Piece this morning in the Wall Street Journal (it’s behind a tollbooth, so no link) about the sorry state of Central American economies tied to coffee prices. Seems that there’s now a global glut; wholesale prices are at 50 cents per pound, while production costs in the high mountains are 80 cents per pound. The result is a lot of people out of work — and the very real possibility that they’ll turn to growing something a whole lot less benign than coffee.

What makes the article worth looking for is a rundown of how high coffee prices were an instrument of American foreign policy during the Cold War: strong prices means stable governments, which meant slim pickings for the Godless Pledge-fearing Commies. Now the Vietnam (speaking of Godless Pledge-fearing Commies) has joined Brazil as a major exporter of low-quality beans, supply outstrips demand.

Not that you’d notice it at the checkout, of course. WSJ points out that while wholesale prices have dropped 80 percent in the last five years, retail prices have dropped 20 percent.

Favorite quote:

“Up to 75% of a typical can of coffee is now made up of the cheap stuff, which they then cut with Central American or Colombian [arabica] beans so your coffee doesn’t taste like a shoe,” says Eric Poncon, director in Nicaragua of ECOM Group.

We’re back.

OTE and the entire Dan Rosenbaum family of fine information products was unexpectedly offline from Friday evening until Monday noon. Some sort of switch problem that knocked out the mail and web servers — and apparently a bunch of other machines.

The good news is that the outage encouraged me to get away from the machines so I had a lovely weekend full of lots of family. The other good news is that I’ve more or less forgotten all the things I wanted to post.

 

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
— Galileo Galilei.

Walt Kelly. “Now is the time for all good men to come to.” [Quotes of the Day]

You Snooze You Win, Learning Study Reveals

Back in the day, the two major wire services (that’d be UPI and the AP, sonny) got together and issued a consolidated style book. They agreed on things like tricky spellings and usage and correct form for datelines. Each service went a little beyond the basics, though. The UPI Stylebook was studded with entries such as:

burro, burrow: A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist, you are expected to know the difference.

That one never made it into the AP version, which is about all you need to know about the difference between UPI and the AP.

Except for this: for years, the AP book was titled “The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual.” It doesn’t take a genius to read that at least two different ways. So I mourned just a little today when I saw that the latest edition — two years old now — is called “The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law.”

 

Blogspace has been passing around this article by Janis Ian (the songwriter and singer of “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen”) — a particularly clear exegesis of the recording industry from the viewpoint of an independent musician:

I don’t pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my walletｷand check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing’s missing…. Every time we make a few songs available on my website, sales of all the CDs go up. A lot.

As the Editor of NetGuide, I spent a fair amount of time deriding Yahoo! Internet Life. Making fun of its name was easy; making fun of its content was much much harder.

And it was no fun at all to look across the battlements and realize that I was competing with Barry Golson, who once edited TV Guide and who conducted some of the best known Playboy Interviews of the 70s and 80s. What made it worse was the realization that his management knew what it meant to create a great consumer title, and while mine didn’t have a clue.

YIL outlasted NetGuide by a ridiculous length of time. Ziff Davis folded it today: bad ad environment. Its 1 million-plus circulation probably just made it too expensive for advertisers, and Ziff is in no position these days to carry titles that aren’t making it. But the closing sucks greatly nonetheless — a bunch more of my friends are now out of work.

Barry, Angela, Ron, Scott: have a round on me. Lord knows you’ve earned it.

 

From Ernie the Attorney:

Can you copyright silence?  Some people think so.  But, of course, some people are frigging idiots.

Oh, good Lord. Me, I read it that someone’s overreacting just a wee tad.

A couple of years ago, the April edition of Electronic Musician magazine ran a “review” of a disc of samples of silence, suitable for use in your favorite sequencer. Funny stuff.

(We’ll just ignore that silences really do sound different from each other. The silence in Carnegie Hall is different from the silence in an airplane hanger. I wouldn’t want to try to make an acoustic model to prove it, though.)

 

My friend Semi, who used to produce an entertaining if erratic e-mail newsletter, has joined the weblog thang. I’d like to think that he was inspired by my sitting in his basement last month, sucking up his bandwidth while writing OTE and trying in vain to hide from controlled bedlam all ’round.

Pretty good writer, Semi is. You’ll especially enjoy his piece today.