I know I keep posting about wine snobbery, but this is about as good as it gets:

“…the 2010 Chateauneuf du Pape Les Origines. A blend of 50% Grenache, 30% Syrah and 20% Mourvedre (45- to-95-year-old vines) aged in small oak, it exhibits an opaque purple color as well as a sweet bouquet of blackberries, espresso roast, ink and graphite. While clearly a modern-styled Chateauneuf du Pape, it retains plenty of the region’s typicity and authenticity. It should drink well for 15+ years” (from a Robert Parker review)

The sweet bouquet of ink and graphite? As this blog says so well, this is Wine Bullshit at its best! (I have previously blogged about wine experts, among other topics on wine, here.)

Bokeh (pronounced bow-kuh): Japanese for really cool out of focus backgrounds in photos!

The background of a photo is out of focus because of the aperture chosen. A large aperture will cause most of the background to be out of focus. This is true for every lens, but some lenses give the out of focus background a special character–bokeh. No one talks about the bokeh of a 50f1.8 lens other than to say it’s crap. You will hear people talk about the bokeh of a 200f2, or one of the most famous Canon lenses, the 85f1.2LII, which was used to make the sample photo above.
Don’t expect to see much out-of-focus background when using a small sensor camera, such as a cell phone or a point-and-shoot. The physics/optics of these cameras mean that almost everything is in focus, much as in a pin-hole camera photo. (As an aside, there is much irony in the use of f64 with a large view camera of the kind used by Ansel Adams–although the format lends itself to producing massive bokeh, the members of the f64 club used incredibly small apertures in order to increase the depth of field when making landscape images.)
Bokeh is not something you have much control over, other than buying a lens with good bokeh. It’s also not something to get worried about. Most people who view your photos are not going to get all critical about the average bokeh your lens displays!

I read this article on tipping from an ex-waitress. (I thought it was politically correct to refer to them as servers nowdays, but I guess it’s OK for an ex-waitress to call herself whatever she wants to.)

I have a simple rule on calculating the tip that I’ll share. Take the first digit (the 2 of $24.50) and double it, to get a $4 tip. This is 20% for a $20 bill, but only 15% for a $29.99 bill. So you can either still closely to it, and hope the over- and under- tips average out with repeated visits, or you can do some rounding ($29.99 is really $30, so tip $6.)

I agree with the ex-waitress that 20% has become the norm for tipping and it’s easier to calculate than the old 15% tip.

But the point she makes that I agree with most is that if you cannot afford to tip 20% or thereabouts, don’t go out to dinner! The tip is part of the expected cost of dining out, so don’t skimp on it claiming that somehow it breaks your bank. Go out less, or go to less expensive places.

So Merriam-Webster Online recognizes incentivize as a word. BFD. That doesn’t make it right. Why don’t we just rid ourselves of all verbs, and take all the nouns and add “ize” – or some other suitable postscript – to them to create all the verbs we need? 

There’s a long tradition of forming verbs from nouns, so why am I so upset by incentivize? Maybe it just sounds too contrived, too stupid. As an economist, incentive is part of the discipline’s jargon, so it has special meaning to me. I also believe that language is not fixed, but must change with the times. Yet, egregious verbization of nouns just irks me.

If you’ve ever thought of what it’s like to drive a Porsche, or seen one and taken a second look, or envied the driver/owner, or just like cars of all color and creed, then you’ll enjoy these photographs celebrating 50 years of the iconic Porsche 911. The first and the most recent, side by side:

It’s simply sublime, to me.