Power Pal

Continuing on my " cork " theme of postings, I read an article about a liquor store in Washington D.C. that is near and dear to my heart - Cork 'N Bottle . Apparently the new owners are trying to change the face of liquor stores on Georgia Avenue in D.C. by not allowing people to buy single bottles of beer. They're even doing wine tastings. Not sure how successful they'll be, but it sounds like a great idea to me. That area could use an overhaul. Long live Cork 'N Bottle.

I read a book review in the WSJ a few weeks ago. The book was about the cork industry. I'm not exactly a wine connoisseur, so I don't know much about the general industry. I do know that out of the many bottles of wine I've had, I've never come across a rotten cork. I was quite surprised to read the statistic about the percentage of wine bottles where the cork ruins the wine. Here's the excerpt: For a couple of hundred years, winemakers and wine drinkers understood that the wine in a small percentage of bottles -- as much as 3% to 5% -- would suffer from the contamination of bad corks (and, sometimes, bad barrels). The culprit was a chemical called tricholoanisole, or TCA. It caused wine to become "corked" -- that is, to smell like a moldy pile of damp cardboard. The TCA problem -- apparently originating at the early stages of cork harvesting -- seemed to get worse over the past few decades. But the cork industry, dominated by a handful of big companies in...

An update to my post about Japan Needing More Babies . I read an article in the WSJ (a summary of an LA Times article) a few weeks back about the graying of China and the implications it will have on its economy in the coming decades. Here's an excerpt from the article: While China's population is relatively young, by the middle of the century it is set to become one of the world's grayest societies. Today, less than 8% of China's population is 65 or older. By 2050, that proportion will rise to 24%, compared with Europe's 28% and 21% in the U.S. In sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of elderly individuals will rise to less than 6% from 3% now. Moreover, at 1.3 billion, China's population is impressive now but will be less so in the future. According to U.N. projections, most of the world's total population increase from 6.5 billion today to 9.2 billion in 2050 will come from sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim world. India's population is expected to ove...

In my quest to become Mayor of Mountain View, there seems to be hope for me yet. An American born Indian guy named Bobby Jindal just won the Governor's seat in Louisinia a week or two back. That's a pretty amazing commentary on how far the U.S. has come in the past decades. Just 15 or 20 years ago, David Duke (a leader of the KKK) was in the running for Governor in Louisiana. It was a landslide victory in favor of Bobby Jindal. So, to go from David Duke to a landslide victory for an Indian guy is simply amazing. Jindal has quite an interesting background, including a stint at McKinsey & Co. after he got his Masters degree from Oxford.

I came across this blog post and thought that a few of these ideas were interesting. Here are the ones that stood out to me: 2. Control your insecurities. Insecurities oftentimes come leaping out of a person's brain and mouth so quickly that the speaker has no idea what words he just blurted out. People that always have to be correct are insecure. People that constantly saying "just kidding!" after every single joke are insecure. People that respond to a joke at their expense with anger or insult are insecure. Insecurity beguiles confidence and weakens your Self. Becoming a better individual means accepting your Self, and not hiding it under the veil of insults, "just kiddings", or factoids. Either you accept mediocrity about your personality completely and without shame, or you change it. Period. If you're fat, either go on a strict diet and exercise regime or accept it and even be willing to poke fun at yourself. If you have a high voice, buy some tapes t...