The Good
There was so much good stuff going on this week on blogs that I read, that I don’t think I can narrow it down to just one thing. Here are three posts that I really enjoyed this week -
- The Wine Whore and Josh at Drink Nectar put together one of the most entertaining tasting videos that I have ever seen. The tag-teamed a tasting of Kiona Wines, and really hit it out of the park…, I kind of mixed my sports metaphors a bit there. Anyway, you can see the video on both Drink Nectar and The Wine Whore site.
- John Cesano posted a great review of Randal Grahm’s fantastic book, Been Doon So Long. His thoughts on the book match pretty closely to mine, and John does a great job of capturing the essence of the book.
- Katie Pizzuto from Gonzo Gastronomy posted a great work of wine fiction on Dale Cruse’s Drinks Are On Me blog. As if writing one of the coolest wine blogs on the planet wasn’t enough, Katie writes some mean fiction too.
The Bad
This week I have to throw myself under the bus for the bad. There was a nice little example this week of how it’s easy to make a mess of things in this limited accountability world of blogging and Twitter. Yesterday my Twitter feed came across with this message:
RT @tomcwark: Why is @bgardner stealing my blog content and publishing it here: (Vino: I’m deleting the URL, as I don’t want to give the pirate anymore traffic) ….as though it was his own work???
I naturally thought, “How dare @bgardner steal Tom Wark’s work? I’ll show him, I’m going to retweet this right away!” So I did. I noticed that a lot of other Twitter folks did the same thing, so a veritable retweet storm had started. That would be great, accept that it turns out that @bgardner was just the designer who created the template for the website.
@DaveWebb: @tomcwark You guys erroneously pegged @bgardner as content pirate. Pirate is using his theme.
Someone was using his template to pirate other people’s traffic, and poor @bgardner was stuck in the middle. I felt awful, and issued an apology. Still, I know that the damage is already done. The moral of this story, is to check into this kind of stuff more closely before you retweet. You wouldn’t want your reputation sullied by something that was passed on by a bunch of people with a quick retweet reaction.
My most sincere and humble apologies to @bgardner for my part in yesterday’s fiasco.
The Ugly
This week, I feel that the good can also be ugly. Another Twitter message that I got this week said,
Wine Whore Review:Tag-Team Threesome: Kiona Wine http://bit.ly/a9wk1a
Fortunately, the threesome in question only involved @TheWineWhore and @nectarwine drinking some @kionawine. Still, not the kind of image that you want to have planted in your brain on a Monday morning.
Oh, snap, we were good and ugly. I’ll take the good and let Randy resemble the ugly! Isn’t this three weeks in a row that Randy has made the ugly list? Is there a hall of ugly shame at some point?
Josh
No, not three weeks in a row, but it is three weeks that he’s had the ugly.
Randy has pretty easily been the most mentioned here though. I keep trying to share the love, but he keeps coming out with stuff that demands that I mention it here.
I almost jumped in on that discussion, too. Luckily, the guy set things straight before I did too much researching on it. Confusing situation, to be sure. Did they figure out who actually was ripping him off?
Not that I know of. I hope they figure it out and bring hell down on him/her.
Thank you very much for the kind words and putting me in the good section. Sadly, if you keep on reading me, I’m bound to let you down and slip in either a bad or ugly entry at some point – but for now I’ll celebrate the recognition for a good post.
It was really easy to write a review of Grahm’s book Been Doon So Long. Randall Grahm is a hero to me, an icon and ironically an iconoclast, and his vinthology is just really damn great, definitely one of the most enjoyable reads in a very long time.
I recently met Joel Peterson, another winemaking hero, and I don’t think I did justice to the experience in the entry covering the experience. The actual experience was much richer than I captured.
Anyway, thanks very much for the kind mention. Cheers!
LOL! Josh beat me to the good! I guess I’ll be a good wingman and settle for the ugly… someone’s gotta!
John, agree completely on Randal Grahm. He’s a national treasure. Glad to include your review on the list.
Randy, I think there’s enough ‘good’ to go around to both of you guys. I think that video might be the single most entertaining wine review that I’ve ever soon. Good job!
To @vinotology re: @thebad and @theugly -
Wow, @I’m not a Twit (if that’s not a real term, it should be) so @I have no idea what the latter two-thirds of this post mean. It’s like a new effing l@ngu@ge – one that @I refuse to accept. @I officially dislike it even more than texting, which is saying something. Keep it up and you may lose your luddite audience
Alright, point taken. Less Twitter talk in my next post, I promise.