Thursday miscellanea #286

  • We’ve had kind of a herky-jerky start at Alabamians Can Read, and it’s mostly my fault. We do have a broadcast coming up on Sunday night, for Daryl Gregory’s intriguing Afterparty. Come join us!
  • Did you know we have a juice bar in Huntsville now? Did you know I took three little boys in there last weekend and reviewed it for Rocket City Mom?
  • “I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine … before she realizes she’s reading.” Thank you, farewell, and godspeed, Maya Angelou. RIP.
  • Apple has purchased Beats Audio for $3 billion. Beats Audio is evidently worth two orders of magnitude more than I would have guessed.
  • You guys brine chicken before you cook it? We tried it not long ago, and we may never do it any other way again. Wow, it’s tasty. For two pounds of boneless chicken, dissolve 3/4 cup each of salt and sugar in a gallon of water. Add a tablespoonish amount of any spices you want (for example, for pasta, I did oregano, basil, and rosemary). Bring to a boil, and let it roll for a minute. Remove from heat. When it cools to tepid, put your chicken in the pot and put it in the refrigerator for at least four hours. When you take it out, shake excess water off and prepare normally. (I’ve grilled it and skilleted it satisfactorily.)
  • Tabasco Sriracha is a thing.
  • Kiss 40 has enough surprises to be worth the money for me. My children shall see them in 2014.
  • I’m leaning toward just wearing my denim shorts. That denim pants of any sort should go so violently out of style seems capricious and arbitrary. And maybe I just won’t play.

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3 thoughts on “Thursday miscellanea #286”

  1. RE: Juice bar – It would’ve been funny if you ended that miscellanea entry with “Maybe I’ll take my sons there sometime soon”.

    RE: Apple buying beats – It’s sort of an interesting purchase for a few reasons. With regards to the cost, some have noted it’s at a markedly lower that normal ratio of revenue to purchase cost for a tech/products company. I think they do about $1 billion a year in revenue. I think the trend tends to be at least an order of magnitude difference between revenue and buy out price, or at least in that ballpark.

    But here’s why it has any real value: Those terrible headphones cost the end user $200+ but to produce them at the factory, they’re in the ballpark of $15. For a while (and maybe still to this day) they were actually made by Monster hardware behind the scenes. So that’s probably a big reason Apple bought them, as their profit margins will fit right in with the typical Apple product margins. Beats also has a streaming service, but as many tech journalist point out: They could’ve bought a big name is streaming music (Spotify, Pandora, etc) and an actual good brand in headphones (Sennheiser) for about the same price and had actual known brands that actually have some quality and success to them beyond 2 years. I’m glad they didn’t though, as I like those brands and don’t particularly want either of them soured by being bought out.

    Reply
    • That brand name on that crappy pair of headphones built into a $3,000,000,000 empire just blows my mind. I’m obviously thinking too hard about what kind of move I’d like to make on my own.

      Love the juice bar comment. 🙂

      Reply
  2. We don’t bother brining chicken but we ALWAYS brine our turkeys. Especially since we grill the bird afterwards. It is the only way I will prep a t-day bird anymore. Me and a 5-gallon bucket, some salt, water, orange juice and spices.

    Reply

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