twitter/Facebook/whatever simply because it’s no longer cool are wrong: they hop off because it’s no longer useful to them. It’s no more complex than that.

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