Posts Tagged ‘News’

Toasting Obama and the Future

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

Beacons of Hope

In 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president of my country, I remember an age of jubilation that was infused into children, adults and people from overseas alike. Backpackers would come to our country with Mandela t-shirts, and when we traveled abroad and told people we were South African we were somehow associated with a little bit of that Mandela magic and people were that little bit more welcoming. With Mandela in power, the dominant feeling was that no matter what happened – things were going to be okay.

In the past 8 years that formative optimism of the Mandela years had left me, and I found myself in the midst of a new generation of cynicism kicked off by the Clinton impeachment, followed by the stealing of the election in Gore v. Bush, and the subsequent anomalies of extraordinary rendition, water-boarding and the abomination that is Sarah Palin. When Gore released his movie, Inconvenient Truth, only then did the world realise what could have been – if only America had fought a little harder in 2000.

When I woke up on Wednesday the 6th of November, after 18 months of watching this election, I realised the enormity of what has happened. As I showered a feeling of relief washed over me and I knew that the page has been turned. (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Lifestyle, Love, Millennials, News, Thoughts | View Comments

West Coast Green – How my life changed this week

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

West Coast Green conference

Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Art, Business, Culture, Design, Dining, Energy, Events, Family, Food, Industry, Labels, Lifestyle, Love, Marketing, Millennials, Music, News, Passion, Stories, Technology, Thoughts, Travel, Wine/11 | Comments Off

A toast to the downfall of Lehman brothers,

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

As a wine drinker and wine lover it has been hard not to be rather cheered up by the images of Lehman Brothers employees walking out of their office with boxes in hand shouting trite like ‘you’re watching history, man’ at journalists. Call this bitter, jealous or misunderstood – but is wine not about sour grapes? And if it’s true that wine is sour grapes then it is also true that it is sour grapes that become more palatable over time, and like my seemingly cynical cheer at the demise of City bankers such an opinion will also become more palatable over time. The reason I believe this is because of one thing that society has temporarily forgotten: value.

(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Art, Business, Culture, Events, Lifestyle, News, Passion, Wine, Wine Review | View Comments

Wine Proof Pants

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

On a recent trip to the Benicassim Festival in Spain, I purchased a pair of quick-dry camping pants from Titanium for the trip. Walking to outside the festival grounds and sitting on our back-packs whilst waiting for the campsite to open, we took the opportunity to crack a bottle of Rioja we’d got on RENFE (a quick note on RENFE – if you’re on the site and can’t select English you need to select the drop-down labelled Seleccione su Idioma to make it so, which means you have to speak Spanish to get the site into English, go figure!)

Red Wine is a perfect libation for festivals – primarily because it doesn’t need to be kept cold; it doesn’t lose its fizz and if you’re drinking wine locally produced its dirt cheap and super-good. Within minutes of popping the cork however I’d managed to spill the Rioja on my new pants and was questioning the merits of wine in a situation where a shower is hard to find… when suddenly, with a splash of from my water bottle – the wine was gone. Brilliant! Wine proof pants – what more could a young millennial wine-lover at a music festival wish for? I reckon marketing the pants specifically as wine-proof and selling it at Bonnaroo could be a good gig.

(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Culture, Events, Lifestyle, Music, Passion, Wine | View Comments

Millennials Prefer Personable Eco-Friendly Brands

Monday, July 21st, 2008

The big brands will destroy the world if left to continue along their current course unchecked.” The future of the world thus depends on the little guy, the independent store and the niche label – and thus whilst the big brand peddling baby-boomers have been the antithesis of what the world needs, the mass label eschewing millennials will save the world.

The crux of the problem lies in what Robert Reich in his book Supercapitalism labels ‘socialised capitalism’: which is ultimately a form of capitalism that allows the rich to get rich with no obligation to share their wealth; and then when the rich go bust (ala Bear Stearns) then socialism kicks in and everyone shares in the losses. The essence of the open-source industry is akin to the blogosphere in that it is a platform upon which ideas are shared with no restriction. Ultimately, wine shares much in common with this ideology in that its wealth is often shared out along the supply chain more evenly than in say, the motor-industry where practically everyone from the production line workers to the environment gets a raw deal. (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Culture, News, Wine | View Comments

Grape Thinkers

Categories

Archives