My freshman year resident advisor from Yale has just won a Pulitzer for her study of genocide, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Marti called last week to tell me the news and The Judy tipped me off about this great USA Todayinterview. As you can see from the picture, she is as brilliant as she is gorgeous.

For those of you well-versed in my Yale misadventures, this is the very same RA who (with the help of smelly suitemate Ben) half-dragged me to undergraduate health after my very first weekend at Yale erupted into something dangerously close to alcohol poisoning. (This is a longer story that probably merits its own post, as it was not altogether my fault and, in retrospect, a pretty hilarious affair.)

But anyway, I’m so proud. I have been meaning to buy this book–I mean, 384 pp. on genocide will make you want to drink Hull Clean, no doubt–and now I’m gonna.

DARPA, the people who thought up the Internet back in the ’60s, have a new network they’d like you to know about: the “Self-Healing Minefield”. Follow the link for a great Flash animation of what this means. The Register has this helpful story about the development, which is both more and less sinister than it sounds.

As it turns out, these are anti-tank mines, far less hated then anti-personnel mines by anti-mine activists worldwide. Anti-tank mines only trigger when a tank– not a 5-year-old years after the conflict– trips its trigger.

The self-healing bit is cool, but somehow terrifying: if the minefield is breached (i.e., a passable lane is created) the networked mines actually “hop” to new positions using rocket thrusters. In tech speak, the minefield “self-reconfigures on the fly and in real-time.” IBM talks a lot about “self-healing computers” that fix their own bugs, but somehow these mines make me think of Terminator, with its warning about the day the computers wake up and decide to reconfigure humans out of the pictures.

Says Wired News: “Giving new meaning to the term phone sex, a British company is selling software that transforms a cell phone into a sex toy.”

I hate to tell some of you it’s not yet available here in the States.

OK, so this is a weird story made more weird by the Google translation of this story from Der Spiegel: Purchase mood: Apple obviously offers for universal Music – economics – MIRROR ON-line ONE. I suppose I could have read the LA Times story that Slashdot linked to, but I didn’t want to register.

I have followed Apple for a long time, and I can honestly say that if this is true it is the most surprising development in their business plans for a long time, maybe ever. In Jobs I trust, but not without scratching my head.

The NYT has an article this morning with the very straightforward headline Why Wine Costs What It Does. I’ve obviously been thinking about this a lot as I wonder just how much our little wine club might costs.

To that end, here is a good guideline:

Quality and perception are hard to separate. “You can get a really great bottle of wine for $40,” Mr. Motto said. “Beyond that, it’s something that depends on how discriminating you are, how important it is to your life, how much you can afford.”

I’m going to suggest that we focus on wines under $20, and maybe do an occassional “splurge night” where we spend up to $40. Does that sound reasonable, or is all of this just completely outrageous in a world where children are starving?

…but this stylish tie is a great start! I’m going to start wearing my “Freedom to Breath Safe Clothing” silk necktie with medical filtration fabric every day!!! I know all my ladyfriends will want the silk scarf variety for their own fashionalbe protection.

As the website says:

These products are unique because they are worn as fashionable clothing accessories such as scarves, ties, and other items until such time as the wearer finds themselves in an unusual situation where they fear for their safety. The clothing item can then be placed on their airway as a filtration device. The lingering image of people covering their airways with their clothing as they fled the World Trade Center is etched in all of our memories. The concern exists that bioterrorism or “dirty bombs” will spread radioactive dust and bacteria which will put our breathing and health at risk.

The ties and scarves are just $40 and available in red, blue, gold, and black. And my, aren’t those models attractive people– secure in the purity of their respiration!

Yes, Paulette let the cat out of the erstwhile bag with her mention of “Swallow Don’t Spit,” our new wine club. Our motto: “Tastes good going down.” Whatever serious oenophiles suggest, we think it would be a sin just to taste and wine and then spit it out. To the dregs, baby! And then there’s the bad-taste joy of the double entrendre–we can never pass that up.

It turns out that a lot of Americans do pass up the joy of the grape. I always knew we Yanks were behind the game, but until today I did not know how far. My new boss handed me a copy of Wine Enthusiast today, to (I’m not joking) research a possible pitch to a major wine and spirits conglomerate, and you can imagine my surprise to read in this article that there are only 19 million US once-a-week-plus wine drinkers. Per capita consumption is only 10 bottles a year, compared with 23 in the UK and 76 in France. Understandably, these businesses consider the US a major growth market, if only they can unleash some fairly seismic cultural shifts in our appreciation of that most varied and storied of all the alcohols (taking a page, no doubt, from the astounding creation of the “A Diamond is Forever” myth in the 1930s). [Thanks to David for the Atlantic link.]

It’s a great article about the ways that winemakers have gotten savvy to branding as the best way to increase consumption and revenues. One of the biggest needs is to make wine more approachable to us Americans, given our natively democratic mistrust of frequently effette wine culture. (Translation: we’re provincial hicks scared of foreign words.) One expert quoted says that US consumers want wine to be “fun, to be approachable, less of an intimidating beverage.”

We at Swallow Don’t Spit aren’t intimidated by much of anything, and consider pretty much anything this side of Finnegan’s Wake as approachable, but we will cop to wanting to up the fun factor. This will be no Frazier-esque Seattle salon des vins. We are re-writing the rules, and working on that per capita consumption at the same time. Maybe we can even turn our approach into a profitable marketing strategy for Wine Inc.

So when IS this first bacchanal going to happen? Paulette and I will have to take this one offline and figure something out. We’ll keep you posted.

In honor of the upcoming inauguration of Swallow Don’t Spit’s monthly or bimonthly (Have we decided this one? Maybe it should be scheduled to coincide with phases of the moon or meetings of the Federal Reserve Board), I thought we could all use a little primer in describing i vini that will be the focal point of these events.

Well, Friday night was fun. And so was Saturday. I’m now 30, Pete’s 29, and the scandalous photos are all here at Aries Convergence.

Christopher Guest is at it again. The This is Spinal Tap and Best in Show auteur is at it again with A Mighty Wind. Click on “He’ll make it a fire” for a great skewering of my new industry.