I discovered the joys of single malt scotch a couple of years ago, when my parents brought back a very fine (if young) vintage from Scotland. This after my mother had famously derided scotch as “tasting like cough syrup.” I’ve had fun in the World of Whisky store in the international concourse in Heathrow, thanks to a wealthy client of ours who flew us to Qatar a couple of times.

But now it seems that everybody else has gotten into the act, and there’s a shortage of single malt. I have had the Glenlivet 22 year, and it’s quite better than Johnny Walker Blue Label. Well, the market is responding as markets do to shortages, by sending the price up. This is signalling the distilleries that they need to be laying down more single malts to come to maturity (much of the oak for the barrels, by the way, comes from the US–are we going to limit that so British oak-growers aren’t outsourced?). However, maturity takes some time, so there will be a slight, twenty-year lag while inventories age appropriately. This is called inelastic supply, so we’ll probably be seeing high scotch prices for a while, or someone will figure out how to improve the flavor of younger vintages.

From CNN.com today:

I can’t imagine they don’t have built in spell-check, but I suspect the editor just kept hitting “ignore” reflexively and didn’t notice the error until a few minutes later, when I checked back and “the” was spelled correctly.

Nice thing about Safari, which I use to compose blog posts: it will underline spelling errors for you. However, some still get through (and sometimes I blog from Camino or Firefox, which don’t have that by default).

I went to First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach, Virginia on Friday, and saw a fair amount of neat stuff. We decided to beat the heat by walking along a bike path and over to a trail along the bay that offered some good bird viewing. The bike path went beside a cypress swamp, and then a side trail took us through a pine forest to the edge of the bay.

Read on for the intimate lives of reptiles, among others.

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So I was talked into seeing Revenge of the Sith on Wednesday at midnight, which, coupled with the drive, made for a short night. Had the crowd been more participatory and less full of showoffy jocks making a show of their popcorn-buying ability for their eye-rolling would-be breeding partners, it might have been more enjoyable at the opening.

Nonetheless, I didn’t completely hate the movie. However, I’ve recently seen a movie that makes me hate it in retrospect.

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Sony announced their Playstation 3 today, and take a look at the current design mockup:

versus the new Cylon raider in the 2003 miniseries of Battlestar Galactica:

Hmmm….

I just saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Meh.

The style of the visuals was pretty interesting, but the whole thing felt oddly amateurish, especially–and this is the weird bit–the acting. Gwynneth Paltrow was terrible. Her accent grated (has she never watched a Thirties film noir pic?), she was stiff, and she and Jude Law had zero chemistry.

The action sequences also were laclustre as they communicated the fact that the actors were in front of green screens and had no interaction with the world. The key to good CGI is faking that really well, and this failed.

I’m glad this was part of my Netflix subscription and not something I payed 9 dollars for.

Want to figure out what’s up with the confusing claims of piracy and whether your overpriced CDs go to fund new artists? You can do little better than reading this Register piece about Fiona Apple’s new album–or lack thereof. Seems a new album has been created and finished for some time, but Sony, her label, won’t release it.

Thanks to the world of P2P filesharing, some people have heard it. So, el Reg asks, why not just put it online where there is zero marginal (per-sale) cost to the record company, and every download is pure profit? Because their heads are far, far embedded in their digestive tracts and can’t conceive of a world where marketing doesn’t surround collections of songs sold on physical media–and because promoting physical media well enough for it to be profitable is so hard, they try like hell to follow whatever the latest trend is in each subgenre…in this case, female singer-songwriters.

Additionally, the online material they want to put out is the most-heavily-downloaded: the back catalog. I mean, what is Fiona Apple really going to do when competing with Ella Fitzgerald, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez? Actually, she’ll probably do quite well as the per-unit cost to the consumer is so low they can afford to take a sampling from many artists as opposed to being forced into betting larger sums of money that they’ll like enough music from a single artist’s CD to make up for the 15x higher purchase price.

But the recording industry doesn’t understand that, which is why they spend their time quaking in their boots about online file sharing rather than on figuring out how to market in the first decade of the 21st century–which is half over.

So, against my better judgment and humanity’s better interests, I finally broke down and got a cell phone. My first bill arrives today.

I look it over, and they nicely split out the previous partial month’s pro-rated charges as well as the charges for this month. The usage tables were a little less clear but the important bit of information, that I didn’t owe anything for them, was clear.

Then there’s this $36 “Verizon Surcharge” charge. What is it?

Verizon Wireless’ Surcharge includes charges to recover or help defray costs and taxes and of governmental surcharges and fees imposed on us, and costs associated with government regulations and mandates on our business. These charges include a Regulatory Charge, which helps defray costs of various mandates, and a Federal Universal Service Charge and, if applicable, a State Universal Service Charge to recover costs imposed on us by the government to support universal service. These changes are Verizon wireless Charges, not taxes, and are subject to change.

OK, so, despite the questionable punctuation, it is more honest than what they list as if they were taxes on your landline phone bill. But $36 dollars? Outrageous! I’m not paying that every month.

So I checked with a friend to see if he got that kind of charge regularly, and then called up, ready to strangle someone through the cell phone. After spending time on their network on their dime, none of the online explanations (which were helpfully tuned to the fact that I was a new user) addressed my concern, so I opted for customer service.

First off, the woman didn’t have the same information about me that their automated service did. That’s pretty lame. But it’s also typical, so I ignore it.

So I state my question–namely what is this charge, and is it going to be this much every month? She responds, “Oh, there is a $35 setup charge, and it is a one-time charge.”

OK, great. But what in the above cited explanation on the printed bill leads you to believe that setup charges would be included?

Had they but taken the time to either add that to the explanation or do the programming to break out that charge into its own area on the bill, I would not have called. I may have only taken 10 minutes of the woman’s time and another 10 or so of the online time, but that probably cost them a sizable fraction of the setup fee itself.

If even 10% of other customers react as I did–and the instructions for new customers seem to indicate they get a number of these calls–that has to be a pretty big cost center for Verizon. Just giving your customers salient details (like explaining any one-time charges) will save you money. You can funnel those profits into a nicer hotel room for boinking your fellow executive. Then everybody wins.

People, people.

And while we’re at it! Exclamation marks! They look kind of stupid (even in parenthetical remarks!) in business writing! Seriously!

While I think it’s a mistake to judge your life solely by how worthwhile you perceive it to be for society rather than your own enlightened satisfaction, I still sometimes take stock.

All my schooling was in the humanities, and I always seemed to do better there even in grade school. My verbal score saved my SAT, for example. But although my compatriots in the humanities (and my company’s clients) often view themselves as the ones who are important because of the beneficial work they do for society, I often have my doubts.

Who, in 200 years, will be more important to society, and have affected it more, Jonas Salk or Mother Theresa? Both are roughly equivalent–practically-focused, giants in their field but not on the level of an Einstein or a Ghandi in terms of turning their field on its head.

I would argue that by a country mile, Jonas Salk will be more often-discussed and often-thanked than Mother Theresa. She did good work saving orphans and children, but Jonas Salk was the one without whom millions of children would have died and another multitude been stricken with deformities.

They’re rare to see in the United States now, but when I was very young you would still often see elderly with crippling deformities they’d been living with all their lives as a result of polio. But as we no longer see them, we don’t see the impact the way we do of the current do-gooder.

The tougher question is, who does more good in the long run: Ghandi or Einstein? Ghandi, for all he was not a living saint, did indeed bring pacifism to the mainstream of social conflict. Einstein, of course, recast much of what went before as a special case and made much of the technology we take for granted possible. Both required fairly strong creative leaps given their positions. Both have undoubtedly helped people. But who will help people later?

It’s tough to say, because science such as Einstein’s is largely value-neutral, except in that understanding the world more completely is a virtue (that is to say, ignorance is not a virtue). So whether his impact is for good or ill on society rests more on whether we use applications such as GPS or nuclear weapons more, both of which are byproducts of his theories. Ghandi’s pacifism is a human construction and can be ignored as easily as it can be taken up. In that sense it may not be value-neutral, but it is subject to the whims of human action.

So when you think about drug companies versus relief organizations, remember that they both save lives, and it’s not so clear cut which benefits society more, whatever the price they charge or misuse scandals they suffer.