* Pie beer is back at Tied House. It’s incredibly tasty stuff. I have almost gotten through a jug in two days.
* The Trader Joe’s chocolate caramels with sea salt are much more gulp-able than the Recchutti variety. Cheaper too. My poor taste will out eventually.
* Looks like Tony Anthony is leaving the Geoff Show to take a command position at Virgin Radio. Good for him and well done, although it will be like losing a co-worker. I’ve been listening to the show, live or in podcast form, since it started in its current incarnation – in fact, the Symposium and the Junkies are some of my best pals, or so it seems.
* I need to find something to buy to be my Christmas present from my mother and Cousin Pa. The fact of the matter is that there’s not really that much out there that I want – certainly nothing I need, by a long shot. I’m trying to fight the phone glee and not get another cell phone – I am sorely tempted to get the unlocked Motorola MOTOFONE F3, which for my money is the most innovative phone in the world right now and a slick $40 plus shipping – but am I really ever going to use it routinely unless my iPhone goes tits-up? No I am not. And I sure can’t use it abroad; one of the cheapening points of the F3 is that it eschews any but domestic bands in its home market. So what’s the point of getting it other than as a cutesy demo and a waste of time?
* It occurs to me that I really do miss T-Mobile. I made the switch about this time in 2003 and stuck with them for a year; the only reason I eventually dumped them was because they didn’t have the greatest coverage around my in-laws’ house and I really needed two-band coverage between my apartment and my workplace. Now, when I don’t have ANY coverage at work to speak of, it really doesn’t seem to matter much who my carrier is, and although i dearly love my iPhone, I would also dearly love to get rid of AT&T, which is not the real AT&T anymore – it’s at&t, which is SBC on steroids and just the sort of Baby Bell swine that made me hate Verizon so much back East.
* Being in the UK and seeing four competing mobile operators (plus the virtual ones like Virgin Mobile, which is my UK number) really makes me sick of how things are set up in this country. By not settling on a standard, we got a market split between two different technologies, with a dual-band carrier on each side and a single-band PCS operator as the “competition.” And with two different technical standards, hardware is tied to the provider. Just imagine what the US cellular market would be like if you could get your phone completely separate from the service provider – which you sort of can with T-Mobile, less so with at&t, but not at all with Verizon or Sprint.
* Life on Mars starts Series 2 on BBC America tonight. NO SPOILERS! Other than “It were dark! We all make mistakes!” “BAAAAAA!! BAAAAA!!”
* OK, that’s 500 words, I can knock off now, right?