Seven Sons

So I’m in Clarksville, Tennessee a town that services Ft. Campbell, KY.
We’re staying just off of I-24 at an Interstate island featuring a
strip of strip malls and big box stores, 10-15 fast food franchises
and adult book stores, mammoth, ever-glowing 50 telescoping signs for
McDonalds, Shell, Applebees and about 40 other places.

I walked from the hotel over to a nearby Target after dinner.  On my
left, very easy to miss, is a fenced-in, civil war graveyard founded
sometime around 1855.  It is sandwiched between the Marriott
Courtyard, the Days Inn, the Homewood Suites and some other chain
dump, bathed in the light of all that is the meeting of I-24 and US
79.

I simply can’t imagine a worse place to lay for eternity.  Thanks for
your sacrifice, young Tennesseeans.  In return, won’t you please
accept this garishly-lit eternal resting place along a six lane
boulevard lined with grease pits, gas stations and porn shops?
Thanks.  Hopefully not too many Big Gulp cups fall upon you.

Okay. So I get this offer. From AT&T. It’s literally so not good I can’t not comment on it.

Here’s the pitch:

I can get “upto” five bars in my own home by buying this AT&T/Cisco prop from Tron for the low, low price of $150. What this magic device does is apparently poach bandwidth from your broadband connection.

Wait. It gets better. You could get a $100 rebate if you sign up for a $19.99 a month calling plan that gives you:

So, I can save $100 by spending $239.88 a year to help AT&T with their spotty network issues. Go. Me.

Thankfully, this is not an issue. I have, on average, 4 bars here. In my secret lair. So I decidedly won’t be contributing to the cause. And I’ll continue to have all my bandwidth for. . . research.

But you might like it. Visit AT&T’s site (featuring music that may drive you insane) or read Engadget’s unboxing.

Of course, I’m curious if this intersects at all somewhere down the litigation/Karma spectrum for AT&T doing an about face on iPhone applications using VOIP on their wireless network. I’ll leave to it to smarter people to chime in, but as far as I can tell this is the Bizarro version of that.

And if anybody has any insight into how much pipe this thing leaches: Post up below.

I’m not sure that the rule-of-threes applies to the death of a magazine. But it deserves an obituary.

I’ll start by saying I’m not much of a food magazine guy. I love to cook, but only because I love to eat. I like photos of food, and appreciate “food porn” as much as the next person, but every photo I have taken of something in my kitchen ends up looking like pancakes. I get Cooks Illustrated, but that’s more like an instruction manual for cooking engineers as opposed to a celebration of the artistic aspects of cooking.

I love to read about food. I came of age in my love for food writing with Bourdain’s seminal “Kitchen Confidential,” but quickly discovered more true artistry in Ruth Reichl and Molly O’Neill. I read MFK Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin and then listened closely when she taught me how to cook a wolf. Lately I have been enthralled by Rochelle Bilow and this weekend I plowed through the Julie/Julia book by Julie Powell (can’t imagine the movie is as satisfying).

And today, maybe not so much tomorrow, but today… I am forced to confront a death of something important that I knew, but not well. Like losing a famous aunt whose home you have never visited. A magazine, silly enough, that I have bought maybe once or twice at the news stand, and ignored every ad in it. A periodical I cherished in absentia because of the name on the masthead. I’m not idealistic enough to feel any guilt about helping cause the downfall of Gourmet, but I am enough of a history buff to recognize the need to celebrate its 70 years of history, the comfort it provided in spite of its commercial nature, and the headlines that its death will garner in contrast to its lack of widespread notoriety in life.

Ruth Reichl, the erstwhile editor of Gourmet and the protagonist of several incredible (meaning hard to believe but nevertheless true), poignant books centered around food, may retire in comfort tomorrow. One can only hope that the passion she exudes in her autobiographies is real enough to keep her written word in constant circulation in a post-Gourmet world. With the charity of history her epitaph will not read “the last editor of Gourmet magazine.” It will read “an artist whose palette was taste and whose media was the written word.”

Rest in peace, Gourmet magazine.