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Greensboro Custom Closets
Greensboro Custom Closets
Closet & Storage Concepts serving Greensboro, NC and the surrounding area designs, creates and installs custom closet solutions for all areas of the home. A new custom closet can elevate the organization of any bedroom, mudroom, pantry, living room, home office or garage, and we can help you find the perfect solution for you needs. We build our custom closets based on your needs and work within the space given, so your closet is always built exactly the way you want.
Custom closets are important because the key to staying organized is having a place for everything. When you design your closet yourself, all of your things have a place, and this eliminates clutter down the road. Often closets become disorganized because they are stuffed with outdated toys & games, out-of-season clothing, or little-used sports equipment. Depending on the items you need to store, of shelves, hooks, tabletops, hangers and any other storage method that would be useful.
If you need to get organized, contact Closet & Storage Concepts of North Carolina to learn more information or schedule a free in-home estimate. Our experienced staff can handle any storage project regardless of the room, space, or size available. So if you need custom closets in the Greensboro area, give us a call today and start yourself on the road to a more organized life!
Our Location
Serving North & South Carolina
Closet & Storage Concepts Showroom/Factory
What Our Customers are Saying...
During construction of an additional room (22'x8') for additional closet space I desperately needed, contacted CLOSET & STORAGE CONCEPTS for a quote and assistance with designing a proficient system for the use of this space. This was for seasonal clothing, shoes/boots, linens, blankets and everyday overflow (i.e., luggage, pet carrier, sewing machine, coolers, etc...) I visited the showroom without an apppointment, was kindly greeted and was immediately introduced to the showroom. At that point was able to view different lines and finishes. Without being overwhelmed with sales people was approached by a designer (Jenny Dabbs). Very comfortable in the surroundings, was asked general questions about the appllication I was there for and she went to work with a graph pad and pencil, drawing out a scheme applicable for my needs and a start to what I needed. This was all new to me and a very nice and accomplishing experience. I was treated with kindness and respect. After the initial visit and design which was a dual effort between myself and my designer (Jenny Dabbs), I must have made at least 4 different changes to that design. Every re-deisgn I introduced was given a welcome response. We communicated via phone, email, cell, sms, and each time my changes were welcomed and given immediate response. I made a final decision on the design and it was submitted for production. I was offered an installation date at my convenience... and on that day they arrived with everything they needed for a complete installation. The installers arrived promptly, introduced themselves, explained the process of their work. They were professional; covered my floors and carpet with canves and were respectful of my home. Also, they were very flexible with my suggestions on the shelving being adjusted. This was an absolutely great experience, from start to finish. The company was more cost effecient than the competitors and I was treated withe professionalism and respect throughout the entire process. Highly recommend this company for your storage needs. This system cost me less than what the cost figured from the systems offered at both LOWES & HOME DEPOT, AND they were more cost effective than their competitors. The quality of this cabinetry is more attractive and gives my home a better value.
- BJ~Angie's List Member
Jen and Andrew McCartney fell in love with their Simonini-built home in south Charlotte's Ballantyne Country Club. But having customized storage areas was important to the couple, parents of two young children. "It's important to me to be organized, said Jen. "I like things neat and tidy. They would purchase the home if the work could be completed before the family moved in. Todd Spires of Siminoni Builders knew who to call. He had worked with Closet and Storage Concepts before. He knew they could be relied upon to do quality work and to get the job done on time. "As a builder I have a lot of responsibility and other things to do, " said Todd "The people at Closet and Storage Concepts took charge and met my customer's needs.
- Jen and Andrew McCartney
Of the closet organization companies we had contact with, your company was the best from the people we dealt with to the design itself. We made the right decision.
I had a wonderful customer service experience and I will recommend your company to others.
What an absolutely professional and impressive team!
I love my new closet. What a difference it makes.
This has been a great experience. Your people are great and the product is super.
We are very pleased and would recommend Closet & Storage Concepts to anyone.
Our designer took in everything we talked about and the price was very reasonable.
It's evident that you care about your customers. Your staff is extremely pleasant and courteous.
The installers where very professional and courteous.
I love my desk. I will use your company again and recommend you to our friends.
Closet & Storage Concepts


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My new favorite cook book is one that has been sitting on my shelf, untouched for months; Bundt Cake Bliss. This wonderful book escaped my attention for so long due to the fact it contains no pictures (I'm a massive child at heart), and I do believe that all cookbooks should contain at least a few mouth watering images; it gives us something to aim for, something to compare our results. Despite its lack of visual aids this book is a dream to read. Starting with the history of the bundt before explaining all you need to know about preparing the tin and baking these unusual cakes all wrapped up in a delightful 50's style package. But despite it's aesthetic appeal, this poor gem has sat gathering dust till Kris dragged me on a shopping trip to search for some black photo frames for the studio's ever depleting stock.
I'm not sure if TK Maxx is a nationwide store, but if it is, I would certainly recommend it to you, dear reader. It's a veritable treasure trove of kitcheny goodness and not only that, but it's oh so cheap! (I picked up a 4 pack of Lindt 70% chocolate for £2.50, that's reason enough to go!!) It's always my first stop for cake tins and such, perfect credit crunch shopping. While Kris was digging through the mountain of photo frames the store carries, I was left to browse the kitchenware department without the reluctant sighs of my lovely fiance, hurrah! Elbows deep in cake tins of all sizes, I discovered something I not only didn't own, but desperately wanted, a bundt tin. Not only this, but the base unit, which I had no intention of using, was severely dented allowing me to wangle and extra 25% off the already low low price. Happy and content I trotted home with my £2.99 bargain under my arm.
As I mentioned before, the credit crunch is having a major effect on every ones life in good old England. Because of this, trips into Newcastle's famous nightlife have pretty much ground to a halt, I'm lucky if I get out once a month these days. Not to let the lack of available funds get me down I dragged our very best friends to indulge in a night of baking and a mass of pear cider we recently acquired from Ikea. Who needs to go out when you have a lovely warm house and enough booze to sink a small ship?! Obviously, the girls baked while the boys shot each other on the Xbox before settling down to munch on our drunken efforts. And, they weren't half bad, considering....
If we neglect the hideous, quasimodo-esqe bulge I was forced to trim from the base that is ;)
Recipe adapted from Bundt Cake Bliss!
400g caster sugar
375g plain flour
225g unsalted butter
225g milk
4 eggs, beaten
2tsp baking powder
zest of 3 lemons
1tbsp juice from a lemon
around 150g icing sugar (I didn't bother measuring, just threw it in a bowl and got to it)
Preheat oven to 180C/160C gas then prepare your bundt tin with butter and flour. Cream butter, sugar and lemon zest till light and creamy.
Add eggs one at a time beating hard after each addition, be careful not to let the mixture curdle.
Alternate the flour, baking powder and milk a little at a time mixing after each addition till just combined.
Spoon mixture into tin and level with the back of a teaspoon. Bake in the preheated oven for 1hr/1hr 10 mins or until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean.
Allow to sit in tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a cooling rack and leave till completely cool then drizzle over the glaze and dust with a light sprinkling of icing sugar.

subset: commoncrawl


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Miranda Hunt, AADP
Locust Valley, New York
A little bit about me:
I am a chef, nutritionist and writer from Long Island, NY. My introduction into natural foods and lifestyle began in May of 1980. I was raised in a macrobiotic household along with my younger brother who was born in his room. As a child, I started cooking for us at the tender age of 11 and 20 years later I am still doing it.
I have a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy & Religion and an additional degree in Nutrition. I am certified by the AADP (American Association of Drugless Practitioners). My nutritional theory is based on paleolithic diets and the teachings of Dr. Weston A. Price.
My Philosophy
I feel that the oldest way is often the best way. I also feel that we have been riddled with more sickness the further we get away from our primal roots. Simplicity is best. A return to basics often produces grand results.
My intention is to educate and illuminate others on how to live a primal yet luxurious lifestyle; to be a primal princess. My goal is to help others live a natural life rich with passion and sensuality. Being healthy and sexy can coexist without sacrificing comfort.
Miranda Hunt, AADP
Send Email
Telephone: (516) 662-5176
97 Valley Avenue
Locust Valley, NY 11560


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Big Sean - Ashley
Artist: Big Sean
Featuring: Miguel
Producer: Million $ Mano, No I.D.
Album: Hall of Fame
Avg Rating: 4.1 ( 8 votes )
I could say that Ashley (off Big Sean's 2013 album Hall Of Fame) is just now getting the visual treatment, but that just wouldn't do it justice. It is more accurate to say its gets the cinematic treatment, because the Ellis Bhal-directed visuals read more like an action thriller…mixed in with some BET Uncut. A break up hurts, so it's only fitting that as Sean recounts his relations with his ex as he is getting jumped, kidnapped, smashed with a bat and forced to dig his own grave; all equally painful. In between some introspective, passionate verses, Miguel belts out a powerful hook that seems to glide atop Million $ Mano and No I.D's swooning, hazy beat. If you want more Sean and already have Hall Of Fame, be sure to check out his 1st Quarter [Freestyle], a freebie released earlier this week.
Big SeanMiguel Music VideosHitmaker
Written by Lucas G. on 01/31/14
Submit your Rating
G.O.O.D./Island Def Jam
First DJ Booth Appearance:
"Billionaire" (2008)
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DJBooth TV
Discover the best new songs, videos, and albums added to the Booth.


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This is an all-natural, chemical-free alternative that cleans your hair, but doesn't strip it of its natural oils like most shampoos. All of the ingredients can be founds in natural foods stores. If your hair is exceptionally oily, you might want to replace the jojoba oil with rosemary essential oil.
- 8 ounces distilled water
- 1 ounce herbs (choose from combinations below)
- 3 ounces liquid castile soap
- 1/4 teaspoon jojoba oil
- 25 drops pure essential oil (choose from this list)
1.) Bring the water to a boil. Add the herbs, cover, and let simmer over low heat for 15-20 minutes. Strain and cool.
2.) Slowly add the castile soap to the tea, then mix in the jojoba oil and essential oil. Store in a plastic container with a flip-top lid and shake well before using!
Goldie Locks Infusion: For golden highlights, combine 2 parts chamomile, 1 part calendula, 1 part comfrey leaf.
Dark of the Nigh Infusion: To effect dark highlights, try using 2 parts sage leaf, 1 part black walnut hull (chopped), and 1 part comfrey leaf.
Desert Bloom Infusion: This is an excellent formula for dry hair. 1 part calendula flower, 1 part marshmallow root, 1 part nettle leaf.
Rapunzel's Locks Infusion: Bothered by oily hair? Use this astringent recipe. 1 part rosemary leaf, 1 part witch hazel bark (not extract), 1 part yarrow leaf and flower.


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"Public Interest" channels pay for retransmission ... the rates are based on the cost of the transponder space. Satellite carriers must make a certain amount of space available at each satellite location for PI channels. If there are not enough channels willing to pay for the space satellite carriers don't have to meet the quota.
The channels must be non-commercial (no advertising except what is allowed on a non-commercial station) and there can only be one from each provider (unless there are not enough providers to buy all available slots).
DirecTV has it right ... they offer channel space for sale to broadcasters such as INSP. INSP has it right that their programming is free. What INSP has failed to mention (or contradict) is that they paid for that satellite space. They think DirecTV should carry them for free.
INSP needs to pay for the satellite space just like they would pay for any other distribution method.
INSP carries plenty of commercials so there must be some sort of confusion here.


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Downtown San Jose's Best Kept Secret
and Home of
The Tabard Theatre Company
As the resident and managing theatre company, Tabard has created a unique and intimate "Destination" for some of the best live music of all genres and most creative theatre productions, as well as a host of other performing arts events. TOSPS is also available for rent to private, for-profit, and non-profit organizations throughout the year, depending on availability.
More about San Pedro Square
Most Tuesdays, 7pm
Check out the local talent! Theatre on San Pedro Square (TOSPS) presents different musicians each week—
Jazz — Blues — Guitar — Big Band
The admission is FREE! Enjoy the open bar and your favorite—or some new—talent!
|Looking Ahead
|Oct. 28
|Big Band
|Joe Ferrari Big Band
|Nov. 4
|Nov. 11
|Blues Society Bands
|Nov. 18
|West Valley College Jazz Band
|Nov. 25
October 31
The Spook Show
Presented by: The Roughhouse
Are you afraid of SPOOKS? Can you handle TERROR? For one night only, The Roughhouse invites you to an evening of chill-arious sketch comedy. Featuring sights so ghoulishly funny and delightfully macabre, you might just laugh yourself... to death! We DARE you to watch - THE SPOOK SHOW.
November 7–22
Subtitled "A Hamilton, County Album" and inspired by his grandmother's photo album, Mark Harelik looks at his grandparents' experience as Russian Jewish émigrés to Hamilton Texas, in 1909 through 1971, when their legacy included a large family and a prosperous family business. Directed by Cathy Spielberger Cassetta
"A funny play …. The scenes evoke the rural era with the firm-handed clarity of a Jewish Horton Foote…they glow." —USA Today
November 28—December 20
In this delightful and hilarious Christmas classic by Barbara Robinson, a couple struggling to put on a church Christmas pageant is faced with casting the most inventively awful kids in history. You won't believe the mayhem–-and the fun–-when these kids collide with the Christmas story head on! A holiday favorite for the whole family.
"One of the best Christmas stories ever—and certainly one of the funniest."
—The Seattle Times
December 7 Pageant is SOLD OUT
December 13–14
NINETEEN returns with its fabulous, exciting, not-to-be-missed concert of holiday music done Big Band style! Only two performances. Both will surely sell out, so get your tickets now!
James Creer
Kurt Gravenhorst
January 30—February 22
The autobiographical story of Mitch Albom, an accomplished journalist driven solely by his career, and Morrie Schwartz, his former college professor. Sixteen years after graduation, Mitch is reunited with Morrie, and what starts as a simple visit turns into a weekly pilgrimage and a last class in the meaning of life. Starring James Creer as Mitch Albom and directed by Doug Baird.
"A touching, life-affirming, deeply emotional drama with a generous dose of humor." —NY Daily News
"Rewarding. Go see it any day of the week." —WOR-AM
April 10—May 3
Written by Brian Crawley and Jeanine Tesori based on The Ugliest Pilgrim by Doris Betts and currently on Broadway, award-winning VIOLET is a powerful story about self-perception filled with energetic, toe-tapping Gospel, Rock, Country, and Rhythm and Blues score and a well-crafted book. Directed by Jay Manley.
"A lovely piece, filled with unexpected details, compassion for its quirky characters and a score that uses southern popular and folk influences with unpredictable sophistication and flair." —Newsday


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MUNSTER | An interventional cardiologist in the Community Healthcare System is using a new treatment option for people who suffer from peripheral arterial disease, or PAD.
Dr. Prakash Makam recently performed the procedure on Lansing resident Sandy Fantin, a longtime hairdresser who developed PAD, which occurs when plaque buildup in the peripheral arteries blocks blood flow.
Symptoms include leg pain and cramps and tissue loss that can lead to limb amputation.
The new treatment, which can be done in an outpatient setting for some patients, implants stents that slowly release a drug to block cell proliferation. It is a minimally invasive procedure.
"Minimally invasive techniques benefit our patients by reducing their procedure time and ultimately getting them back to their normal activities sooner," Makam said. "Drug-eluting stents have been used in the heart arteries for several years with great results so this latest drug-eluting stent for the legs is an exciting milestone in cardiovascular medicine.
"We are making real advances in the treatment of PAD that will lead to fewer amputations and a better quality of life for so many people."


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Hempfest Canceled
Bummer, dude...
Bummer, dude...
POrTland legalized it. Now York?
Miley clearly wants you to know she likes weed.
The internet won't help you find weed.
A new battleground has been announced.
Sign thieves have met their match...maybe.
If you've been carefully rolling up a two-foot joint to spark up in Monument Square in celebration; not so fast.
Pot will still get you into trouble in Portland.
A Montville dude has a totally righteous way of supporting veterans!
Grab six bags of chips, we're going to Portland!!


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that's ron and hermione and the other is harry walking away
Tom: It originally said in the script that Hermione slaps Draco. I think they were worried that a punch was gonna be a little too physical. So I said to Emma, "do you wanna run this? We should rehearse this to make it as convincing as possible. Slap me!" She was like, "no i'm not gonna" and I was like "come on, slap me. Let's do it right now to get the emotions." And when I said slap me I was like "movie slap me."
Emma: I feel terrible. I feel really bad. I'm not really sure what I was thinking.
Tom: She just went 'whush' and just smacked me right across the face. I didn't know what to do. I was like "oh yeah that was really great" and kind of just walked off sheepishly.
I'm guessing this challenge list was made before the release of Deathly Hallows: Part I. However, even if I include the 7th movie, it doesn't make my decision much easier.
I think I have to go with Prisoner of Azkaban, though.
First of all, I love the musical score for this movie. I used to fall asleep to it every night. It also has a lot of amazing things, like…
Aunt Marge…
the Knight Bus…
and of course, Sirius Black.
But beyond that, I feel like this movie had better continuity and transitions (unlike Goblet of Fire)…
…better acting (as the kids got more used to their roles and acting for camera), and better special effects (especially compared to Philosopher's Stone. Er, Sorcerer's Stone. Whatever you want to call it).
Those Dementors were creepy.
When we get into later movies, the screenwriters cut out so many things that I just can't forgive them for. But we'll get into those later in the challenge.
Oh, the other great thing about Prisoner of Azkaban?
We get to make shameless Titanic jokes.
(Go here for the complete Harry Potter 30-Day Challenge)


text: Reservation Specialist back to Job Opportunities Are you able to treat each and every customer as if they are most important customer of the day? If so, this position may be a great fit for you. As Reservation Specialist, you will be one of the first people that our guests interact with. Their experience starts with you. Responsibilities include making reservations and answering questions about our Dolphin Interaction programs, Birthday party packages and School field trips, and ensuring that each customer has a worthwhile experience booking their trip. Our agents must be very knowledgeable about what we have to offer because customers may have numerous questions regarding our Interaction programs, and what we have to offer. If you are ready for a fast-paced, team-oriented atmosphere and have a strong attention to detail, apply for the Reservation Specialist position. DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES• Provide callers with information regarding our interaction programs, birthday party package and School field trips• Book guest in our Reservation system• Data entry, filing• Work along with our Marketing team on special projects QUALIFICATIONS• High school diploma or equivalent• At least 18 years of age• Must be able to work weekends and holidays• Some customer service experience preferred • Bilingual a plus• Strong listening skills• Strong problem-solving skills• Ability to function effectively in high stress situations• Excellent organization skills• Ability to continuously learn and understand changing job-related policies and procedures• People-oriented with a positive and cooperative attitude STARTING PAY$9.00 an hourPart-Time, Winter Season HOW TO APPLY: Fax resumes to 305-365-0075Attn: Reservations PositionOr send email to firstname.lastname@example.com: Reservations Position Qualified applicants will be called to schedule interview. EOE Apply Now


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A Whole New World Lyrics - Kelly Clarkson
I can show you the world,
Shining, shimmering, splendid,
Tell me, princess, now when did
You last let your heart decide?
I can open your eyes,
Take you wonder by wonder,
Over, sideways and under,
On a magic carpet ride
A whole new world,
A new fantastic point of view,
No one to tell us no,
Or where to go,
Or say we're only dreaming
A whole new world,
A dazzling place I never knew,
But when I'm up here,
sponsored linksIt's crystal clear,
That now I'm in a whole new world with you
Now I'm in a whole new world with you
Unbelievable sights,
Indescribable feeling,
Soaring, tumbling, freewheeling,
Through an endless diamond sky
A whole new world
Click here to submit the Corrections of A Whole New World Lyrics
Thanks to leanne for submitting A Whole New World Lyrics.
The following area is only for review, if you want to submit the lyrics or the corrections of the lyrics, please click the link at the end of A Whole New World Lyrics.


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Display the size of the trash prior to emptying | 41 comments | Create New Account
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Display the size of the trash prior to emptying
Maybe that additional line could be changed to...
if amount > 1024 set amount to amount / 1024
To only change to MB if the size is over a MB.
Display the size of the trash prior to emptying
Actually, that additional line should be:
if amount > 1024 then set amount to amount / 1024
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text:
For all people living in Britain it is pretty easy to start watching Eurosport. They just log on to the site at start to watch. But if you are living outside of the UK, I have a great tip to you, so that you can still keep on watching Eurosport with an English Commentary.
You just need the VPN program called overplay. Overplay do however cost 9.95$ per month, but that is nothing compared to all the benefits you get from this world wide. So first get the program overplay, find it here: http://overplay.net
Next you log on to one of the UK servers and when it say it is connected you are almost ready to watch Eurosport.
I have to tell you that Eurosport is not free to cost, but I find it incredible cheap. It only cost 3.99 GPD per month, and from that you get one of the best broadcasting of sport in the genre:
- Tennis
- Snooker
- Cycling
- Cricket
- Moto GP
- Curling
- Equestrianism
- Basketball
So head over to Eurosport and sign up for an account and start to enjoy lots of Live and Video on Demand sport.
Find Eurosport Player here: http://www.eurosportplayer.co.uk/


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Franklin pop-rock superstars Paramore have just unveiled an official live video of the band performing 'Last Hope' at the Chicago date of their recent MOMENTOUR run. You can watch it for yourself below:
Tags: Paramore
Posted in Media, News | No Comments »
Josh Farro, ex-guitarist from the Tennessee pop-rock giants Paramore, has announced that he is in the early stages of recording a new album:
Tags: Josh Farro, Paramore
Posted in News | No Comments »
A YouTube channel, known as 8 Bit Universe, have recently released a chiptune reworking of Paramore's popular single, 'Ain't It Fun', portraying it in an 8-bit Nintendo style. You can give it a listen below:
Tags: 8 Bit Universe, Paramore
Posted in Media, News | No Comments »
Reading/Leeds Festival have released a huge selection of new names for this year's festival weekend, including the heavyweight pairing of Paramore and Queens Of The Stone Age who will co-headline the main stage. You can check out an updated poster and all the new inclusions below:
Tags: A Day To Remember, Bombay Bicycle Club, Deaf Havana, Hacktivist, Leeds Festival, Paramore, Queens Of The Stone Age, Reading Festival
Posted in News | No Comments »
Rock future legends Paramore have unveiled the video for their track 'Ain't It Fun', taken from their self titled album out now via Fueled By Ramen. Check it out below.
Tags: Paramore
Posted in Media, News | No Comments »
Returning for its second year running, our annual Reader Awards is your chance as the reader to cast yout votes and opinions and to let us all know exactly what has been so great for you in the world of music these past 12 months. It was also a chance for those of you in bands, labels and live music venues to get your fanbase to let us know just why we should all take notice of you.
We asked you what you feel have been the best releases, most noteworthy bands, notable record labels, the best venues the UK has to offer and even to help give us all a heads up into what are going to be some notable names throughout 2014,
Now, the results for this year have been compiled and are all listed with the top five results based on the amount of votes received below. Remember, if you're not happy with the results, they are all down to what you readers have provided us. If you didn't take part too, you have only yourself to blame. Feel free to discuss and let us know your thoughts in the comments below:
Tags: Bring Me The Horizon, Destroy Everything, Download Festival, Forever Can Wait, Paramore, The Word Alive
Posted in Features, News | No Comments »
It goes withouthout saying that 2013 has been a fantastic year for music. These 12 months have brought us fantastic albums, coming from established bands, debuts from up-and-comers and also a few brilliant comeback records from our recently reunited favourites. Indeed, with so many great releases being fired out throughout the year, boiling this down to the 10 absolute best is nothing short of a challenge.
However, we put our thinking caps on, knuckled down, pulled all of our opinions together and managed to finalise what are our top 10 albums of 2013. Take a look below at what we thought has made 2013 such a fantastic year for music and undoubtedly has made it an arduous task for whatever 2014 has in store for us to even match up to, nevermind top:
Tags: A Day To Remember, Arctic Monkeys, Bring Me The Horizon, Jamie Lenman, Letlive, Palm Reader, Paramore, The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Wonder Years, Touché Amoré
Posted in Features, News | No Comments »
Mancunian pop-rockers Leopards have just released a video of them covering Paramore's 'Ain't It Fun'. You can stream and check it out below:
Tags: Leopards, Paramore
Posted in Media, News | No Comments »
Pop rock heroes Paramore have released the video for their track 'Daydreaming'. Check it out below. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Paramore
Posted in Media, News | No Comments »
Paramore took the world by storm when they released their critically acclaimed second album, 'Riot!'. Suddenly, this small Tennessee band was on everyone's lips and have been getting bigger and bigger ever since. Frontwoman Hayley Williams went from the girl next door to the girl on the cover of Kerrang! and many more music magazines alike. Now, they're on sell-out arena tours and featuring in the charts on a regular basis, and it doesn't look like their fame is going anywhere anytime soon.
Tags: Flyleaf, Paramore, So You Like, The Dollyrots, Tonight Alive, VersaEmerge, We Are The In Crowd
Posted in Features | No Comments »
Date: September 2nd, 2013
Venue: The O2, Dublin
Support: Walking On Cars
Website: www.paramore.net
Facebook: www.facebook.com/paramore
Twitter: www.twitter.com/paramore
Many thought that following the huge drama generated from the departure of the Farro brothers, undeniably the band's biggest hiccup in their career to date, that pop-punk favourites Paramore held an uncertain future. Some even felt that this could well be the end of their lifespan as we know it. However, this year saw the release of their self-titled album, and now the trio are back at Dublin's The O2.
Tags: Paramore, Walking On Cars
Posted in Live | Comments Off
Pop-punk trio Paramore have just released an animated video to accompany their brand new single, 'Anklebiters'. You can stream and watch the full video below:
Tags: Paramore
Posted in Media, News | No Comments »


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362 days since the shooting. I had a very productive day, but I also had a weird reaction that I hadn't done in some time. I shrank away when someone touched my left side. I guess I still feel vulnerable even though I almost never feel pain. I hope that's going to go away. With time. In other news, I sold my bike. I had mixed feelings about it. I love riding it, but it reminds me of how i chose not to ride it that day. Also I was too weak to ride it until recently. Now I realized it's taking up a lot of space and I get my exercise from running instead. So I sold it to a stranger who had his stolen the other day. I'm hoping he'll take care of it. It's a good bike. Well worth my investment.
Gary Oldman has a victim complex, and in an interview with Playboy that made the internet explode yesterday, he aligns himself with other casualties of our "all too politically correct" culture, including Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin. He also says the word "nigger," calls Nancy Pelosi "a fucking useless cunt," and reduces Hollywood to "a town that's run by Jews."
Gary, Gary, Gary. Where to begin? Let's start with this: straight white guys wield a disproportionate amount of power in our culture, as they have at least since the idea of a Western world began. What's more, they historically have used that power to perpetrate the most gratuitous kinds of violence, and so it is laughable whenever one of them tries to assume the identity of the oppressed.
I'll say this for Oldman, he's incredibly well spoken. And he is onto something—the P.C. police make life annoying for people with original, imperfect perspectives. But he shits all over his point by pointing to Baldwin and—most inexplicably—Gibson as targets of society's double standard.
"Bill Maher could call someone a fag and get away with it," Oldman told Playboy. "He said to Seth MacFarlane this year, 'I thought you were going to do the Oscars again. Instead they got a lesbian.' He can say something like that. Is that more or less offensive than Alec Baldwin saying to someone in the street, 'You fag'?"
It's less offensive, Gary, much less offensive, because it comes down to a matter of intention. For such an articulate man, Oldman demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the nature of comedy, which—in its purest form—exists to hold privilege accountable. That's why it's difficult for men to make rape jokes, white people to make black jokes, straight people to make gay jokes, etc. Of course it's possible for anyone to joke about anything, but the punch line never should be the oppressed, always the forces that enable oppression. Unless you're an asshole, in which case I suppose it's funny to threaten to bury your girlfriend in a rose garden.
And that's what Oldman seems like, an asshole of the classic variety. He uses comics like Maher and John Stewart as a counterpoint for Baldwin and Gibson—neither of whom were brought to task for things they said in jest, mind you—and it's telling that the examples he cites on both sides are middle-aged white guys with chips on their shoulders. It's borderline narcissistic, if not outright racist, and implicit to his appeals is the idea that people who look and sound like Oldman are under attack from the other.
Ultimately, there's a cowardice about Oldman that renders him more pathetic than anything else. He uses Baldwin and Gibson as conduits for his own fucked-up worldview, effectively insuring himself against the critics he knew would come calling. He never calls someone a nigger, per se, but merely wonders whether the Jewish officer who arrested Gibson the first time hadn't ever said the word himself.
The interview is filled with similar hypothetical race, gender and faith baiting. In the end, Oldman reveals himself to be an insecure good old boy, clinging to the days when white WASPy dudes could express their bigotry with impunity. And he's a hypocrite. Out of one side of his mouth, he expresses disdain for being a movie star; out of the other, he complains (repeatedly) about never having won an Oscar.
Something tells me that, in "a town that's run by Jews," he won't need to clear space on his mantle for any awards in the near future.
© 2014 Tommy Jordan O'Malley
It's been a few months since I wrote here. Working on A Year Above the Influence was a tremendous exercise in self-denial and discipline—two things I'm historically bad at—but in the last few months of 2013, it felt like a friend who asked to crash on my couch for a week and ended up staying a year. By the time it was over, I needed some space, some time to reacquaint myself with the untethered life.
I entered 2014 full of questions. Would I smoke pot again? Would I booze? Would I go crazier than ever and end up in rehab? Would I keep up with any or all of the constraints I'd imposed during 2013? Would I would I would I would I would I… the overwhelming unknowns were driving me crazy. I became incredibly self-conscious about the choices I made, and so I stopped writing about them.
I took six months just to live, to let things happen without the pressure of a blog. People have asked me when I'd be writing here again—and most of those people wanted to know specifically about The Nancy Diaries (the grand finale is coming, I promise). At first my answer to that question was, "Next week." But next weeks came and went, and I realized I just wasn't ready, as counterproductive as that was to growing an audience. Eventually my answer became "I'm going to finish it soon." And now here we are.
And more to the point, here I am, ready to answer your questions. To start, I've done pretty much everything since the year began: drank booze (and gotten drunk 5 or 6 times since January), smoked pot with friends (man I love it, but that shit is my kryptonite; I cannot—and do not—keep it in my house), eaten lots of sugar (with 3 or so inches added to my waistline thank you very much) and introduced dairy & fried foods to my diet again. I haven't done other drugs, but that wasn't really a thing for me before the year started anyway.
I had my first hangover recently. I drank whiskey and then stayed out til 4 a.m., smoking a blunt on a rooftop in Bushwick with friends. The skyline from those warehouses east of Manhattan is the sorta thing I dreamed about when I was kid growing up in Boston, wondering what it would be like to live in the big city someday.
Now I know—it's pretty fucking awesome, even when you're broke and figuring things out. New York is the best city in the world. And that's why being hungover was so awful. I felt like I was going to vomit until about 5 p.m. the following day, and even though I left the house, I couldn't see anything around me. I had to keep ducking into coffee shops to sit and drink water. All I could think was, "What am I missing because of this?" I enjoy being out of control, but not that out of control.
I've maintained lots of healthy habits, as well. I consume gobs of salads and green juices and fruit smoothies. And I run regularly, distances totaling about 20 miles per week. I've scaled back the long runs, because I don't want to have a knee or hip replacement in my 40s. Running the Austin Marathon in February was one of the best experiences of my life, but the training really brought me to my limits. That said, I'm always going to push my limits, and trust that I will run more marathons in the future. Hoping to do Boston in 2015, in fact.
I'm not good at saying no to myself, and not just in the sense that I have a hard time doing it. I'm not my best self when I'm in a state of prolonged deprivation—I learned that last year. By October, I'd become so rigid, so regimented, that I'd completely stopped experiencing joy as a primary emotion. The psychological toll of telling myself "no," "can't," "shouldn't," "won't" was such that I couldn't embrace the things that I was allowed to do. Everything became a chore, a task, something I had to meet with success or failure. The stakes were too high, and I collapsed under the pressure. What's more, I became incredible judgmental of other people's choices, and tension mounted accordingly in some of my relationships.
In the end, I'm glad I did it. I'm happy I took a year to be healthier that I'd ever been, to clear my head, and to give myself a benchmark against which to measure choices I make for the rest of my life. Do I feel guilty now when I smoke pot or have a glass of wine or eat a bowl of ice cream? A little bit, to be honest. But I'm happy to feel that, because it keeps me in check. And more importantly, it's better than feeling like the uptight asshole I became toward the end of 2013.
© 2014 Tommy Jordan O'Malley
I'm done.
Last week it was Gawker's disgusting article on the woman with the 7 foot wide ass.
Every day this week, one of the big three (Gawker, Jezebel, HuffPo) have been rolling out articles on women's bodies, the photoshopping of women on magazine covers.
One article after the other that…
Feeling the fuck out of this.
A sort of postpartum depression has impressed itself on me since the new year began. I spent all of 2013 testing my limits, and then at midnight on January 1st, it was all over. The first thought that entered my mind in 2014: "What was the point of all that?"
To begin, it's difficult to talk about Year Above the Influence without talking about Lester Brathwaite. He and I started this blog as a collaboration, the idea being that we two trash bags would document our experiment and finish the year with a book deal in hand. Well you know know what they say about the best laid plans.
Lester relapsed for the first time in February. From there, his use of drugs and alcohol escalated. When, in April, he decided to walk away from the blog, I wasn't surprised, but I was hurt. I suddenly had to manage the blog on my own, and I resented that.
I judged Lester's substance use, what I saw as his unwillingness to commit. I couldn't empathize with his situation—we said we were going to do something, so why weren't we both doing it?—and that put a strain on our relationship. With time, I accepted that my frustration wasn't with Lester so much as it was with myself. His relapses held up a mirror to my own behavior. I had to question why I wanted to take a break from alcohol and drugs in the first place. Was I an addict? Did I have a problem? Was I one of those people?
Although I go to extremes in lots ways, I am not an addict. I am not powerless over substances, and I rather prefer being sober to being fucked up. That doesn't mean I'm never going to get drunk or do drugs again. If I want to, I will, but at the moment, it's not something I'm particularly interested in. I do believe that alcohol and drugs can fuel the creative process, and so I will always indulge when I feel my tank tipping toward empty. As surely as there is value in moderation, there is value in altering the state of an artistic mind.
All of that said, I do have problems, bundles of them. But I'm working on solutions. Every time I talk to my therapist, or go for a run, or mail a check to some other creditor, or hug my mother, or kiss my boyfriend, or visit the dentist, I'm doing what I can to clean up the mess I made for myself in my 20s.
Have I fixed anything? Well, I'm in a better place at the start of 2014 than I was one year ago. Physically, I've never felt better, what with the good eats and marathon training.
Financially, I'm better off than I've ever been—even if living in New York makes it damn near impossible to save a dime. (I can't even talk about that asshole Sallie Mae, who wants nearly $700 from me every month.)
Professionally, I've made strides toward securing a future beyond bartending, which is a major relief. I was terrified I would end up trapped in restaurant jobs for the rest of my life.
And on a spiritual/emotional level, I continue to chip away at all the bullshit that made me the angry Irishman I am today. Therapy helps, but to be honest, sometimes I wonder if there is a permanent solution to my temper, short of zapping my brain with electricity. I fear I'm hardwired to be a hot head.
One thing I know for sure is that I am not someone who does well without a sense of purpose, a measurable outcome. In taking away all of my vices in 2013, I gave myself lots to write about. But now it's the new year, and what's my next step?
Could I write about my reentry into the world of wine and cake and French fries? Sure, and to some extent, I will do that. But I've spent the past 365 days talking about myself—unleashing my happiest and most shameful memories on the internet—and I'm tired. And frankly, I'm bored with myself. I need something new, something beyond my story, but first I have to celebrate and mourn my completion of this project.
Everything I did in 2013 was for myself. I needed to hit the reset button, to reclaim the focus and drive that escaped me after college. And so—as is my custom—I sought the most extreme route and took it. Writing the blog made me accountable to an audience and kept me on track. But it also gave me a space to test my material safely and without external influence. Some things worked very well (I'm especially fond of the stories I wrote about my three arrests), and others fell flat. In the end, I realize that I need someone to edit my work, to tailor my perspective to a more general audience. Sometimes my ego gets in the way of what I'm trying to say.
A bunch of people have reached out to me to say congratulations and express their pride in what I've accomplished. Don't misunderstand me; it means a lot to be loved and validated, but I have to admit, it all feels unearned. I mean, it's not like I got a new degree or built a house or eradicated the common cold. I engaged in some old-fashioned healthy living, and that's a frankly selfish pursuit.
The number one question I got as the year drew to a close was, "Are you going to drink after the ball drops?" The answer is yes, I had a glass of wine at midnight. A 1981 Bordeaux, which was in excellent shape, if perhaps a bit aggressive for my first taste of alcohol in 12 months. Truth be told, it got me pretty tipsy, and I didn't appreciate the sensation. I've gotten used to being in control, and it's not something I'm eager to surrender. I'm gun shy, but I'll find a way that works for me.
Sugar is what I've been abusing. At midnight on the 1st, I went to town on a half dozen pignoli cookies from Montelleone's Italian bakery in Brooklyn. The following two mornings, I ate cookies and brownies for breakfast. Then I threw away all of the sweets in my apartment. If I have it, I'll eat it, and so sugary treats remain verboten in my house. It's a strange feeling to walk down the ice cream aisle and tell myself "no" when "yes" is once again an option. But exercising self-control with food is not the easiest thing for me.
In terms of dietary changes, I've had yogurt and fruit every morning, but apart from that I'm treading lightly with the dairy. I did eat a duck burger smothered in cheese on Friday night, and I dipped the accompanying French fries in mayo (in all, a delicious one-way ticket to diarrhea town). Otherwise, though, I'm craving the staples I adopted last year: apples and peanut butter, homemade granola, green juice with ginger, chicken soup, etc. My body is rejecting things that it wants but shouldn't have, and that's a blessing, a built in system by which to check my bad habits.
At the beginning of this post (which I've been writing for six days now), I talked about feeling depressed. I wrote more than I ever have in 2013, and that has left me with a bit of output fatigue. So although I have a plan to keep building momentum in 2014, I am taking time to enjoy some much-needed input. One of my more successful cousins once said to me, "The best writers are usually the best readers."
I was not the most studious high schooler on the block. If I'm being generous, I'd say that I read maybe 20 percent of the books assigned to me. As a result, I am a woefully under-read 31 year-old. Last year, I picked up The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; I lasted 15 pages before admitting defeat. Totally over my head.
This year (and probably several to come), I'm embarking on a quest to read all of the Great Books, starting with Homer (whom I translated from the Latin when I was 12, thank you Boston Latin School). I'm rereading the Iliad at the moment, taking breaks to brush up on the history surrounding the epic. (Tell you what, that Trojan War was some crazy shit. First of all, men kidnapping and raping women left, right and center. Secondly, was everyone in the Bronze Age mentally ill? Because people were hearing voices and then killing one another on the reg.)
Another thing I'm doing this year is putting myself out there. I always talk about telling stories and doing stand-up, but I'm actually going for it. I'll be out four nights per week doing open mics and—the hope is—invited shows. I predict this will be a very good thing for my relationship, as now my boyfriend can watch HGTV without my constant complaining. The only thing I hate more than "House Hunters" is "House Hunters International."
Anyway, I'll keep updating this blog for the next month or so, at least until
I finish the Austin Marathon. I will finish the Nancy Diaries and keep you posted on my life below the influence. Eventually, I'll move everything over to tommyomalley.com, which I'm in the process of building. But my posting certainly will be less regular, as I'll be busy making shit happen in the real world.
In conclusion, thank you for reading this silly little blog. It's been the most fun to write it, even when things got dark or uncomfortably personal. I recommend acknowledging your negative influences and spending some time above them. It's really wonderful to use your free will in that way, to remind yourself that you are in control. Screw anyone or anything that tries to tell you otherwise.
© 2013 Tommy Jordan O'Malley
To everyone who's read this blog throughout the year, thank you for indulging my exhibitionism.
And to those of you who have reached out—publicly and privately—to share your stories and encouragements, you have my deepest gratitude and respect.
This year has taught me a lot about being a person who lives among people. We're all going through our own shit, and if we just focus on that, then we'll make the world a little easier for everyone else. Screw the Joneses, keep up with yourself.
I wish you all a wonderful end to 2013. I'm celebrating by running 15 miles this morning and then going to work. Tonight, my boyfriend and I are hosting 40-something people in our studio apartment in Brooklyn.
I for one am ready for midnight, ready to rejoin the ranks of the free-willed, ready to make choices that will surely give me diarrhea or worse. Having strictly defined my limits all year, I'm eager to test them again. One thing I've learned about myself is that I'm most comfortable when I'm pushing my boundaries.
I'll write a proper reflection on the year in the coming days. But for now, enjoy what's left of 2013, and let's all agree to make 2014 our biggest and baddest yet. Identify a risk and take it—the more it scares you the better—because what's the point of a life parked in neutral?
© 2013 Tommy Jordan O'Malley
Read: Part 22.
Have you ever seen a face plumped with filler and Botox express anger? Imagine a leg buried knee-deep in cement trying to run. It's not going anywhere, but damned if you can't spot the effort from a mile away.
In the instant I defied Nancy, her preserved expression shifted—if ever so slightly—from bemusement to blind rage.
"Why are you trying to destroy me," she yelled at me, her eyes ablaze with the fury that comes from hearing "no" when obedience is expected.
"I'm not try to destroy you," I said. "I just can't quit without stating my reason."
"After everything I've done for you, after all the things I have given you!" She inched closer to me as her volume grew.
"Nancy you are making me very uncomfortable right now."
"I am making you uncomfortable! That's really something, with the way you have been holding me hostage with your accusations all week!"
I was shaking, barely conscious of my ability to form complete sentences. And yet, I managed to respond to her every delusion. Whether or not I said the right thing… Well you know what they say about hindsight.
"I don't know how to respond to you, Nancy. You don't seem rational."
"You know what," she scoffed, pausing to consider her next move. "This isn't going to work out, this just can't work. How am I supposed to trust you anymore?"
She stopped talking and walked toward me with a purpose that haunts me to this day. Her face was red, sweaty, snarling like a cat who'd been held under water. She was ready to attack, and when she did pounce, it was my computer that she went for.
"This is mine," she yelled, grabbing the $3,000 MacBook I'd purchased for her six months earlier.
"Nancy, I'm in the middle of typing an email." (In fact, I was in the process of emailing myself stories I'd written on her computer—some of which were decidedly NSFW—because I knew where our conversation was headed.)
"Not anymore you're not, you spy!"
"What are you saying, I'm a spy?" I was genuinely confused.
"You are a spy! You took notes about my life and now you're using them against me!"
"Nancy this is not how I want this to play out."
"Well you should've thought about that before you tried to slander me! And you know what! How can you prove anything? All you have is a notebook full of stories you might as well have made up! You think your fabrication will hold up in court? Because trust me, you do not want to come at me in court!"
At that point, I got out my phone and called my lawyer, who happens to be my sister. Nancy saw the phone and again came at me.
"Give me that! I paid for it!"
She grabbed my wrist and tried to pry the phone from my hands.
"Get your hands off of me right now," I demanded, my tone full of fuck you. "You paid my bill, I paid for the phone. You need to step away from me and my property."
Nancy looked scared. She knew she was losing control, and there was nothing she could do to reclaim it. I was a toy that she wasn't allowed to play with any longer, and so she was throwing a tantrum.
"Who are you calling," she demanded.
"My lawyer."
My sister didn't pick up, so I left a curt, professional message and hung up. I couldn't decide what to do next.
"Nancy," I began. "It sounds like you are firing me."
"No no no. You gave notice. You quit on me!"
"I gave notice for six months from now. You are telling me that we can't go forward from today."
"Well I don't see how you expect me to work under these conditions another moment! You're a spy!"
I stayed very calm as I explained, "I moved across the country to work for you. I gave up my life in Boston, and you cannot just cut me loose. I'm happy to leave today, if that's the decision you come to, but I want severance."
"You're trying to extort me. That was your plan all along! You set this entire thing up!"
"We both know that's not true. But in light of your behavior, I agree that this is not a good working relationship anymore. I just want what's fair."
"And what do you think is fair. What's your price, Tommy?"
"I think three months on top of what you owe me for last month is fair." Three months pay amounted to $9,600. She owed me an additional $3,200 for February.
Nancy went into the kitchen and called her scumbag lawyer, Terry. I met him once at a lunch. He spent more time complimenting Nancy's appearance than he did discussing her business.
"He won't put it in writing," she whined to him. "I tried, but now he wants to get severance. He's trying to extort me, Terry. He wants three months pay. This is the worst case. I don't know. I have to see. Ok. Ok. Ok. I'll call you back in a few minutes."
I don't know how to express fully the joy I felt sitting at the dining room table and watching Nancy squirm on the phone with Terry. Even if I never saw a dime of severance from her, having a front row seat to her dissolution was retribution enough for all of her harassment and disrespect.
"Ok, I'm going to pay your extortion," Nancy said. "I don't have a choice. You're blackmailing me and threatening to ruin my name, so I'll pay. But you have to sign a confidentiality agreement. My lawyer is faxing it over now."
My sister called me back as Nancy was speaking. Nancy called her lawyer again while I was on the phone.
"Hi Maureen, I think I'm getting fired," I said.
"He's on the phone with his lawyer right now. Tommy, what's the name of your lawyer?"
"She wants me to sign a confidentiality agreement."
"Tommy I asked you for your lawyer's name," she barked.
"Ok, I gotta go, she's yelling at me right now to find out your name."
I hung up, and I didn't acknowledge Nancy's questions. The one thing my sister said was to get my belongings and leave Nancy's house without signing anything.
"I am going up to the office to get my stuff," I said. "Would you like to follow me to make sure I don't take anything that's not mine."
"No, I don't think you're a thief. I just think you're a spy."
"Whatever Nancy."
I walked into my office, passing Vishna along the way. He'd been frozen on the couch the entire time. I grabbed what few trinkets I had there—a teddy bear my boyfriend sent me for Valentine's Day, my phone charger, etc.—and went back to the dining room.
"You know, you're going to have a really hard time in this life, Tommy," Nancy warned. "You are a nasty person. This entire thing, I see it now, you set it all up to blackmail me."
"I don't need to listen to this, Nancy, you're no longer my employer. You're not paying me to be your friend anymore. I don't have to sit here and accept your attack." A glorious rush surged through my body.
He tone suddenly shifted from sinister to wounded. "I don't know what I ever did to you. All I ever did was give and give and give. I gave you food! I gave you a career! I gave you my HOUSE, which your friends had sex all over! By the way! Don't think for a second that I missed that!"
She'd shifted back to rage. I was silent. She was referring to the going-away party she'd allowed me to throw in her Boston townhouse. The party at which, in fact, two of my ancillary friends had sex on her bed. I couldn't argue with the truth.
She took a moment to collect herself before launching into an aria, the tone of which was melancholy.
"You think you can just manipulate people to get what you want, well that's not the way this works. You forget that I know people. How could I ever recommend you for a job after this, I really don't know. And you're missing out. You played this all wrong, Tommy. You could've stayed with me and learned something about business. I could've introduced you to people that could've taken you to the next level. I see what's happening here, I've seen it so many times before. You come to LA, you get a small taste of Hollywood, and suddenly you think you're part of it, you're better than everything and everyone you knew on the way up. Well I have news for you, you're not better than this job, and you are going to struggle. You're going to end up nowhere if I can help it!"
"I agreed to sign your confidentiality agreement, Nancy, not listen life lessons and threats."
Nancy's mood circled back to rage, just like that. The highs and lows were coming so fast and with such distinction, I felt compelled to applaud. It was a "Rose's Turn" moment, and deep down, I was terrified and living at the same time.
"You can't manipulate me, Tommy," she howled. "You have no proof! All you have is your word, and it means nothing in this world compared to mine! Nothing!!!"
"Actually Nancy, I do have proof. I recorded you and Aaron talking about your sex life in front of me on the ride back from Santa Barbara last month."
"You did that. You recorded me. It all makes sense now. You have been planning this for even longer than I thought. This is what you wanted all along."
She got in my face. I thought she was going to hit me. I was hoping she would.
"You've been out for me from the start! You saw a rich woman you could take advantage of! I see it all now. Well listen to me, it's not going to work. It will not work!"
She waved her finger at my nose. I could smell the green juice on her breath. I decided to leave the building as soon as she did that.
"I'm extremely uncomfortable right now, Nancy. I don't know what you're going to do to me, so for the sake of my safety I'm going to leave. I'll come back later to sign the confidentiality agreement. I'm going to get my stored belongings out of your garage and call a cab to take me home."
"You do what you need to do, Tommy. She glared at me, full of a certainty that suggested she'd reclaimed the upper hand.
With that, I went down to the garage, dragged my boxes out to the driveway, and called a cab. I pulled a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it. I had hidden my smoking habit from Nancy the entire time I worked for her. I hoped that she could see me puffing away on my Parliament Light, because screw her. When I was finished, I flicked the butt at her front door.
While I was waiting for the taxi, my boyfriend called. He was at the airport in New York, about to board his flight to come visit me.
"You're not going to believe what just happen babe," I said to him, as I lit the wrong end of another cigarette.
© 2013 Tommy Jordan O'Malley
I hope everyone reading this had a wonderful Christmas, if it's something that you celebrate. If you don't, then I hope you enjoyed your day off.
As I get older, part of the fun of the holidays is seeing how traditions blend between two families. My bother and his wife hosted Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas morning brunch at their house in the suburbs of Boston. Her family and ours, two groups of people who otherwise might not know one another, now forever bonded over their marriage and three kids.
On Christmas Eve, my mother, sister, boyfriend and I also went to a party at my other sister-in-law's father's house. We all planned to attend the 11 p.m. mass together (the choir was an off-key, unrehearsed nightmare, for the record). But before that, we spent time with my brother's new family. It was a different cast but the same idea as dinner earlier in the evening—a bunch of would-be strangers sharing the holiday because my brother and his wife crossed paths on campus when they were in college.
On Christmas night, after having spent the previous two days running around eastern Massachusetts visiting family, we retired to my mother's house to play board games and have dinner. My boyfriend, who's Jewish, introduced us to a new tradition: ordering Chinese food. (I ate steamed chicken with vegetables, in case you were wondering, and it was terrible. I really wanted the dumplings.)
Just a few years ago, a Christmas like this would've seemed impossible. We're Irish, so naturally some of us weren't speaking to each other for reasons not worth recounting. During those years, I would celebrate the holiday with friends' families. I learned new traditions during that time, such as getting your drink on throughout the day.
One year, I drank a little (waaaay) too much wine at dinner, after which I met up with high school pals at a bar. A few of us ended up going to this guy's house—a guy I knew but hadn't ever really hung out with—and smoking pot. Let's call the guy Matt, because that's his name.
Anyway, a couple of us were obliterated by the time we got to Matt's—me more than anyone, I'm sure—and I took a trip to a bad place. I told Matt that he was a mean guy in high school (he wasn't) and other similarly douchey and untrue things. Eventually my boyfriend threw me in a cab and took me back to Cambridge, where we were staying, before I could embarrass myself further.
I woke up the next morning with a head full of ache and regret. I found my glasses broken—they'd fallen off my face at the bar, and someone stepped on them—and my phone missing. I was in a full-blown panic attack. I called and texted myself from my boyfriend's phone. Eventually someone texted me back to tell me that they had my phone, but they wanted $100 to return it. I was pissed off… until I realized that it was Matt. He was fucking with me, and I deserved it. I eventually got my phone back and lived to survive this tale of self-inflicted humiliation.
One thing that that Christmas did for me is give me a benchmark against which to appreciate all Christmases going forward. It also allowed me to empathize with people who go to the dark side when they drink. I am, by and large, a crazy drunk. I like to get naked, scream in people's faces, and generally just have an happy, NSFW time. But that Christmas, when I was lost in the wilderness of depression, I got a taste of what life would be like for me if I didn't get my head together, if I didn't start taking care of myself, if I didn't reconnect with my family.
I have another friend from high school who often gets dark when he drinks (or at least when he drinks around me; there's a lot of history there, some of which I'm not so proud of). He and I were not the nicest to each other when we were young, and he likes to talk about it whenever he's drunk. I always tried to hear him, to lend a healing ear to his trauma, but one day I got fed up and said, "Hey, that was literally half our lifetimes ago. Can't we just move on from it?" His response was to kiss me and say, "I did that because fuck you and fuck your stupid boyfriend." In trying to hold me accountable for being a teenage dick, he added, "You can't change the past." True that.
The past can be painful for its embarrassments and sadnesses, as well as for the hurt we inflict on others. But taken as a point of reference, it's something that makes the victories of today—sitting around a table with formerly estranged family members, for instance, or sharing a happy moment with someone who's forgiven you a wrong—all the more rewarding and meaningful.
© 2013 Tommy Jordan O'Malley
Monday morning following our phone conversation wasn't the most pleasant for me. Having told Nancy that I felt sexually harassed by her—and having refused to budge when she tried to minimize my complaints—I was trapped between empowerment and dread as I got ready. I didn't know what to expect when I arrived at Nancy's condo.
My walk to work along the beach that morning, which normally took no more than 20 minutes, felt interminable. I ran over potential scenarios in my head. Would Nancy cry when I saw her? Would she yell? Would she want to talk about our conversation from the night before or pretend it never happened? Would she apologize? The suspense made origami out of my gut.
When I finally arrived at Nancy's, I was surprised to find that she was not home. This hadn't been one of the options I'd considered, but I was admittedly relieved. For even though I had rightfully asserted my boundaries the night before, Nancy still wielded a sort of power over me. She was, after all, the person who signed my checks, the reason for my move to California. I wasn't sure I could maintain my resolve and dodge her manipulations when we were face to face.
I went to my office and found a note from her on my desk.
Hi Tommy,
Thank you for addressing your concerns with me. I assure you the things we talked about will be handled and kept in confidence. I hope you are happy working here.
Today is a very hectic day for me. I'm going to be running around, so I probably won't see you. Here is a list of things I need done before Vishna arrives tomorrow afternoon:
Buy groceries
Sync my phone to my computer
Buy me four bikinis from Nordstrom for my photo shoots with Vishna—must be two pieces, and not cut too high or too low. No granny panties, but nothing Girls Gone Wild either. Tasteful.
Pick up Vitamin V prescription from CVS
Find out when the ARCs of my book will be ready at the publisher. Need these ASAP.
Make food for the girls to eat when they get back on Thursday.
Roast veggies for me
Make green juice for the next two weeks.
Edit the two columns I sent you for my blog.
And please, remember to smile today. I'm very glad and grateful for you.
Namaste, your friend,
It was a nice enough effort on her part, but I found myself judging her attempt at reconciliation. I read face-saving motives into her words, which perhaps were or were not intended, and realized that my time with Nancy had surpassed its expiration date. I didn't trust her, and I couldn't imagine working for her for another five days, let alone five months.
About an hour later, I heard Nancy come through the front door and walk into the kitchen. My stomach, which had settled, folded in on itself again. I poked my head out of the office and said, "Is that you Nancy?"
"Oh hi Tommy, I didn't realize you were here. I just got in from a meeting. I'm drinking a quick glass of milk and then heading right back out again. Aaron is coming to pick me up any minute."
Aaron was coming to pick her up. The same Aaron from whom she'd asked me to collect her camera equipment twelve hours earlier. The same Aaron with whom she'd wanted to break up and never speak to again. Apparently they'd made up overnight, a dramatic reversal that brought me to the intersection of boredom and awe. Her behavior was, as ever, predictable and shocking.
"Did you get my note," Nancy asked me.
"Yup, looking at it now."
"Ok good, and you think you can get all that done before Vishna arrives from Prague?"
"Sure thing."
Vishna was the son of Nancy's Czech friend Henni, whom she met when they were teenagers backpacking through India. Henni fell in love with an Indian man, got married, and had a kid. After her husband died, Henni moved back to the Czech Republic with then-teenaged Vishna.
Nancy flew Vishna in from Prague to take promotional pictures for her website. His ticket, which I'd arranged, cost nearly $3,000.
"He's the only one who can really capture my spirit on camera," she'd told me repeatedly, seemingly justifying the expense to fly him across the ocean, although I knew that wasn't the reason for his visit. She once also said, "To be honest, Vishna is kind of sexy. Not in a physical way, on a psychic level. We just get each other. Nothing could ever happen between us, though, can you even imagine? Henni would kill me!"
I imagined that Nancy regularly had imagined something happening between her and Vishna—who was my age, by the way—and it made me wonder if the guy knew what he was getting himself into. There's no such thing as a free trip to Los Angeles.
While Nancy was annotating my to do list from the kitchen, Aaron arrived to pick her up. He honked his horn from out front, which normally would've irritated Nancy—what would her wealthy neighbor's think—but she didn't seem to mind. It broke up the awkward conversation between us.
"That's my ride," she hollered from the foyer. "Thanks for getting everything done today. We'll talk later."
She left as quickly as she'd arrived. We managed to have a full conversation without seeing each other. It was decidedly less stressful than it could've been, at least on my end. The fact that Nancy avoided being in a room with me suggested that she was feeling uncomfortable, perhaps even guilty. And the fact that she was back together with Aaron confirmed that she had, beyond a doubt, lost her damn mind.
I spent Monday checking off items from the list Nancy gave me. I left work at 5 p.m., after receiving a text from Nancy saying that she wouldn't be home until late and that I should get going when I felt good about the progress I'd made.
Vishna's plane was scheduled to land at 4 p.m. on Tuesday. All I had to do before picking him up was buy groceries and bikinis. So, first thing Tuesday morning, I headed to Whole Foods. While there, I got a text from Nancy that said she'd be working in her bedroom and didn't want to be disturbed; she had a headache. When I got to her condo, however, Nancy came into the kitchen, where I was unpacking the bags.
"Hi Tommy," she said, steely and solemn. It was the first time we'd seen each other since she dropped me off at my house on Saturday night. Her eyes were buggy and red. I wanted to vomit everywhere. Nerves.
"Hi Nancy, how are you?"
"I'm fine thanks, just feeling a bit run down from all I've been doing. And I need to be tip top when Vishna gets here, because it will be such a waste if he travels all this way and I don't look my best in the photos."
"That would be a nightmare, for sure."
"I know you have a lot on your plate right now, but I realized we haven't backed up my phone on my computer in a while, and I really need that to get done. I had a panic attack this morning thinking about losing everything I've got on here. That would be totally beyond the pale. Can you take care of that asap?"
"Of course, I can do it right now. Where's your computer?"
"It's on my bed," she said, handing me her phone. "I'm going to make myself some tea and then nap for a few hours."
"Of course, you should rest."
I went down to her room. The phone she'd just given me was open to a text conversation with Aaron that read, "From now on, Tommy is not to know anything about my videos. I only want him to run errands. He's out of everything else, I just can't trust him." I plugged it into her computer.
Nothing with Nancy ever felt coincidental. My immediate thought upon reading the text was, "Thank god." I wanted out of the madhouse, and she was making it very easy for me. At the same time, it pissed me off, the passive aggression, the idea that she couldn't trust me. She played everyone in her life, always portraying herself as the victim.
Here's a true (if tangential) story. Nancy once coauthored a diet book that sold 750,000 (the only book of hers that ever sold more than a few hundred copies). The main writer—the person on whose research the book was based—was a well-known nutritionist M.D. After its publication, Nancy and the doctor stopped speaking. Years after their falling out, Nancy was giving a talk at a women's conference, and she saw the doctor in the audience. She had security remove the doctor, because as she put it, "I didn't know why she was there. Maybe she wanted to kill me. It was terrifying." Later, when we were editing one of her books, Nancy confessed to citing the doctor's research without attribution. "I changed some of the wording from our original book," she told me. "But those are essentially my words. I'm the one who wrote them that way, she just provided the study. I don't want to give her any more credit for my success than she's already claimed."
Anyway, that afternoon, after the phone debacle, I went to Nordstrom and bought four bikinis, as instructed. I sought out the most expensive sets I could find, in part because they were fabulous, and in part because I didn't care to bargain hunt for someone with whom I knew my days were numbered.
When I showed Nancy the bathing suits, she squealed. She loved them, as she loved all of her gifts to herself. "You really have a knack for shopping for me, Tommy," she enthused. "No one else has ever just gotten my style like you!"
Her praise fell on deaf ears. My contempt for her swelled, as the anxiety I once felt in her presence shifted irreversibly to disdain. I didn't believe a word she said, and I knew, right then, that she didn't either.
Nancy went into her room to try on the bathing suits. She smartly spared me a fashion show. She did, however, open the door three separate times to tell me how great she looked. I considered that she might be trying to taunt me, to test my limits and let me know who was boss in our relationship. Then I thought better of it and realized that she was just genuinely ignorant of other people's boundaries.
I left shortly thereafter to pick up Vishna. It took him more than an hour to get through customs, and by the time we got back to Nancy's, it was nearly 6 p.m.
"You can take the rest of the afternoon off, Tommy," Nancy told me, ignorant of the hour. "Vishna and I need to catch up."
I said my thanks and headed home. The following day—Wednesday—was a big day for me. It was to be my last day really working for the week. My boyfriend was flying in from New York in the evening. He and I planned to drive to Santa Barbara to pick up Nancy's dogs on Thursday. She'd left them with her former housekeeper during our Seattle trip.
We never made it to Santa Barbara.
On Wednesday morning, I arrived at work at my usual time, 9 a.m. Nancy already was dressed and organizing things in the office. I worked from the dining room table, so that we weren't crammed into the same room. At about 11 a.m., she went into the kitchen to grab a glass of milk. On her way back to the office, she casually mentioned, "By the way, Tommy, I need you to put in writing the exact date that you want to stop working for me. If you could do that now, I'd really appreciate it."
A fire ignited in my stomach, and in an instant my entire body got warm. I could feel my face getting red. The sweat in my throat made it difficult to speak, but I managed.
"Ok. But you understand that I'm not quitting by choice. I told you I can't work for you because of what we talked about."
Vishna was in the other room, and I tried to be discreet. But Nancy kept the conversation going. I assumed she'd already provided him with a skewed account of the situation anyway.
"I know, Tommy," she said, her tone taking a right turn toward agitation. "But I just need the date in writing and nothing else."
"Why do you need that," I asked, understanding that she was trying to get me to quit, but not knowing enough to comprehend what the legal impact would be.
"It's just for my records."
I called her bluff. "Ok then, I'll write it. But I have to include the reason I'm quitting—that you have been sexually harassing me, and that I reported it to you on Sunday—in anything I write."
If you ever want to see a narcissist explode, just back them into a corner with the truth. I couldn't believe I said it to her, but as soon as I did, I finally saw the rage that I'd suspected lived beneath the plastic veneer. In that moment, Nancy went boom.
© 2013 Tommy Jordan O'Malley
"Junk Food Junkie" by Larry Groce. AKA my worst fear of where I'll end up in a month.


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Putting a Local Face on the Nation's Fast Food Debate
The fast food strike has hit at least seven states; local employees and customers respond
Damien Davis works full time, but he knows he's going to have to start looking for a second job any day now. He works at the West 4th Street McDonald's and is one of the thousands of the city's fast food workers who are facing the prospect of not making ends meet even after putting in their 40 hours every week.
Last week, fast food workers throughout New York City — and the country — were walking off the job to demand an end to abusive workplace practices as well as a $15 minimum wage and the right to unionize without retaliation.
Workers at fast food restaurants including Burger King, McDonald's, Wendy's, KFC, Domino's, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Papa John's have the support of national and local elected leaders, as well as organizations like Fast Food Forward, which have helped spur the movement and encouraged ongoing negotiations.
According to Jonathan Westin, Campaign Director for Fast Food Forward, raising the minimum wage for these workers will be a winning situation for everyone.
"If they have more money in their pockets, they'll spend it right here," explained Westin, "helping to boost the entire economy."
At the W. 4th St. McDonald's, 20-year-old Davis was listening to music while taking out the trash. A slight man with a boyish grin, Davis said he was not allowed to talk on the job but paused to answer a few questions and greet a regular.
Davis, a resident of Brooklyn, said he did not participate in the strike, though he works at McDonald's full-time and does not make enough to support himself. When Our Town Downtown asked Davis if he has another job, he smiled and responded, "not yet."
Fatima Lucky works full-time at the Wendy's at 650 Broadway and also lives in Brooklyn. Unlike Davis, Lucky participated in the strikes and said the reception seemed positive.
Lucky said she does not make enough at Wendy's to survive and is currently looking for other jobs.
Lucky is skeptical about the movement's success though.
"It's sad because [the fast food companies] make billions a year and they cannot even give us a one dollar raise," said Lucky.
Carlos Vinales, 24, works full-time at Popeye's on Delancey and, while Popeye's is not one of the participating restaurants in the protests, Vinales said he does not believe the $7.25 he currently makes an hour will be enough to survive. Vinales lives in public housing off FDR Drive.
While he just started at Popeye's, Vinales continues to work a maintenance job in his off hours.
Given the opportunity, Vinales said he "probably would strike."
At a Burger King on Delancey and Suffolk, employees refused to answer any questions about the strikes.
Many news outlets have noted increasing the minimum wage for fast food workers could ultimately result in more expensive dining options at those restaurants. Would that make a difference for consumers?
It's difficult to say, but Sarah King, Jenny McGrath and Annite Forte, all 22, who were dining at the W. 4th St. McDonald's said a price hike and its impact on their choices would ultimately depend on the restaurant.
"It's known to be cheap, that's the advantage, that's why we go to McDonalds," said King. "I don't think I'd eat there if it were more expensive."
Tags: Our Town, Our Town Downtown
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Find records of William Robertson
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William W Robertson's last known residence is at Auburn, Placer County, California.
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Simplest marketing question may be the most difficult
Jun 6th
By Jeffrey Slater, {grow} Community Member
There is a simple question I ask almost every day about any new marketing project I work on with my team. It seems so simple but in reality it can be an organization's most critical struggle:
How will we measure success?
Not only will I ask my marketing team this question but I also check in with other departments such as sales, finance, and IT. I want to know what it would look like to them if a marketing effort worked. How will we know to do more or stop doing it at the end of a certain period of time? How would they judge this as worthwhile? Before jumping into tactics, we need to have a very clear agreement on success.
Gary Vaynerchuk the social media guru and owner of Wine Library spoke at a conference I organized in Napa Valley about two years ago for the wine marketing industry. He was asked by a winery owner to answer the question, how do you measure success online with Facebook or Twitter? He chided the crowd by answering "What's the ROI of your Mom?"
Now, I think his point was that some things are difficult to calculate as you try and measure time and money spent versus the return on that activity. And he was making the argument that investing in relationships can't easily be described by an equation. Although Gary is quite a thought leader, he obviously doesn't live in the corporate world of marketing.
Today's marketer better be prepared with some metrics.
I like this question I use about measuring success because it forces a marketing team to think through where we are investing time, money and energy. And since all three of those are often in short supply, you better make sure you are focused on meeting your company's larger strategic goals. And bringing along others from outside the department can be helpful in building consensus on what success might look like for your work.
Here are five examples of how I have measured success during the last year.
EVENT MARKETING: To make our conference successful, we need to have at least 10 senior brand executives from our top strategic customer accounts attend our forum and be activity engaged with us for five hours each. So success is 50 hours of time spent with senior leadership.
EMAIL CAMPAIGN: Our conversion rate on our email campaign must generate 4 times gross revenue as the program cost. Simple math: the campaign cost $10,000 and we must generate $40,000 within 8 months from the start of the project.
PUBLIC RELATIONS OUTREACH: In the coming three months, at least 25 articles online or in print must appear mentioning our new product launch from targeted publications with a reach exceeding 1,000,000 readers in total.
WEB ANALYTICS: Traffic to our new website must increase 15% year over year and with a 25% increase in the time spent on the site by new visitors.
LEAD GENERATION: We must generate at least 50 news leads each at the two new trade shows and those leads, over six months will create at least twice the revenue as the cost of attending the events.
Note that each metric or KPI (key performance indicator) includes a specific number that we can measure. And, these goals were established by marketing with input from sales, finance and other engaged colleagues. I do this for several reasons but when I report out our progress at the end of the quarter to our general management team, everyone has already agreed what success looks like and I can share if we achieved our goal.
Not everything can be quantified but often that is because we get lazy and we just say, "I know what it will feel like if we are successful." That just doesn't cut it. Well-defined success parameters help build marketing credibility internally which boosts confidence on those riskier activities.
How do you measure success?
Jeffrey Slater is the Global Director of Marketing for Nomacorc. His blog, MomentSlater unravels the mysteries of marketing based on his 30 years as a professional marketing executive and entrepreneur. Follow Jeffrey at @Moments_Later.
Illustration courtesy NASA free photo site.
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Here's a problematic discussion this point creates:
While, yes, we need measurements and metrics, when it comes to social we start out by identifying the places "worth using" (there are too many to use all of them … duh … ) and then we measure … what? Whether we picked the right ones?
Or … we assume we picked the right ones and we measure … what? Whether the people working them are succeeding?
In other words, there's a procedural disconnect.
I 'KNOW' I'm using (twitter … facebook … whatever). The phrase "I know" is based on my belief that I as the leader (or whomever makes such decisions) can make the right choices. And of course even that is open to ongoing reevaluation.
Now it's simple; I measure results defined by … well again, whatever. And effected by … whomever.
Simple, nothing. What if you made the wrong choices before the work got started? What are you metrics worth then, and is the problem that you made the wrong choices or that you have the wrong people working them? Or for that matter, maybe you defined the wrong metrics.
Facebook is a no-brainer. Or is it? Twitter too, right? What about rich-media choices like Instagram/Pinterest/Vine?
Again: the problem, as much as I agree that there needs to be a measurement protocol, is that if you measure results from a flawed assumption base you're measuring the wrong thing. And IMHO, many, MANY people are making the wrong assumptions, colored by an incredibly broad set of assumptions leading to an incredibly narrow set of conclusions.
Metrics aren't useful or repurpose-able unless the variables can be adequately and confidently defined (commercial; that;s what my company does (HA!) ).
Jeffrey Slater
If I don't have the right metric in place, I can correct and refine as I go along. One of the best marketing/life lessons is to be heading in the right direction and to try and get "close to the pin". If I want to influence key decision makers, I need to spend time with them. So spending 50 hours is better than not connecting at all.
I'm sure Occam had it right. The simplest solution is often the right answer. Thanks for these comments on my post. And thanks to Mark for publishing this on his blog. Cheers.
http://seopop.org/about A. Pizarro
I think the discussion of ROI is an important one. However, it appears to me that we often get caught up in the complexity of a problem and forget that a simple answer many times holds deep truth.
The success of my "Social" media campaigns can easily be measured by the number of social interactions that lead to the outcome I had in mind when I initiated them. If I'm looking to create evangelists, how many do I have after a set amount of time.
Ultimately, your success is only as great as the number of people who care about your product, service or cause. People will share a funny photo or comment on something that makes them angry but how many people can your message provoke to pickup a phone?
If you can truly connect with people, your metrics will take care of themselves.
Just ask Zappos.
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http://lafetraconsulting.com/ Bruce La Fetra
ROI measurements are a tactical measure that tell you how well something is working, but not whether it is the right tactic. In order to know you are on the right track, you also need to do strategic assessments. This can be as simple as having clear criteria for what you want to accomplish, and then evaluating performance against the same criteria. It's important to note that Jeffrey goes this extra step in defining the goal as not merely 10 senior execs for 5 hours, but execs from top strategic accounts and mentions in specific targeted publications. Seems obvious, except too many leaders focus just on the number and not on the context.
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http://learnit2earnitwithlynn.com Lynn Brown
Yes and 'context' is the one thing Gary V. talks about all the time. Thanks Bruce for your insight it is a good add to what Jeffrey related to in his article.
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I met with wine guru Tim Hanni a few weeks ago and got his consumer-friendly perspective on wine. I posted about this on sibling blog Grape Wall of China and thought readers here might also be interested in it, as well as two other recent posts.
Screw it? Video conference with Wolf Blass, George Samios
After Australian Embassy staff checked my bag, passed me through a metal detector, and gave me a cavity search (OK, scratch the last part), I joined four local wine journalists in Beijing last Tuesday for a video conference with iconic wine maker Wolf Blass and Foster's Global Wine Ambassador George Samios. The event – jointly hosted by Austrade and ASC, which distributes Blass' wine in China – focused on the use of screw caps on wine bottles.
Lessons learned: Training 2,000 restaurant workers in China
Since her last post, Yvonne Chiong has completed more than 30 two-hour training sessions with restaurant employees in China – all over Shanghai as well as in Beijing and Hong Kong. The idea was to give them a basic understanding of wine.
Hate Sauvignon Blanc? Try blaming your childhood
"If you hated mowing the grass as a youth, you might just hate Sauvignon Blanc."
"There is so much stress on luxury goods that we would rather people not drink wine if it's the 'wrong' brand."
"Imagine you are trying to sell shoes and you don't realize people have differently sized feet. If a shoe doesn't fit someone, you wouldn't tell them, 'Well, your foot isn't mature.'"
These are some of the intriguing comments made by Tim Hanni when he spoke to a small group of China wine industry people in JW Marriott's Pinot Brasserie in Beijing on April 8. Hanni is a wine researcher and educator, one of the first two Americans to become a Master of Wine, a founder of Napa Seasoning and training company WineQuest, and director of the Lodi International Wine Awards.
I first read about Hanni in this Wall Street Journal piece and then interviewed him for Grape Wall of China last month. I looked forward to getting his take on the wine scene and he didn't disappoint. Over nearly four hours, he covered everything from his experiences with the Master of Wine exam to chemistry, biology and etymology (What do we mean by 'palate'?) to the history of wine and food to his rock band (that's a whole other story).
Hanni took the Master of Wine test in 1989 and "failed it miserably." He knew he had the technical expertise, but was poor at essays, so he signed up for a three-day writing course. The course ended up being for engineers, he took it anyway, and this led to an epiphany.
"It was brilliant. We learned to take words that we think we all know, and to then agree on what they mean," he says. "It occurred to me that with much of the language of wine, we think we know what we mean, but deep down there is a lack of agreement."
Forget about notes of gooseberries and hints of cloves: Hanni says he has been talking to wine makers, sensory specialists and others for 20 years just to discover what we mean by "flavor" and "taste."
"You have all this wine education going on and nobody's taken time to answer the harder questions, such as "What's a palate?" Or about the biggest piece of the puzzle, "How do senses work with the brain?"
He speaks of scientists who do brain scans to gauge the impact of our senses on it, of how atmosphere, color and music can affect wine drinkers, or of the power of suggestion (he says one study found that people gave different evaluations of a white wine and then the same wine – unbeknown to them – dyed red).
He goes so far as to make wine sound like therapy. Take Sauvignon Blanc, a wine often associated with a grassy smell. "We find that people who dislike Sauvignon Blanc have grass allergies; have bad memories of childhood summers; have bad experiences with lawn mowing and lawn moving equipment."
Which is all to say that why we like or dislike a particular wine is individual, a product of our senses, of our memories and preconceptions, and of a myriad of other factors that argue against a "one size fits all" philosophy.
"People are anatomically different – one size does not fit all. And the size that is being pushed on people is dry wine," he says.
"Imagine you are trying to sell shoes and you don't realize people have differently sized feet," he says. "You wouldn't say, well, your foot isn't mature."
On Friday, I will have part two of the Tim Hanni talk, which covers how he categorizes wine drinkers as well as the food and wine demonstration he gave us.
(Thanks to Arcy Y. for the photo.)