Short on a Sweet Deal

Bailout is a new wine from Crushpad out in San Francisco.
Am/Mex bought a bottle last week because we believe in the wine and because of a unique sales pitch that grabbed us by the grapes. They're letting short sellers like ourselves bet that the Dow will go to hell in the next 6 months, and if it does, we get a rebate on the cost of the wine. Here's the rub... on the day we bought our bottle of Bailout, the Dow closed at 7936.75. For every 100 points the Dow falls between last week's purchase date and August 14, 2009 -- when it is bottled -- Crushpad will send us $2. That may not sound like a lot but wait... in these dire times who would bet on the Dow? This gives us a chance to balance our 401K losses with a gain on a nice bottle of wine. Am/Mex will drink to those small victories. We'll keep you posted on how it all turns out.

Sparks Plug

I once declined the offer to replace my second-generation iPod when its motherboard was damaged and instead asked for whatever surgical requirements were necessary to restore it. To the genius's chagrin, I preferred my tattered and now outdated mp3 player to the newer model he waved in his hand, complete with video capabilities and double the storage capacity.

This affinity we have for media and the technologies that animate them is the subject of Sparks, a smart web-based serial by Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson about humans and their sometimes irrational relationship to technology.

There's a Sara Sparks in all of us: a twinkle of emotion and a connection we feel toward our personal gadgets. We spend so much time with them that they really do become extensions of our bodies, helping us remember phone numbers and birthdays, storing our favorite songs so the ride on the subway doesn't feel so long, and facilitating our work tasks, to name a few. We buy them expensive protective cases, take them on vacations, and, I don't do this, but some people name them.

Sparks is a perfect balance of McLuhanesque humor and contemplation in a well-written, accessible form. At just three episodes into the series, I look forward to the course that our heroine technologist will take in the episodes that follow. A posthumous digital McLuhan cameo would be a fitting next move.

You can also subscribe and take the series with you (if your generation of gadget allows).

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Follow Those Videos

As The New York Times reported today, Mr. Kim of Kim's Video -- former home of over 55,000 titles -- conducted a scrupulous search for the perfect inheritor of a film and media collection that had been steadily growing since 1987. He settled on a proposal made on behalf of Salemi, a Sicilian town founded sometime around the fourth century B.C.

For those of us who had the patience to thumb through the vast collection of rare films and music, saying good-bye to Kim's Video suddenly feels pretty good. This covetable collection's successor is a small town that, after a history of crushing blows, is undergoing a unique and impressive change by allowing "prominent artists and intellectuals to assume control of the government". Art critics, photographers, performance artists, and others are taking command of the town, and turning it into an artists-run mecca.

We can only imagine the possibilities: Italian sensibility and cinema have always been a good combination. Add to that a restored 17th-century Jesuit college as this collection's base, a glass of Limoncello, and a planned relationship with the Venice Biennale to make Salemi the perfect destination spot. On the other hand, tourism is only one way of savoring its creative by-products. In an effort to appeal to outsiders and promote the development of this town-in-progress, Salemi houses are available for purchase for one Euro. There are some stipulations to this too-good-to-be-true offer, but it makes nomads like us strongly consider a relocation plan.

Tutto va bene!

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