The full brochure.

The first pincho we tried was at La Marina Company. It was by far the most elaborate and special in a “you’re not going to ever make this at home” sort of way.

La Marina Company: Panacota de frambuesa con anchoas – That’s a cooked cream of raspberries with anchovies.

The presentation was gorgeous, but the combination of flavors was a little too bizarre for our philistine tastes. It came with a little dropper of Modena olive oil. There were too many flavors for my wife’s expertise in anchovy quality to gain any purchase.

A close-up of La Marina Company’s pincho. In general we were pretty displeased not only with the pincho, but also by the service. It took about ten minutes for the pincho to make its way down from the upstairs kitchen. By that time, we’d almost finished our wines.

La Casona: Suprema de buey – This “Ox Supreme” was described in the brochure as “Hamburger of ox meat with onion, egg and cheese”. After La Marina Company, our eyes were immensely disappointed when the tiny little burger rolls were plopped down before us. But wow, had hour eyes deceived us! The first bite had us both moaning with pleasure. The grainy bread, the tender meat, the sweet caramelized onions and the cheese made an excellent combination. Supreme, indeed!

It’s really not much to look at, but I could happily eat a dozen of these little treats.

Cafetería Colón: Hamburguesa de potro a la barbacoa – “What’s potro?”, I asked my wife. “Baby horse”, she replied. Whoa! Well, this is the place that had kangaroo meat in 2009. The ingredients listed were: sweet roll, colt meat, tomato, onion, garlic, pepper, parsley and barbecue sauce.

Like most foods with barbecue sauce, the sauce completely overwhelmed any other flavors, making this a very boring pincho to eat. The potato chips on the side did little to make it any more special. I’d certainly never have guessed that it was foal meat. It was a big let down after the previous hamburger in La Casona.

La Abadía: Destinos Pejinos – Apparently pejino is a local word meaning “a humble resident of coastal Cantabria”, so the title translates to “humble Cantabrian destinations”. Indeed, the primary ingredient was respigos, a local winter delicacy. The ingredients were listed as: pastry toast with cumin and respigos.

Visually, it looks like something your sick cat might leave on the carpet, but it was quite tasty in a humble, healthy sort of way. I didn’t care much for the “pastry toast” on the bottom; it reminded me of a bland granola bar.

The second night, we went to El Concept, but they were out of pinchos, and had enough business so that they didn’t really give a damn. Boo!

El Somera: Guiso de jabalí al chocolate – The name means “wild boar stew with chocolate”, and sure enough, that’s what it was. Unfortunately, for cost saving motives, there were a lot of potatoes, and very few chunks of boar meat. I must say, however, that I was impressed.

The little bowls were lovely. It definitely took second place away from La Albadía’s respigos.

A bore eating boar.

El Guti: Hamburguesita de ternera con salsa de queso y su guarnición – The title means “Little beef hamburger with cheese sauce and garnish”. The meat was fantastic, and the potatoes were fresh out of the frying pan.

The little burger looks insignificant, but the taste was powerful. I think it just barely edged out El Somera for second place.

Conclusion

Of the six pinchos we tried, I would rank them as follows:

1. La Casona – Definitely the best tasting pincho of all, despite presentation.
2. El Guti – Excellent flavor, though simple presentation.
3. El Somera – Wonderfully warm stew, with a slightly sweet chocolate tone.
4. La Albadía – Very hearty and healthy, but nothing spectacular.
5. Cafetería Colón – Too much sauce, but a decent snack.
6. La Marina Company – A lot of work put into preparation, but a very eccentric taste.

So concludes this year’s Pincho Week. I hope to do much better than a 33.3% sample size next year. ¡Hasta entonces! Until then!

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I admit that sometimes I forget just how people talk back home and it’s a shock when I visit. The manner of speaking in this film is a very authentic example of western North Carolina speech. If you have any interest whatsoever in bluegrass music and how it’s really played in the Deep South, I urge you to spend nineteen minutes watching this film. You won’t regret it.

The music is absolutely fantastic. I particularly liked the pun-laden knickknacks. Here’s a list of all the awards this movie has won.

In case you’re curious of just how small the town is, you can have a look around on Google Street View. That’s the barber shop with the white awning and the pickup truck. Give a 360º spin to really appreciate the locale.

Unfortunately, two years ago, the head barber, Lawrence Anthony, the first person to talk in the film, passed away. His son intends to fulfill his father’s wish to keep the shop open. Since then, the shop has sustained some water damage and is in need of repair. You can find a follow-up video and a link to donate to Lawrence Anthony’s nonprofit Barbershop Preservation Fund here. I’ve just made a donation.

It would be a true shame to lose this culture. Thank you so much to Matt Morris for documenting it.

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I picked up a bottle and continued shopping. At the checkout, I asked the cashier if she knew anything about this wine, and she responded that it was a great wine for the price, a good “weekday” wine, and it was the wine that her father drank with his lunch everyday.

The wine was quite good, definitely one of the highest quality/price ratios I’ve ever consumed. I won’t bore you with those bizarre adjectives wine connoisseurs use, as I’m not one. But I am a bit of a psychology connoisseur, so I would like to discuss things this winemaker did very, very right in packaging their wine.

First of all, the name is genius. It literally means “red [horse] mane”, hence the horse logo, but out of the corner of your eye, or with the movement of someone pouring you a glass, any Spaniard or wine drinker knowledgeable about Spanish wines is going to see the words Crianza and Rioja, both of which are marks of quality and their usage is highly regulated. You have to get official certification to put either word on your wine bottle. Crin Roja is neither crianza nor Rioja; it’s from a vineyard called Vinícola in Castilla La Mancha.

Secondly, you almost never see gold netting on bottles of wine in my price range. Only the very finest wines, usually reserva or gran reserva are netted. The internet tells me that this tradition originates from an intent, by rich Europeans of yore, to prevent the house staff from opening the expensive bottles in the cellar for themselves before refilling and recorking them with an inferior wine.

Why is all this important? Not only do these clever tricks make the wine sell better, but they actually make it taste better!

The industry of expensives wines is mostly all bullshit. Blind taste test after blind taste test have shown that those of us that are not wine experts (and the experts, too, to some extent) base our estimations of wine quality on subliminal and priming stimuli, with price being the primary factor. As neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer explains in his book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist,

What these wine experiments illuminate is the omnipresence of subjectivity…Our human brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that prejudices feel like facts, opinions are indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think the wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a Grand Cru, then we will taste a Grand Cru.

Our sensations from drinking wine are interpreted by a subjective brain that is also factoring in biases and beliefs and expectations. Just like the placebo effect still works even when the patient knows they are getting a placebo, cheap wine in a fancy gold netted bottle with words that look like crianza and rioja will taste better, even if you know it’s all just clever packaging.

¡Salud!

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They were very stern at first with an announcement over the intercom telling us that video and still image recording devices were expressly prohibited, but when the artist comes out to pose for photos with her fans, screw the rules! So I took some photos…

There was a light right behind Rosana that made for some really awesome fog shadows, but also was completely blinding when she moved out of the way of the beam.

She plays chords and even some complex fingerpicking on most of her songs, but her lead guitarist was absolutely phenomenal. Why is the lead guitarist always on the singer’s right and the bassist on the left? Is there a reason?

With social networking what it is these days, I thought that leaving a message on her Facebook page might actually reach her. I don’t know if it will, but this is what I wrote.

Querida Rosana,

Soy estadounidense, y me enamoró con una española en 1999, y me dijo mi novia que su cantante favorita eras tú. Inmediatamente compré los dos discos, y pasé el año que estuvimos separados por el atlantico (por razones de inmigración) escuchando tus discos. ¡Sin saber ni siete palabras en castellano! Pero con tus letras me iba aprendiendo. Entonces, entenderás que ocupas un sitio muy especial en mi corazón.

Ahora estoy casado con esa misma española y vivimos en Cantabria. Te vimos en 2007 y otra vez esta noche, y nos encantaste las dos veces. ¡Eres una gran artista! Y sobre todo una gran persona.

Un abrazo americano,
Erik

In English:

Dear Rosana,

I’m an American, and I fell in love with a Spaniard in 1999, and my girlfriend told me that her favorite singer was you. Immediately I purchased both CDs and spent the year that we were separated by the Atlantic (for immigration reasons) listening to your CDs. Without knowing even seven Spanish words! But with your lyrics, I was learning. So, you’ll understand that you occupy a special place in my heart.

Now I’m married to that same Spaniard and we live in Cantabria. We saw you in 2007 and again tonight, and we loved you both times. You are a wonderful artist! And an even more wonderful person.

An American hug,
Erik

She might not see it, but if she does, I’m certain she’ll take the time to respond.

See you next tour, Rosana! ¡Hasta la próxima gira!

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Yesterday I bought, downloaded, and read Sam Harris’ new e-book, Lying. (No, really, I did!) It was a quick read. Amazon lists its “print length” at 26 pages. While not as thought-provoking or groundbreaking as Harris’ full length books, it did make me consider how honesty and dishonesty affect my life. It was definitely worth my two dollars.

That’s right; it only costs $1.99, and it’s only available in e-book format.

This is the first “book” of its kind that I’ve seen on Amazon. It straddles the gap between essay/article/blog entry and full length book. I like the idea that someone can write thirty pages and then charge a small fee for people to download it. Obviously this won’t work for all genres or authors. If what you want is for your ideas to reach the largest number of people, then you’d better be giving your words away for free. But if you’ve spent a few weeks polishing your too-short-for-a-book thoughts on a topic, and are already a respected author or person that people will want to hear from, then it seems like a great way to make a little money for your troubles.

Apple has already shown the value of pricing music and software down at the $1 level; consumers are much less picky about deciding what to buy when the prices are so low. It will be interesting to see if other authors begin publishing shorter works, perhaps single short stories, as electronic books.

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Just over a year ago, in May of 2010, we bought Roomba. We had two recommendations from friends, so we splurged the 300€ and bought a robot to vacuum our floors. Initially it seemed pricy, but it’s some of the best 300€ we’ve ever spent. As my wife said to me soon after we bought it…

I think I like the Roomba. It doesn’t clean as well as I do, but it cleans about as well as you do.

I very quickly learned an important lesson of Roomba ownership: Do not watch it work! It will drive you mad. It will appear to drive right by every little speck that you want it to clean and if you want it to go to a certain part of the room, it will go to the other side. You just have to trust in its algorithms: if you let it run until it thinks it’s done, it will probably have gotten to every last corner of your house. The proper way to use the Roomba, of course, is to turn it on before you leave home. That way you aren’t tempted to watch it work, and it’s also as noisy as any vacuum cleaner. The hardest part about vacuum cleaning now is picking up all the toys that the Roomba can choke on.

For a while now I’ve been meaning to duct tape my video camera to the Roomba to see what kind of “Roomba eye view” video would result. I finally got around to doing it this week, and I must say that I was hoping the result would be more interesting. There’s a lot of stops and spins and very few long stretches as it bounces off all the furniture. The low angle view of our house is pretty neat, though.

It recorded fifty minutes of bouncing under chairs, the view from behind the toilet, and lots and lots of footage of our floor molding. I couldn’t watch more than about four minutes of it, so I cut it off at the five minute mark and uploaded it.

It was an experiment that I wanted to try, and I’m glad I did, but I don’t think I’ll do it again.

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What I love most about the Fitbit is all the data. I love having data to examine, especially data about myself. While I haven’t learned anything shocking about my daily movements, it is interesting to see how many more steps I take on days when I take my daughter to the park to play, versus when I don’t, or how few steps I take on rainy days when walks are scarce. It makes me more aware of how much exercise I’m getting, which almost always results in me getting more of it.

The hardest part about using a Fitbit is to remember to put it on and move it from article of clothing to article of clothing when changing. It weighs so little that it’s very easy to forget. While the Fitbit does measure general restlessness while I sleep, it can’t actually tell when I sleep or how well I’ve slept.

It seems pretty inevitable to me that most of us will have data-gathering sensors implanted in our bodies in the future. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to see graphs of all sorts of measurements taken over the course of my day, measurements that are easy to take in a laboratory or with handheld devices now, but taken by sensors from inside my body:

• Heart rate
• Breathing rate
• Blood pressure
• Blood sugar
• Blood oxygen
• Blood alcohol level
• Blood cholesterol
• Brain waves (electroencephalography)
• GPS and altitude coordinates

Imagine the diagnosing power all this data could give your physician, if she could pull up your vital trends for the previous six months or ten years. Obviously there are privacy concerns involved here. The Fitbit company has already had a security problem where information about their clients’ sexual activities were publicly searchable via Google. Where, when, and how often your heart rate and breathing rise is your own business and no one else’s, except for maybe your doctor’s if you are feeling ill.

There is a huge opportunity for medical preventive technologies given this sensor data, as well. Diabetes, seizures, heart attacks, and maybe even cancer, probably have early warning signs that could be watched out for and preventive steps taken before the first symptom is felt. One of the most memorable TED Talks I’ve seen was one by Robert Fischell back in 2005 about how his team has sensors that can predict heart attacks, and how much the chance of survival drops with each minute after a heart attack begins.

I, for one, welcome the future of implantable data collecting machines…and all the glorious data they will spit out!

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Twitter

Twitter is a bit like microblogging; you spit out your stream of interesting observations, and people can either choose to listen to you or not. This form of sharing is most useful for celebrities or corporations or brands, who can market new products or offers on best last minute holidays or whatever. But it can also be a fun to meet new likeminded people. I like the laissez-faire, Darwinian nature of it, where, if you tweet things that are interesting enough to a lot of people, eventually you will get a lot of people listening to you.

This is the equivalent of “Public” sharing on Google+. I suspect that most of my posts on Google+ will be marked as public since I will be duplicating most of the content on Twitter, and I have a general aversion to restricted sharing.

For Google+ to completely obsolete Twitter – which I don’t think will happen soon – it would need some form of tagging, because sometimes Twitter hashtags can be quite fun and useful.

Facebook

When I first started using Google+, I was confused why I wasn’t having to accept anyone’s “friend request”. I just got notified that people were “adding me to their circles”, and without my permission! The problem was that I was still thinking with a Facebook mindset. Facebook demands a bidirectional relationship. If I don’t explicitly agree that you can listen to my posts, then you can’t.

The closest equivalent to this on Google+ is to share content to “Your circles” (e.g. everyone that you have agreed to be friends with, though not necessarily that have agreed to be friends with you!). This is a good default setting for anyone moving from Facebook to Google+. Of course you can further restrict your sharing to any arbitrary subset of your Google+ connections.

Conclusion

Any time someone comes along with a new way of doing things, it’s a bit jarring. The more I understand Google+’s circle system, the more I like it, with the exception of being excluded from posts I would be interested in that the poster thinks I wouldn’t. I think that Google’s circles are simple enough for anyone to understand, but complex and customizable enough to allow for a very fine level of control for its users. Google+ is still in its infancy and is lacking many, many features that will be needed to permanently pull users away from its competitors, but I see a lot of potential and nothing spurs innovation like some good healthy competition.

In the interest of brevity, I have simplified the privacy settings on Twitter and Facebook for this post to the way that I personally have my accounts set up.

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One thing Google+ is using circles for is to allow you to optionally restrict who can see your status updates to only certain circles. While on the surface, this seems like a good idea, after giving it a little thought, I’m convinced that it is an inherently bad idea.

Other Interests

One of my favorite things about Facebook is that it gives me insights into other corners of people’s lives that they normally might not share with me. I love seeing photos from a marathon that someone has run or hearing about their time participating in a civil war reenactment. With Google+, those are exactly the kinds of posts that they might restrict to their subset of friends that they think are interested in those activities. The unrestricted “fire hose” format of sharing is one of the advantages of online social networking over how offline relationships work, where people only talk to you about things you have in common. Sometimes you end up finding a common interest with someone that you would never have found if you weren’t sharing your entire self with everyone.

Opposing Views

I have this one Facebook friend that loves to read books about and post quotations supporting the myth that the United States’ Founding Fathers were all Christians and wanted the US to be an inherently Christian nation. This is one of my pet peeves because the profound intelligent foresight of the Founding Fathers to divorce government from religion is one of the things I most respect about them. So I butt rhetorical horns with this friend whenever I can. Most of his quotations can be found to be frauds simply by searching on Snopes, but others are genuine and need counterexamples. My point with this anecdote is that, using Google+, this friend would most likely only post his “Jefferson was a Baptist” nonsense to his likeminded churchgoers and never get any other viewpoints, resulting in a filter bubble, a polarizing ideology-strengthening echo chamber that’s not good for anyone.

Filter When Reading, Not Sharing

I love the idea of being able to filter my feed by circles. Back when I was using the Nambu Twitter client, one of the things I loved about it was the ability to categorize my followees into groups. I’d never miss a tweet from someone in my “Friends” group, but would often just “mark all as read” for the entire “Celebs” group. It was great. I had progressive cascading layers of contacts that, depending on how much time I had for social media consumption, I’d read in order from “most important to me” all the way down to Ashton Kutcher.

The way I think social media works best is to share everything to everybody and then let each consumer filter their incoming feeds by what is important to them. Google+, should it win its battle with Facebook, may ruin what is most beautiful about online social networking.

Why Google Won’t Change This

After thinking about this issue a bit more, it occurred to me why Google has done this…and it’s not to make a better user experience. You see, Facebook collects information about you based on which links you click on in your feed. If it notices that you tend to click on political stories hosted by entities owned by News Corp, it’s a pretty good bet that you’re politically conservative, and thus, they can show you ads targeted at political conservatives.

This is where Google’s genius insight comes in. On Facebook, in order for them to gather subtle ad-targeting information about you, you must actually use Facebook. On Google+, on the other hand… Say you sign up for Google+ just to check it out, but aren’t that big into online social networking and you never go back. You’d think they couldn’t collect information about your interests, right? Wrong. With this new circle-restricted sharing, they can! Let’s say that three of your Google+ friends share links about pottery and restrict them to circles that you are in. Voila! Google can deduce that you are interested in pottery and can, if you are logged into Google, show you pottery related ads on any website using Google Adsense across the internet. Your friends, not just you, are giving Google information about you by using circle-restricted sharing.

The advertising genius behind this subtle social networking “feature” is astonishing. After all, advertising is where Google’s revenue comes from. Let’s just hope that Facebook doesn’t borrow this idea and ruin their free spigot of social sharing.

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From Norboru Kaetsu, the producer:

Many people gave us praise for this program, but one of the students said, “I found the program interesting, but it is still light. Our year is much heavier than that.”

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