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Gentil Hugel - a pleasant white wine from Alsace.

Lately I've been drinking some tasty and inexpensive white wine from Alsace, which you might remember as the place Tomi Ungerer comes from.

This is called Gentil "Hugel" - by itself a fun multilingual mix, like Alsace/Elsaß itself. A link where links do well:

http://www.hugel.com/en/

The web site is actually pretty charming, with things like pictures of the hotel in Macau where they went to (presumably) sell wine.

Anyhow, this wine was imported by Frederick Wildman & Sons - a pretty reliable importer, in my experience. The single bit of marketing copy that really struck me as true (from the hugel.com site) is the description of the wine as grapey.

Yes, it's very grapey. It tastes like Autumn. I recommend it. I paid twelve bucks US.

Bank of America Online is down down down...

I'm sure it's just a minor, temporary glitch, but in these scary times it's unsettling when your online banking is unavailable without any explanation.  At least the ATM worked... um, five hours ago...

Fun surfing: Alltop Design News

I more or less randomly stopped over at http://design.alltop.com/ tonight and found lots of good design links to surf through. All of it very high-bandwidth stuff, but cool. I'm not sure what to make of alltop per se - besides better aesthetics, I don't quite get what they give me that the likes of Google and a couple good blogs don't already - but there you have it, variety is the life of spice.

fail@me.com

I've been a loyal mac.com customer for years.

I recognized the Mobile Me rollout as a travesty from the start, but as a software engineer I knew what the problem was: technically oblivious upper management had forced the release of half-baked software over the authors' objections.

So far I've held on as a loyal customer, and I have no plans to leave. For me, the price is easily worth it -- if the software works. And I genuinely believe Steve Jobs was caught off guard by the rank incompetence of his web-app management, and has cracked the whip unambiguously.

I'm not going anywhere in 2008. But hey, Steve: you promised it would get good this year, and it's already September, and:

• Mail I've handled on my iPhone or on me.com still doesn't "push" to my Mac 12 hours later.
• The "reply" function on me.com routinely throws the web-app into a bad state ("action not allowed").
• Sync from my Mac to me.com to the iPhone is basically nonexistent.

Message from me to me.com: I still love you and I believe in you, even if you made a catastrophically bad call on SproutCore. But if you don't make it work@me.com by January, I'm out. Sure, you might still keep my money, since $100 for non-mail sync and not changing my email address seems like a good deal to an old fogey like me, but still: I'll find my escape hatch and sing its praises to the world, and that would be sad.

You were never exactly the best, but you always cared. Please, me dot mac dot mobile sprout dot oops dot com, pleeease don't fail.

YouTube ads for porn?

Since I don't live under a rock, I know there's a lot of crossover between pornography and YouTube. But today I saw it manifest in a brave new way.

Having followed a link from Seth Godin to YouTubeSunshine.com I semi-accidentally clicked on this video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPhgv6VrVHQ

Which got me the screenshot above. Fascinating.

(And no, I didn't click on the porn link. Could be, um, a Trojan.)

Psychedelic Cattle

It's morning again, and again I'm washing my shoes. This is the ritual. This is how summer passes wraithlike through San Francisco, in a barely perceptible, stubbornly sticky coat of red-brown dust. In pitchers of Radeberger, in Porta-Potties full of bats.

The word Zeitgeist, a good German word with more than a hint of the Enlightenment about it, is almost translatable, and what it can almost be translated to in English is the spirit of the times. It's one of those words we know or pretend to know if we read the New York Times on Sunday, and pretend to not know if we really like motorcycles. But if the Zeitgeist was ever a spirit of the times, it would have to be the times of a soaring NASDAQ and resurgent cocaine chic and that glorious self-delusional high of not quite winning in the Boom. Of having more than you should, but less than you could, and in any case having it all built on a tower of some flat, syrupy artisanal homage to England.

But that wasn't really the moment. Zeitgeist was full every day then, even on the fog-bitten cold nights, and everyone could always afford enough artisanal British Columbian weed to tough it out. Some of those people still go, but the easy money's gone and the people who got theirs have bought houses and acquired offspring and a habit of not taking them to bars. The Zeitgeist is a spirit, that's as clear as Everclear, but it's not the spirit of the times.

The bartenders, mostly, are still the same. The modern primitive Webmonkey addicts have moved on, and the tattoos have settled back to the honest pedigree of a drunken night out. The ugly people have sway again, and on those warm afternoons when a breeze of gorgeous hipsters wafts over the benches you can close your eyes and remember that the crowd was pretty ugly during the dot-boom as well; it was just much better off.

Now it's back to basics, in a way. Back to people who like to ride bikes; does anyone even remember the bike-messenger fashion? Back to people who like their motorcycles more than their Ducati-branded leather jackets. Back to the rest of us too, loving it and hating it at the same time, thrilled to be drinking a fine Ossi beer in the sun in a cold town, thrilled at the focus on conversation, at the constant pickup that's rarely more than a flirt, at this tiny drop of down-market European civility in such an unlikely place - and in the same heartbeat appalled at the blandness, the lack of ambition, the hesher grunts and the standing water breeding unknown tropical diseases - and terrified, always terrified of those bats.

So maybe Zeitgeist is the spirit of timelessness, or of San Francisco's way of letting a beer sit through two generations of newcomers and still drinking it. Or maybe it's just psychedelic cattle.

(I wrote this for Brice, probably over a year ago, and mailed it to him, but his e-mail was broken that day. I just ran across it again, and I don't think I posted it anywhere, so here it is. And the bats idea was from James. )