Cold turkey, etc

We had a tranquil Thanksgiving break, chiefly occupied with eating lemon meringue pies and hiking. We went up to Lookout over Black Mountain a number of times and also drove over to Yellow Mountain section of the Appalachian trail. We had sandwiches at this barn and then hiked to the top of this bald or one like it. On one of our hikes, we passed a happy fellow who told us Taco looks just like his cousin’s dog — a “Newfoundland duck polling retriever.” Most people try to pin our mutt as an Australian shepherd, so I thought he was joking. But at home I did some lateral Googling and found the “Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever”… and there is some resemblance. We found a giant cricket, apparently dead, who thawed out by the time we got home. Named Lassie.

I’ve been reading AJ Leibling and enjoyed these lines:

“‘But we never did come together again for the reason that the Guildsman found out they could do just as well themselves [rainmaking] provided they had the right sort of Cannon.'”

…

“Whatever Hearst’s talents as a newspaperman and an operator of newspapers, this principal contribution to American journalism — a contribution that changed the whole nature of the profession — was to demonsrate that a man without previous newspaper experience could, by using money like a heavy club, do what he wanted in the newspaper world except where comparable wealth opposed him. It was a concept as simple as a very big bank roll in a very small crap game.”

The Economist on blogs:

Old media also face a newer and more unpredictable source of competition – the blogosphere. Bloggers have discovered that all you need to set yourself up as a pundit is a website and an attitude. All through the recent election campaign, the new media outsmarted the old media when it came to setting the news agenda’
… all orthodoxies are being chewed up by a voraciously unpredictable news media, which is surely all to the good.

Thanksgiving in Reno.

Though it lost the game, Yale trounced Harvard with a prank.

Erik D’Amato’s stunning “Worst of Budapest” is a must for the expat hordes. Though fitting, the wall-paper should go.

“Blog” is the least understood word of the year. “A Merriam-Webster spokesman said it was not possible to say how many times blog had been looked up on its Web sites but that from July onward, the word received tens of thousands of hits per month.”

Ensconced in Geneva, Humphrey tells me about Hedgestreet. Humphrey’s the smartest financeer I know; thinks the $ is going down another 20% but reminds us the Europeans will suffer most, since their exports will be slaughtered by goods manufactured in $-pegged China.

Finally, here’s an interesting precedent for entrepreneurs peddling their wares with an eye on current events: a teapot (made in England!) in 1770 for sale in the colonies bearing the legend “No Stamp Act.” A reminder that a good news hook can sell just about anything.