Month: February 2006

What spreads faster? Truthiness or brrreeeport?

Scoble is running a test of blog search engines, and this is my contribution to the dataset.  Hmmm…I am not yet there. Let’s say “brrreeeport” and “truthiness” in the body of the post and see what happens now.

In other news, things have been busy, but nothing has been really blog-worthy — sure, we had a beautiful 70-degree day while New York was getting socked with 27 inches of snow, but you could read that in the newspapers.

Possibly the most interesting thing we did over the weekend was go to the Kehillah production of Hannah Senesh.  As he introduced the play, the director (Kehillah’s drama teacher) said that he really couldn’t tell us to “enjoy the play”, and he was right.  It was a very meaty play for highschoolers to deal with, and they did a wonderful job.

Back to work…

Not just entertainment, but wine

San Jose Rep took advantage of a semi-captive audience during the production of The Immigrant and made it easy for subscribers to renew — they had a card preprinted with everything but our credit card number waiting for us when we sat down.  And they even offered an incentive: a free bottle of wine if we renewed that day, versus an implication that they’d be telemarketing subscribers who didn’t renew. 

So we renewed our subscription (we were going to do so anyway) and brought our bottle home, where it would have spent some time in the wine fridge until its number came up.

But we’re not the only ones in our havurah who are Rep subscribers, and the other family brought their bottle to the Super Bowl party, so, of course, we opened it.  (Well, we opened ours, because it was already at the right temperature, but let that pass.)

The wine was a Cedar Brook 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon, and it was perfectly pleasant; it went well with pizza, and was fine with salmon the next night, too.  What struck me as interesting, though, was the text on the back label, which said that “Cedar Brook wines are produced exclusively for hotels and restaurants throughout the world.”  So I guess I won’t be restocking this one. 

I was curious, though, and after a little research, I discovered that Cedar Brook is yet another label from the ubiquitous Bronco Wine Company, which is probably most infamous for its biggest seller, Two-Buck Chuck (aka Charles Shaw).  I’ve had a couple of their other wines, too (Black Mountain and ForestVille for sure, and probably others), all of which have been drinkable, unlike Two-Buck Chuck (which, I am happy to report, Trader Joe’s cheerfully took back).

Did you leave these?

When Diane came home this afternoon, she found a mysterious potted plant on our doorstep.

There was no note, and no indication of who left the plant or why. The best guess we have is that it might be related to the March of Dimes mailing which arrived today from one of our neighbors; at any rate, the card in that mailing had flowers on it.

Or maybe it was a SuperBowl party thank you.

Whatever the reason, it was certainly one of the nicer things we could find on our doorstep!

Weekend Update

Yesterday, we went to San Jose Rep to see The Immigrant, a play about the experience of a Russian Jewish immigrant in Hamilton, Texas, where he started as a fruit peddler and ended up as a respected member of the community (and the only Jew in town), owner of the local department store.  I wonder how similar his story was to that of my grandfather, who was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant and eventually owned a grocery store.  Even without that connection, I would recommend the play.

Today, we hosted our annual Super Bowl party — as usual, we had more than enough food (most of it of dubious nutritional value, especially the stuff I picked out!), and far too much beer (one six-pack, untouched).  The commercials didn’t seem to be up to the standard I expected of the Super Bowl; the best commercial, by far, was from FedEx.  Other notable commercials included the ones from Hummer, Sierra Mist, and the Bud Light magic refrigerator commercial.  But most of the commercials went in one eye and out the other — I’m glad I wasn’t paying for them. 

The best news, though, is that my father-in-law is no longer homeless.  He and his girlfriend moved into their apartment yesterday after their stuff arrived from Valley Stream — they were lucky to be able to lease an apartment in the complex they wanted (Fellowship Square in Tucson) with only a six-week wait.  They’d been staying in hotels, with friends, and with family, but they said that moving from place to place every week or so was getting tiring, so I know that they’re happy to be firmly grounded again.