I'm leaving Harold Washington in a few minutes, now that I've caught up on some reading:
- Clancy Martin attempted to explain the martyr-like appeal of Ted Cruz.
- Deeply Trivial, who writes survey questions as part of her job, explained why she doesn't take surveys.
- Via Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, the University of Arizona outlined some new data linking sunspots, shipwrecks, tree trunks, and hurricanes.
- Suzy Khimm described the return of the pillory—via Internet, of course—as a tactic of some public prosecutors, most notably in the 2013 "Flush the Johns" operation in Nassau County, New York.
- Cranky Flier got interested in a robot that cleans airplanes. It's pretty cool.
- NPR media critic Adam Frank said I should watch SyFy's new series, "The Expanse."
- Engineer John Hayes wondered if we'll ever see a space elevator of the sort depicted in Neal Stephenson's Seveneves or Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.
- Spanish writer Cristina Pop thought living in London was the worst three years of her life. (It sounds like her experiences don't exactly line up with mine, starting with her not speaking a word of English when she got there.)
I also watched a time-lapse video of the Chicago River turning green last year. If you want to see this odd Chicago tradition, go downtown tomorrow at 9.
Man, I have missed this:
I had lunch with a friend here at the Duke today (and I walked, getting me to 15,000 before noon), so why not stay and write some documentation?
I've also decided on a new rule. I gave up beer for February because I think there's a correlation between me drinking beer and me staying consistently 3 kg over my target. Well, not much changed, and I missed beer, so my New Rule is that I can have one beer per 10,000 steps (or fraction thereof). And I think I'll aggregate this over the week.
Think Progress grinds through the history of Trump Steaks™:
Reporters from Home magazine, Gourmet magazine, People, New York Daily News, and Every Day with Rachael Ray showed up to the launch, which featured speeches by both Levin and Trump. Trump took the opportunity to boast of the steaks’ quality, telling reporters that the product was going to be a boon for the company, equivalent to Trump Vodka, which had launched just a year earlier.
The steaks were only available for mail order, and ranged from the Classic Collection, which cost customers $199 for two filet mignons, two cowboy bone-in rib-eyes and 12 burgers, to $999 for 24 burgers and 16 steaks.
But despite the rash of media attention, [Sharper Image CEO Jerry] Levin said, the steaks just didn’t sell.
Not all reviews of Trump Steaks were bad. Sharon Dowell, former food editor for the Oklahoman, called the steaks “tender, juicy and absolutely among the best-tasting steaks I’ve cooked on my home grill.” The New York Post gave them a 7.5 out of 10, noting that it was “an undeniably good steak” — but still three times the price of another steak that they gave a 7 to in the same taste test. Gourmet, in their taste test, were less effusive, calling the steaks “edible, but not particularly good.”
Martha Stewart, however, had perhaps the most unique response to Trump Steaks. In an interview with Joan Rivers, the lifestyle mogul and former Apprentice contestant replied “Too bad!” when Rivers said that the steaks weren’t actually from a slaughtered Donald Trump.
This person is the front-runner for leadership of the Republican party.
A medium-length list this time:
And this brings me to lunch.
Crain's lists five Chicago-area distilleries, including Few (my favorite), that have run out of room:
- The West Loop's CH Distillery plans to build a 20,000-square-foot distillery in Pilsen on the site of the old bottling building of the long-defunct Schoenhofen Brewery. It aims to boost capacity to more than 100,000 9-liter cases per year, up from about 8,000 in its current distillery and tasting room. The two-and-a-half-year-old distillery, whose top products are vodka, rum and two types of gin, produced 5,000 cases last year, up from 2,900 in 2014.
- Few Spirits in Evanston is seeking its fourth expansion in five years to meet demand for its barrel-aged products. The company doubled the size of its warehouse two years ago and is again running out of space. With production doubling last year, led by sales of gin and whiskey, Few is looking to expand again.
Local booze-makers are riding a boom in sales of craft spirits, which jumped 35 percent in 2015 to about 2.4 million 9-liter cases from 1.7 million in 2014, according to the American Distilling Institute's annual survey. That's after 42 percent sales growth in 2014 and a 50 percent spurt in 2013.
While figures aren't available for Illinois, the breakneck growth of CH Distillery, which distributes only in-state and has no immediate plans to do otherwise, offers a clear indication that the local market is just as robust.
I love Few's barrel-aged gin, which is as much a sipping spirit as a good Scotch or Bourbon. CH doesn't make all of their own stuff yet, so them opening their own distillery is good news.
I have three books in the works and two on deck (imminently, not just in my to-be-read stack) right now. Reading:
On deck:
- Kevin Hearne, "Iron Druid Chronicles" book 8: Staked.
- Kim Stanley Robinson, "Mars" trilogy book 2: Green Mars.
Meanwhile, I have these articles and blog posts to read, some for work, some because they're interesting:
Time to read.
Meanwhile, I seem to have a cold. Yuck.
Washington Post writer Fritz Hahn is freaking out that the U.S. now has more breweries than ever:
As of Dec. 1, 2015, the Brewers Association had counted 4,144 breweries in the United States, the most ever operating simultaneously in the history of the country. According to historians, the previous high-water mark of 4,131 was set in 1873.
Even when they are given a chance, some small brewers have expressed frustration with the way beer bars order products. Instead of buying three kegs of a new beer and running through them all, as it might have done when local beers were a novelty, a bar tends to buy a keg and, once it’s empty, fill the draft line with a competitor’s product, and then another one, and so on, before rotating back to the first brewery’s beer weeks or months later.
Many in the beer industry pin their hopes for small breweries on localization: the idea that consumers would rather drink beers made down the road than across the country. Lary Hoffman, who co-owns Galaxy Hut in Arlington and Spacebar in Falls Church with his wife, Erica, prefers to stock most of the taps with Virginia breweries, such as Blue Mountain, Champion and Three Notch’d. “You can get any style of beer locally now, and the quality is on par with the best beer in the world, so why not seek out the regional option?” he asks. A handful of national brands, including Bell’s and Avery, show up on the 28 taps at Galaxy Hut and the 24 at Spacebar, but they’re the exception. Customers would be angry “if our draft lineup looked like a Safeway shelf,” Hoffman says.
So, the problem seems to be, too much choice? Yeah, I'm not sure that's something we need to solve. Of course it can be daunting to look at a beer list from a place like Beer Bistro or The Green Lady. That's a problem we want. I lived through the 1980s and early 1990s, when we had maybe four "craft" breweries including Anchor Steam and Sam Adams. I'd rather live today, thank you.
Too many interesting things to read today. I've got some time between work and Bel Canto to get through them:
I have not read Bel Canto, though I understand it's loosely based on an actual historical event. I also haven't ever heard anything from composer Jimmy López before, since it only permiered last month. Friends who work for the Lyric tell me it's pretty good. I'll find out in a few hours.
The New York Times Magazine has an in-depth analysis of the daily fantasy sports (DFS) industry. I'm not that interested in fantasy sports, but this article had me riveted:
Here’s how it works: Let’s say you run D.F.S. Site A, and D.F.S Site B has just announced a weekly megacontest in which first place will take home $1 million. Now you have to find a way to host a comparable contest, or all your customers will flee to Site B to chase that seven-figure jackpot. The problem is that you have only 25,000 users, and the most you can charge them to enter is $20 per game (anything higher is prohibitively expensive). And you’ll need $2 million or even $3 million in a prize pool if first prize is valued at $1 million (remember, you still have to pay second place, third place and beyond). So you need to somehow quadruple the number of entries. But how? You’re already paying high cost-per-acquisition fees to sites like RotoGrinders, which charge, according to Harber, anywhere between $100 and $200 per person they refer to your site, and you’ve already put your logo on every bus, trash can and ESPN screaming-heads show out there. You’ve also kicked in some of your own money (known as “overlay”) to spice up the pot.
The solution is simple: You let each contestant enter hundreds of times. But even given this freedom, a majority of people will enter only a few more times, which will help but probably won’t get you all you need. If, however, you can attract a few high rollers who are willing to book several hundred or even several thousand entries apiece, the path to the $1 million first prize becomes a lot more manageable. And as long as you can make sure those players keep pouring in their thousands of entries, you can keep posting the $1 million first prize all over your ads.
In the game lobbies of DraftKings and FanDuel, however, sharks are free to flood the marketplace with thousands of entries every day, luring inexperienced, bad players into games in which they are at a sizable disadvantage. The imbalanced winnings in D.F.S. have been an open secret since this past September, when Bloomberg Businessweek published an exposé on the habits of high-volume players. The numbers are damning. According to DraftKings data obtained by the New York State attorney general’s office, between 2013 and 2014, 89.3 percent of players had a negative return on investment. A recent McKinsey study showed that in the first half of the 2015 Major League Baseball season, 91 percent of the prize money was won by a mere 1.3 percent of the players.
So, how is this at all fun to casual players? Someone explain it to me.