The LA Times is shocked to find out that UC Berkeley is no longer the daily hotbed of campus protest that it was in the 60s and early 70s. I guess that's what happens when you fill up a university with grade-obsessed engineers and premed students who have too much homework to spend time at protests! They go to Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, and find only a few quiet tables for student groups like the Cal Snowboard Club and the campus 'personality' we called "The Yeshua Guy" (Rick Starr, another perennial campus fixture when I was a student, apparently 'retired' several years ago, to the relief of Sproul Hall office workers and female students everywhere).
(Yes, you have to register to read articles on latimes.com, but you could always get a username and password from bugmenot.)
Shelby's parents got their most recent issue of Wine Spectator a few days ago. The cover story was "A Beginner's Guide to Wine Collecting: Advice for Every Taste And Price Range". I thought "hey, that could be news we could use", and started reading, but my brain pretty much shut off by the third paragraph:
To that end, we've set some realistic parameters to help you get started. A budget of $10,000 will allow you to make a strong commitment to wine collecting. Bearing in mind that your collection cannot take shape without proper storage, $2,000 is allocated for building a small cellar or buying a stand-alone unit that can hold up to 250 bottles. That leaves $8,000 to stock the cellar.
$10,000! I guess that we've still got a ways to go before the cognoscenti can even consider us to be 'novices'. But then again, if you're a Wine Spectator subscriber, your normal day-to-day wine consumption is probably above the level of what most laypeople would consider to be "collecting" ...
Posted by Kevin at October 2, 2004 10:26 AM