Gigabiting

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The Wall Street Journal has one. And the New York Times. Playboy Magazine too.

What’s a news organization to do?

Newspapers and magazines have turned to selling wine as a new way of generating revenue from readers. There’s nothing new about the business model. Classified ads were the traditional way for publishers to take advantage of the communities they created. With subscriptions dwindling and the advent of free Craigslist classifieds, a diverse group of publishers has applied the same principles to wine clubs. Read entire article.

     Jetsons image courtesy of Hanna-Barbera

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If only life could be like the futuristic utopia of The Jetsons. A hungry Jane pushes a few buttons on the food-a-rac-a-cycle and there’s dinner for four. No chopping, no sauté pans to wash, and best of all– no grocery shopping.

Grocery shopping is the most universally detested of all household errands.

We are inconvenienced by trips to the dry cleaner, we shudder at the thought of holiday gift shopping, but nothing fills us with dread like a trip to the supermarket. Read entire article.

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Today’s post was was going to be about chicken soup.

I had it all planned. I was going to show you a graph from the Centers for Disease Control illustrating the way the flu season peaks in the month of February. I had collected entertaining anecdotes about Jewish penicillin and a charming photograph of someone’s grandmother ladling it up from a steaming soup kettle. I had the results from a University of Nebraska Medical Center study documenting chicken soup’s ability to reduce neutrophils cells, which trigger the inflammatory responses that make cold sufferers feel so rotten.

Then  J.D. Salinger died. Read entire article.

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This post is for anyone who has ever dreamed of owning an olive grove on a sun-drenched Tuscan hillside or a vineyard in the Loire Valley.

And this post goes out to all of you who prefer not to be up with the chickens, who hate dirt under your fingernails, and get queasy from the smells of tractor diesel and manure.

Why buy the farm when you can rent?

Growers and producers with a wide range of offerings will lease you a portion of their operation— for one growing cycle you can lay claim to your own beehive, apple tree, oyster bed, or row of grape vines, and then reap the benefits of the harvest. Read entire article.

Remember the milkman?

Once a fixture of the early morning landscape, making deliveries to about a third of all households in the United States, the milkman was all but extinct as the 20th century drew to a close, with sales down to a paltry 0.4% of the retail dairy industry. It appeared that the milkman would remain a bit of quaint nostalgia for those old enough to remember, and younger generations would never know home delivery that doesn’t arrive in an Amazon box. Read entire article.