Lewis Perdue's Blog, page 38

Wine Snobs Suck!

Snobs suck!

This 1997 episode from San Francisco's Bay TV features wine guy Lewis Perdue (60 pounds heavier than he is now) who believes that wine snobs are a lot worse than the anti-Christ. You don't have to study wine to like it. Hell, you don't have to study Snapple to know what flavor you like. What YOU like is what YOU like.

Pay no attention to those wine snobs behind the curtain.

They're just petty totalitarians who all like the same taste in wine and want you to feel inferior if you don't like their choices. The only thing you need to know about wine appreciation is to drink wine that doesn't suck and to spit out the wine that does.

NOTE: the wine brands seen in the segment have changed since 1997…some good ones now suck and some of the sucky ones are not bad at all. Trust your own taste.

Lew now writes about the wine business at wineindustryinsight.com, about wine drinking at savvytaste.com, about wine and health at french-paradox.net and about the books he's written at lewisperdue.com.

Nada, Nada, Nada: Thoughts on Hemingway & Existential Flames In The Head

I've just reduced my latest manuscript from 144,000 words to 83,000.

And lost nothing at all but fat (the manuscript, not me ….wish editing/writing could be more aerobic).

The editing, and a Facebook conversation with friend Mark York reminded me of Ernest Hemingway, one of the all-time masters of tight, powerful writing.

He wrote terse prose partly because he was a journalist and trained that way.

Partly because he spent so much time outrunning bullets and bulls to bother with flowery writing.

And he  wrote so intensely because he never lost the existential flames in his head.

All his life, he carried the deep sense of angst, the nagging and unknowable doubts about why we're here, what it all means … stuff most people stash away in the back of the emotional closet.

Bus as we all know, Hemingway got too close to that heat in his head and it finally killed him.

I think that anyone who has read the following from "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" and truly paid attention to the meaning, knew why he died on the business end of a .12-gauge.

What did he fear?

It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.

Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y naday pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.

Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.

Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

Some of us live in it and never feel it. He felt it too intensely.

Forget Nukes: Coal-Fired Power Plants Can Emit 4X The Radioactivity of Three-Mile Island

Forget about being hysterical about Fukushima.

The average coal-fired power plant can continually emit four times the radiation as Three Mile Island.

How's that possible? Because low-sulfur coal use in coal-fired plants contains thorium: a radioactive element that is released when the coal is burned.

What's more, the particles containing the thorium are among those most likely to escape pollution controls and are the perfect size for lodging in the lungs of those who inhale them.

I wrote an award-winning investigative article on this issue some three decades ago. The article, based on numerous expert interviews including scientists at CalTech, UC Davis and other institutions — was instrumental in California's denial of permits for new coal plants.

So, before anyone gets freaked about the minuscule amounts reaching the U.S. from the Fukushima reactors, they might want to take another look at something closer to home.

Now, I'm not an anti-nuke kinda guy. I spent the summer of 1966 working for Westinghouse in Elmira New York where I calibrated neutron counters that went in both commercial and military reactors (nuclear subs, aircraft carriers and a few guided missile cruisers from that era).

But this may be some interesting perspective.

Thought you might want to know.

Zaibatsu: The Big Money Conspiracy That Brought Down The Global Economy To Make Billions In Profits

Is 2011′s Great Recession: An accident, or a well-planned global conspiracy?

The research behind  Zaibatsu suggests that the financial collapse was part of a diabolical plan and that it was no accident that the same megabanks, billionaires and financial manipulators who caused the disaster were the first to recover and are now bigger, fatter and greedier than ever before.

Zaibatsu, originally published by Worldwide Library in 1985, was developed with the cunning covert, cooperation of three highly successful international securities professionals. With their help, Lewis Perdue wrote a book that book accurately predicted the economic crash of 1987 and asserted that most of the same conspirators would create today's Great Recession.

Why a novel? Zaibatsu's facts and detailed research were woven into a novel for two important reasons:

1. When billions are at stake, naming the big names and their global felonies is a short-cut to the grave, financial ruin or both.

2. More people read novels than dry financial exposés.

FACT? FICTION? Read it and you decide.