I find wine absurd. That's not to say I don't like drinking it. I'd drink it at work if I could! But how do you choose one? Seriously ... by what criteria does one purchase wine?

This was well summed up by a friend of mine who, at 19, entered a liquor store in our hometown of North York and suggested, "we're looking for a good bottle of wine." Following this, we went to a hardware store and asked for "a good thing."

Fifteen years later, I have added a bit to my knowledge of wine, but I'm not sure if any of the knowledge is useful; I know that Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are grapes, that Napa Vally and Bordeaux are regions (and that you could probably spend weeks in Bordeaux and come away describing it as an indecipherable taxonomy of applied geography). But still, is it useful? Useful means that I can predict pretty well what tastes good.

Well, a few nights ago I drank a bottle of Jip Jip Rocks Shiraz 2007. And it tasted very good. I think it was the best wine I can remember drinking, and I remember at least the first two thirds of it.

I think it was $15 at the LCBO; not a big price. I took a different approach to finding it; I think, a logical approach. I had come across the name Robert Parker Jr.; an American wine reviewer who is both an anti-elite in his bucolic homestead and unrefined upbringing, and, relative to folks like Billy Munnelly, confidently snobbish about really good wine. Unlike many anti-snobs, Parker doesn't balk at drinking a $60 wine or calling it as better than a lot of $12 wine.

There's some backlash against Parker: who is this nobody from nowhere-USA? Even if he is somebody, he's destroying wine by favouring certain rich, heavy types and forcing small and large vintners to comply.

Perhaps, but I don't care. Like I said, I want to drink wine that tastes good. And Jip Jip Rocks Shiraz 2007, bought on Parker's recommendation, tasted great.

So, my approach was simple. I discovered that some of Parker's ratings can be accessed at Wine.com -- specifically, with a click from the homepage, they lay out the wines that are highly rated and that cost under $20. The rating system is a bit odd, but it's enough to know that a rating of 80 is good, 90 is excellent and 95+ is very excellent. So, I just cross-referenced what RP (as Robert Parker's ratings are symbolized with) rated highly with what the LCBO sells (it turns out, correlation is poor).

Now, I learned very little about earth or limestone or breezes or rivers or Chateaus or grafting or anything to find a nice wine. I just learned Robert Parker's name and did what he said. He seems to correlate with my taste.

My point is not that people should be sheeple. Rather, it's that I cannot access wine with the approach commonly presented by the greater wine industry. Even Billy Munnelly's 3-type breakdown failed me; they all tasted not that great.

In my view, drinking wine should be a journey (I cannot but hear Adam Clayton's "A musical journey!"). I mean, if you go to Ireland, you don't go first to the geography and then to the people and then to the food. You do it all at once; you mash it all up, and how you make sense of it is through experience (sensuous). A hamburger in Doolin while chatting with young hitchhikers and listening to traditional Irish music is sensuous; it's a discrete moment and memory. As a moment, it can be used to understand other things; is this music like that music? Is a hamburger considered Irish food or foreign food? What's common and what's different between the generations?

I'd love to find a book, perhaps an annual book, written as a wine journey for the uninitiated. Why not! You start with something bold, then learn one thing about it and why it's bold. Then you go to an Ontario Merlot, and try to understand what's different about them. And so on.

I think I could understand one or two bottles a week; but I cannot understand 75 of anything, at least not all at once. I need to work my way through them, experientially, creating context using useful, common criteria.

So, wine! Get your act together. Write something useful, you stained, fruity lallygag.

PS -- next up:
MAIPE MALBEC 2008 Argentina | Proviva
VINTAGES 93823 | 750 mL | $ 12.95

What motivates a personal trainer? Some people love the culture of gyms. But I think personal trainers are often motivated by helping people. For 30 or 60 minutes at a time, they're physically close to a person who, in many cases, wants to feel better about themselves; trainers have the ability to help them get there. You could say that there's no irony between them -- the trainer isn't using a bait-and-switch technique, or attending sessions on how to "sucker in" more clients.

Usually, they're not just acting like, but are being a real person. Pretty simple, really.

Notwithstanding all that, training is normally capitalistic. My friend trains in her clients' homes and drums up work herself. She's an independent business person -- she uses her own capital to buy equipment and promote her company.

The free market is competitive. Though Adam Smith anticipates many features of capitalism -- the minute division of labour chief among them -- the pitting of opponents against one another to produce the best offer (product, price or marketing/placement) for consumers is central to how we view the positive side of the system today.

But within this system is a central irony -- that companies want to profit from their relationship with customers -- certainly from the consumer relationship (the B2B relationship is a bit harder to fudge). Most of the ads I take in make me feel like I'm being lied to; in fact, I think most people of my generation automatically handicap anything they receive via mass distribution, or that doesn't carry a label of authenticity with it.

What is the larger effect of this? I try not to consume media much anymore; just radio and Internet mainly, but few movies or magazines and no TV. But if I, like many people, took in hours of media daily, and if it was all funded by explicit and implicit (embedded) advertising messages, would that not affect how I see the world? The level of trust I generally have.

And would that carry over to my trust of political leaders, or in fact of policies that were genuinely developed in an objective and fair way -- the governance of our nation. Or of personal relationships, or of how I might relate socially in public places, like malls or sidewalks, or while driving in traffic.

I think there's something big about closeness -- I think physical trainers are more likely to develop friendships with clients than to lie to them and use them. What about mid-sized private companies? Are they more authentic than multinationals? And, if so, what is it about multi-nationals that makes then inauthentic? Can a multinational consumer chain be built that cultivates genuine and honest relationships in all points of business (relationships with suppliers and other vendors, creditors, employees/owners, and customers)? What if a group of local, authentic businesses formed a federation -- would it change things? What if that federation adopted a form of central authority -- what then?

I've written before that authenticity is big -- in PR and in business as well as of course in life. But for people who don't perform personal training or public school teaching etc. as a career, it can be difficult to not creep over that line. But that line really, in the long run, is vital personally and in society.

I like France's TGV trains because you can cross the country in a few hours and, if you're travelling between city centres, it often takes less time to travel from a train seat to your destination building than it would from a plane's touchdown to arrive at baggage collection. While these trains cross the French countryside at close to 200 kph, passengers are able to roam the length of them reasonably freely, and can have a hot lunch or sit in a bar stool and read a newspaper. Though many are driven by the desire to arrive quickly at their destination, few are so obsessed that they move to the front of the train to achieve this. In fact, almost anyone on a TGV train would find it irrational for a passenger to deem forward motion within the train as progress toward their destination.

If anything, on a train moving to Lyon from Paris, it may be beneficial to walk toward Paris while being hurtled toward Lyon, because the train station exits may be close to the back of the train in Lyon. It's not really necessary to point this out; most people get it.

But I wonder if in other contexts progress is measured more in terms of moving up and down a train that is otherwise hurtling toward something else at an immeasurably higher vitesse.

General Motors is bankrupt and shedding decades-old brand icons -- not to mention 1/3 of managers -- as it tries to recover from something terrible that happened.

But what exactly happened? Did cars end? How could such a terrible outcome affect an otherwise blessed corporation?

Perhaps the answer can be seen in how progress was measured at GM. Manufactured Obsolescence is one business strategy aimed at stimulating demand by deliberately making your products worse. Stimulated demand could give the appearance of progress, while in fact, anyone who thinks clearly and independently could see that deliberately making your products worse for 40 years would probably not make your company better.

The finance industry -- capital for capital's sake -- similarly engineered highly complex new products that created an illusion of progress. Much of the mortgage industry stepped onto a train clearly marked "Going over a Cliff" and then began to, not just walk but run along the length of this train in a direction marked progress. Funnily enough, this blind march did not stop the train from going over the cliff.

I've written many times about Jane Jacobs. I think the lesson of her life is that an intelligent person who is exceptionally independent of mind or contrarian will find it easy to see that trains marked "Going over a Cliff" will in fact go over a cliff. But, as Warren Buffet says, the elite management class spends much more time looking left and right to see what they should do than thinking for themselves.

In between reading about the decline of western civilization due to economic collapse, I like to lighten up and learn about the coming decline of global civilization due to environmental collapse.

Recently, it's become clear that common sense can go a long way toward understanding a complex world. Models and world leaders could not predict the current state of our economy, but if you think carefully about whether people can accumulate debt forever, some things become more clear. Jane Jacobs was a successful intellectual who observed and experienced reality and reported on it and theorized anew based upon it. She had little formal training, but she's been proven dead right on urban planning.

So, I'd like to offer two theories based not in math, but in observation of the economy and ecology.

Ecology and the economy are closely related. A hundred years ago, much of Canada's GDP was a measure of things that grow in dirt, livestock that eat those things, the harvest of trees and other organic material, and the mining of minerals and other deposits. In other words, our wealth closely approximated things we took from the Earth.

Today, we have a service economy, and this is underpinned by Paul Romer's theory of endogenous growth; ie. economies grow because they generate technological change, which makes things more efficient. Today, we take more corn, trees, deposits and livestock off of the land, but it's a fraction of our economy; in the large part, we design better fuels, improve the lay-out of cities, improve the rubber in tires, invent information technology and cure pot-holes. We incrementally improve the efficiency of society, all while freeing more people to spend more time thinking up more improvements.

This is called a positive feedback loop, where "positive" is not a moral phrase. In fact, dire ecological predictions are underpinned by positive feedback loops; in the podcast behind the Gwynn Dyer link above (and here), three such positive feedback loops are named around global climate change:

• the melting of the polar ice caps, which has visibly started and cannot be disputed by people looking at them, removes an essential and quite big "Earth mirror" and replaces it with the Arctic equivalent of a black driveway.
• the melting of glaciers will release ancient stores of methane gas, which is 10-times worse as a greenhouse gas than C02
• as oceans warm, their capacity to absorb CO2 will decrease.

Each of these phenomena require a small trigger -- such as our global output of greenhouse gasses -- and they will then feed upon themselves, and each other, far beyond the capacity of our total economy to exert control. When you start to enter a black hole, you cannot get out.

Economically, the credit crisis was also a positive feedback loop, with the collapse in home prices starving consumers of their raison-de-spend, causing layoffs and further bank failures, accelerating the cycle. It really doesn't matter what the trigger is when you've been absent-mindedly storing pails of gasoline in your living room.

Tragically, the economic and ecological loops could trigger a third, political positive feedback loop. Should the ecological loop trigger migrations from equatorial areas, refugee issues arise just as the economic loop triggers civil unrest generally. Governments that should be tackling the first two feedback loops will be distracted trying to reverse the political loop. At just the moment when we need a belle epoque to create regulatory and technological solutions to these problems, we will have the least capacity to do so.

Now, in case you have a gun in your mouth, you may want to read a little further. I'm asking you to consider a second effect, which I'm calling inertial blindness.

Let's say that you want to build a party town somewhere in the Nevada desert. You require water, so you invest in technologies to draw the water from ancient sources deep underground and over time this water enables your manufactured city to generate billions of dollars in both private wealth and tax revenue. But as your city grows, your annual draw on the underground water supply becomes significant. Although your economic growth continues, you're creating an ecological deficit in doing so and the situation becomes absurd. That it continues can only be evidence of both blindness and inertia. No rational person would build a large city on top of a 10-year water supply, but inertial blindness allows this. No rational person would try to build the CN Tower 10,000 feet high, just because at 1800 feet things were going so well.

Borrowing to consume some goods is an interesting strategy, especially for a young person who needs a house and a car before s/he can pay for these things. But what if the inertia of this consumption continues into the realm of blindness, to where consumption-beyond-means occurs because not doing this is harder than doing it (also, see Sacco).

The oceans have absorbed roughly 30 per cent of CO2 emissions since the start of the industrial age. But we are inertially blind to the fact that they cannot absorb infinite CO2 emissions. At best, they will stop absorbing these emissions; at worst they will become emitters themselves. Inertial blindness may lead us to turn 70 per cent of the Earth's surface into a smoke stack.

When borrowing and consumption slackened in the early 1990s, quantitative minds who were financial experts engineered new financial products, capable of extending growth. Again, this was inertial blindness -- it was anything but real growth, but it allowed the real growth to transition into theatrical growth. Following 9/11, theatrical growth was accelerated with more creative mortgage products and low interest rates. (Note bene, we did get the Segway out of this decade).

I'm writing all of this because I think it is essential that we develop models -- more sophisticated than I'm capable of creating now -- which identify and isolate these two phenomena, allowing policy makers to kill their causes. It is important that the national conversation (again, what a terrible phrase) include terms that mean what I mean when I say positive feedback loop and inertial blindness. We need to know when we're cutting down the last tree on Easter Island and when we're switching from tree-based energy to alternative energy. We need to know when growth is real and when it is a stage play in a dark theatre.

It is just shocking that the top people in our society did not know these things.

Seems a little short, no. I know I'm getting older because law and order appeals work on me, but I'd like to see this guy get 20-30 years for what he did.

I'd like people sitting around a bar to say, remember Dragan Gorgijevski? He's rotting in jail until he dies ... (though he's still better off than the woman he killed or her boy he maimed and left severely disabled.)

I'd like to point out that buying a physical CD from a physical store is officially "retro."

One week before I started undergrad, I took off with two friends to the Laurentians and Montreal to drink and toast a point of inflection. In Montreal, Rue St. Catherine was the only rue, and it was debauchery.

Thirteen years later, I brought two travelling companions of a different sort -- my wife and daughter -- to promenade the rue's of Outremont; sort of a muted fusion of Le Marais and Dufferin Street.

I love young Quebecois -- they're confident and sophisticated. I love old Quebecois -- they're kind and complex. For a brief moment, looking at a fleur de lis, I thought about being a nationalist. Being proud of a singular race/state. The blue was compelling -- so bright compared with the maple leaf that is like one's front door. But I cannot be a true Israeli, even if the old Levine blood counts for something. I am 32 and have never lived as a Jewish person. And I cannot be Quebecois of any degree for the same reason. But maybe that's beside the point.

What's better about pluralism? It's not an easy answer. There's complexity in the system and in the answer. But pluralism is right. I think I know that with certainty.

We met an amazing Senegalese man on a bus on route 80 Friday night. He was with his family. We liked talking to him -- it was small talk, but there was something underlying. He was leaving Montreal for one year, then returning -- I think for good. Is he Quebecois? His french was perfect, I think. I liked him more than any hoser; more than a bourgeoisie wine-sipper in North Toronto. Within the "scoring" of pluralistic complexity, perhaps he is more Quebecois than me, and less than others.

Ontario is orange. That's our fleur de lis. And everyone else is a grade of orange, or not orange, but living in it like marshmallows in hot chocolate.

We'll return to Quebec. Get a bit better at french and do the small towns where you can't revert to English. Then we will see ...

post script: Jan Wong was censured by the Parliament of Canada. It was wrong.

Two things kill me about public washrooms: the insanely long lines that form outside of women's washrooms, and the utter silence that is ambient in nearly all washrooms.

For the latter, this is disconcerting. I have heard people pat-pat on their blackberry behind a stall's doors. I have heard of people who answer their cell phone. I have also heard other sounds ... sounds which, while universal, I don't want to hear; or to have others hear.

The following public places use music to help offset awkwardness: elevators, taxis, airplanes during boarding, doctor's offices, dentists offices, waiting lounges, tunnels that connect two subway stations (live music, no less), hotel lobbies, movie theatres before a screening, etc.

Washrooms, on the other hand, are made of a material so hard it can echo the crash of tossed dandruff. Doesn't it seem time to throw a little white noise, or Luscious Jackson ... even Jermaine Jackson ... or anything in there to muffle the fluffles?

As for the lines outside women's washrooms, this no doubt was a source of pride for men in the year 2400 BC when drinks at the Coliseum were 2 crowns a piece and people were usually hammered by the third mauling of a Christian, but I'm not sure I feel the same pride today. I wouldn't feel proud if a boy couldn't pee because no one had thought to install a 2-foot-tall urinal. People do think of that, because it's ergonomic (in the original meaning). Why, then can washrooms not be designed for equal rate of use, not equal square footage. If 10 men and 7 women can use a washroom in 10 minutes, and human physiology could take 5 million years to adapt to this, why not just move the wall a bit so it's roughly equal. It's not about empowerment, it's just dumb the other way around.

Regardless of whether Napster was itself illegal, it was only popular because no alternative existed which had the blessing of music "owners." Today, the iTunes store is a very popular web-tool that essentially gives users what Napster did, but with the blessing of the music "owners."

Some people who use iTunes own fewer than 1000 songs. In my opinion, in a library of 1000 songs, about 200 are truly enjoyable. However, a typical core library of 200 songs begins to lose its "freshness" after about three months of rotation. Adding songs to that list through iTunes costs $1 a song, so even being very careful and adding only "core" songs, it will cost $198 to gain another three months of "freshness," or $66 per month. Some people will pay this, and enjoy picking the songs. Many will find the cost -- and agony (watch someone sweat over a large, unfamiliar menu) of making 66 individual choices per month -- prohibitive.

Satellite radio (or Internet radio, TV radio, or other digital audio), on the other hand, can be thought of as someone with a library of 250,000 songs, including every new one. The key advantage, however, is in the feedback. If a satellite radio station can be "trained" to know your musical tastes, then it can not only deliver old songs that you are likely to enjoy, but predict which new songs you will also like. In fact, if it can narrow your tastes well enough, you may even be able to receive just a core of 200 good songs, out of a selection of 250,000 possible songs, and this core will automatically update with newly released songs every day, completely updating before any song becomes stale.

In the case of portable music, an iPod is comparable in price to a satellite receiver (it is likely cheaper, but has a shorter life). However, satellite radio costs close to $15 per month, while 66 new songs per month on iTunes costs $65. Furthermore, for the average consumer, no decision-making is required.

Despite my love of iTunes, I think that, within a decade, music-as-content will be stored on central servers and streamed to users, rather than "owned" by individuals.