On the squash court today, one guy said, "whoa, look at these wheels!", after he made a particularly good get. I said, "must be those little chocolate donuts for breakfast".

Remember that?

If not:

Posted by: Random Penseur at 10:40 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Here's a question for all of you more socially couth people out there: how do you handle the situation where a guest to your home for a meal brings with him a bottle of wine? You've planned your menu and you have, hopefully, purchased wine that will harmonize pleasantly with what you will be serving. Your guest brings a wine that pleases him greatly and he wants to share it with you. Or, he just brings something because he doesn't want to show up empty handed. Either way, you may not know the difference. Now, what do you do? Do you open the wine, thus perhaps upsetting the balance you've tried to strike? Do you just thank the guest, and put the wine away? I never know how to handle this. I was confronted by both situations yesterday.

We entertained my pilates class friends at the house. Our class has shrunk to three, including me, and I invited the other two and their significant others and the instructor and her significant other, out to the house for lunch yesterday. I determined that what I really wanted to prepare, other than grilled veggies and assorted cold salads, was chili-cheese burgers and so I did. I selected a Spanish white that was from close to the French border and was 30% Gewürztraminer, a grape that can stand up to spicy food. I bought six bottles and chilled them all.

Lunch was a great success and indeed did not break up until about 5:45, thus requiring me to cancel our dinner engagement. My wife wouldn't let me throw everyone out.

I put all the wine into the fridge and served the first three bottles of my wine, which went just as well as I had hoped it would. Then, for the fourth bottle, we opened a really grand unfiltered rose that one guest brought. He had tasted it and thought we would love it. Clearly, it needed to be open. We drank that one sitting in the garden while watching the children play as some smoked cigars (I passed this time).

I didn't open any guest wine during the meal and happily we had need of more wine after lunch. If not, I am not sure what I would have done.

What would you do?

Posted by: Random Penseur at 10:40 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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1 Etiquette states that guests who bring wine are not supposed to expect the wine to be opened on the spot - it's supposed to be for the host(s) to enjoy another time. As far as I know, it's the host's choice if they want to use it at that time but certainly shouldn't feel required to.

Posted by: Hannah at August 13, 2007 11:42 AM (lUH62)

2 A bottle of wine brought to the house is a gift for the host(s). Depending on the situation, I may or may not open it. If I have planned wines, as you did, I will put it aside either for us to enjoy later, or to share with guests over conversation after the meal. If I haven't planned a particular wine, then I'm more than happy to open it. If the person who brought it asks about it, then I'll open it and serve it along with whatever I have, and give the guests a choice of either or both. We're pretty relaxed about that kind of thing. I do make a point of telling the giver how much I liked it, or at least, how much I appreciated the gift. Especially if I save it for later.

Posted by: caltechgirl at August 13, 2007 12:00 PM (/vgMZ)

3 Man, I really wish I could help with this, but sadly I can't. Its not that I haven't run into this situation, its just that there isn't much of a need in trying to decide which flavor of MadDog 20/20 to start with. So, we drink the bottle the guest brought, then start in on my stash. The situation changes though if Thunderbird is the wine being provided by the host. You always start with the Thunderchicken, same goes for Night-train...

Posted by: phin at August 13, 2007 01:54 PM (CQcil)

4 Note to self: if having Phin over for dinner, ask him to bring flowers. I have not had the pleasure, such as it is, of MadDog 20/20 since college and I actually only recall that I drank it and nothing more comes to mind.

Posted by: rp at August 13, 2007 02:53 PM (op1yW)

5 Since I run a small winery and my daughter runs our tasting room and our son-in-law-to-be is part owner-and-manager of two huge wine & spirits stores and our daughter-in-law-to-be works for a winery too... This happens a LOT with us when we have guests over, as you might imagine. Almost everyone we know socially are in the restaurant or winery industries. I play it by ear; if they bring something that might go well with what we had planned to serve, I'll open it. If not, or if it's something I just don't want to open, I gush over it and, while winking at the guests who brought it, stage whisper I will be saving it for another time when Dan & and I can enjoy it together. Sometimes the guests insist we save it and sometimes the guests insist we open it, thus taking it out of my hands entirely. And that's fine with me. Nobody seem to get upset about it, whatever we do or don't do. After all, it's WINE! Now, how can anyone get upset about something so fabulous?

Posted by: Amber at August 14, 2007 10:05 AM (zQE5D)

6 I have issues with this one, and that's mainly because I have red wine junkies for friends and I can't drink the stuff as I'm allergic to the tannins. As such, I generally bring a bottle of chardonnay with me, so that I have something to drink if they didn't get one. I can't expect them to remember every little thing and I wouldn't want them to. This way, if they did remember, they get to expand the very limited white sections of their respective wine cellars. If they didn't, they can open the bottle and I'll have something alcoholic to drink, and so perhaps will other people who would also like a glass of white wine. And if they choose not to open it at all, I will happily drink whatever they have that's not red wine and I won't raise a fuss about it. In other words, it's up to the guest to be gracious about this, not the host. The host has other things to worry about, and anyone who raises a stink about their wine not being opened is someone Emily Post should come back from the dead and bitchslap for having poor manners. If it's a gift, it's up to the recipient to use it as they will, not for the guest to tell the host what they should or should not do in their home, at their party.

Posted by: Kathy at August 14, 2007 12:13 PM (sUnJj)

7 When my guests bring wine, we just shove the box in the fridge and save it for later.

Posted by: Howard at August 14, 2007 03:14 PM (u2JaN)

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I have been ruminating a bit on the credit crisis engulfing the markets. I have been reading books and academic papers of late concerning valuation of collateralized debt obligations and mortgage backed securities for a couple of months now. I have been discussing the problems faced by traders and investors in marking portfolios to market and marking portfolios to model and what happens when there is a real contradiction between the model and the market. I have been doing this because I am a geek and I find the structured finance side of the market, and the implications on leverage and the implications leverage has on liquidity, to be utterly fascinating. You should, too, by the way.

One of the issues I think is most interesting is that the models created by hedge funds or by structured financial products traders rarely actually accurately models a total melt down. The models, take Bear Stearns recent debacle, probably did include the possibility that the exotic securities they were trading could go totally south, but the humans doing the trades and making the investments in the funds would have discounted that possibility down to very little if not nothing.

That's what we humans do. We make plans but we cannot honestly confront a worst case scenario. That's why we call it a worst case. We give it that name and that assume that the probability of it taking place is not worth discussing. I think it is human nature. We don't actually assign a real probability factor to the problem posed by the worst case. I think that the only place humans do this is with regard to estate planning. We know we're going to die so we make plans for that worst case scenario. But not everyone does this, you know, and not everyone who does do it can successfully contemplate the worst case scenario posed by their own certain mortality and do it efficiently and correctly.

We don't like to think about bad endings. Or monsters, come to think of it. But I think that they both exist.

No, human beings plan for the middle and include slight deviations from the middle. Some really smart humans can plan for volatility but even that will remain within artificially set expectation bounds so that when the volatility surpasses those bounds, trouble can result.

Where am I going with this?

I'm not 100% sure. Maybe I am just going with the thought that I have to be a better planner. I have to take disaster planning more seriously, for instance. I, and many others, will discount the possibility of a catastrophic disaster down to zero and stop thinking about it even though we know that power failures, for instance, can last days.

We plan not with our intellects but with our emotions.

I think it is time to take the emotional out of the planning stage.

It is time to contemplate both the worst case downside scenario and the best case upside scenario for this family corporation I am an officer of and start to plan accordingly even if the business and financing climate has changed. This is different from lawyer think and legal analysis. It is going to be an interesting exercise.

Oh, and I really have to finalize our wills.

You should, too.

Posted by: Random Penseur at 11:41 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 Sage advice, as usual.

Posted by: Wicked H at August 10, 2007 02:44 PM (zOWa5)

2 Sounds complicated Should I even be thinking about a will at the tender age of almost 23?

Posted by: Hannah at August 10, 2007 03:09 PM (lUH62)

3 Great advice rp. Hannah, If nothing else you should have a living will that explains your views on life support, heroic measures, etc... This way people aren't left having to make a decision they "think" you would want. Main reason I have one is I don't want my family to have to decide whether or not to pull the plug. Kind of morbid thoughts at 23, but things happen.

Posted by: phin at August 10, 2007 03:30 PM (CQcil)

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I was chatting today with one of my partners at work and we were discussing a dream I have long held of visiting all of the UNESCO World Heritage sites. [Political digression: the United Nations does not care to acknowledge that Jerusalem is in Israel. Israel has several sites but Jerusalem is the only city that gets listed without a country designation, other than that it was suggested by Jordan. Jordan behaved shockingly badly until the Israelis threw them out of Jerusalem. Bluntly, the United Nations is a nest of anti-semites. End digression]

So we pulled the list up together and reviewed. I have been to 48 of them. It feels like a lot but I suspect many of you will have been to many more. Check the list out and let me know how you did?

Posted by: Random Penseur at 10:53 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1 Uhhh, forty-eight is a lot. I've been to three. Sigh. I need to get out more.

Posted by: Kathy at August 03, 2007 10:53 PM (ufifB)

2 I've been to 21 of them, although the numbers are going to be higher for anyone who's been to several major tourist sites in the U.K. That said, wow--some of those places sure are out of the way.

Posted by: Jeff at August 04, 2007 02:40 AM (3q8gx)

3 I've been to 90, which seems show offy, but when you look at the whole list, it is shameful how small my list is. I'm good on the UK, Italy, North America and France, Mexico and Spain. But there is so much of Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and South America not even touched. On the other hand, it just points out what to get done before I die.

Posted by: Anne at August 05, 2007 04:58 PM (q0PnG)

4 I've been to forty. They're reasonably well spread out over Europe, South America, Australia, southAsia and Israel...including it's capital, Jerusalem. So many places, so little time.

Posted by: Jocelyn at August 05, 2007 10:35 PM (2+m3k)

5 Looks like I come with 12 World Heritage Sites. I don't think listing Jerusalem on its own is a sign of anti-semitism. UN folks usually have a groupthink automatic desire to be as ridiculously politically correct as possible, and so would like to think that listing Jerusalem on its own is in some way a sign of political neutrality. Of course, in actuality it's just another sign of distance from the reality, which is that the State of Israel exercises a very normal and regular (if, admittedly, disputed) sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem and has done so for a significant enough period of time.

Posted by: Andrew Cusack at August 06, 2007 10:06 AM (v/Tqy)

6 I've been to 30 ... I think! Most of my travels were some 20 years ago, when I was in college - and it's hard to remember the names of certain places!

Posted by: Monica C. at August 06, 2007 08:49 PM (FMnfx)

7 Throws my lowly "Pueblo de Taos" into the ring and blushes furiously. Dang, I need to get out. Not more - ANY. Heh.

Posted by: Margi at August 06, 2007 09:03 PM (DwLKz)

8 I had to scroll down depressingly far to reach the first of any of the sites I've visited. And now am feeling quite un-learned of the world I live in, too much so to even count, although I can't fathom my list would contain more than ten. In two countries - the UK and the grand ol' homefront.

Posted by: Jennifer at August 07, 2007 07:02 PM (RlFqM)

9 Seven. Clearly I have a lot of catching up to do. One of these days?

Posted by: Mark S at August 08, 2007 03:25 PM (ek/FX)

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