The Milkman Cometh

One of the best things we found on Mercer Island is access to this wonderful milk delivery service. Smith Brothers Farms brings us fresh dairy products every Thursday morning, for roughly the price we pay in the grocery store. The milk comes directly from the farm, (presumably that means happier-than-average cows ?) and in a blind taste test our kids preferred it to the store-bought stuff.


(here's the milkman bringing his delivery down our driveway)

What am I reading?

Instead of using this blog to repost links to interesting things I read, I'm going to start clipping them to my
Bloglines blog instead.

You can subscribe using the RSS feed.

Gourmet coffee reviews

So far I've found nothing in Seattle to compete with my favorite Espresso Vivace, but recently I tried Caffe Del Sol Espresso from Cafe Vita Coffee Roasting Company. I bought it at Larry's Market, not directly from the roaster, but the taste was pretty good anyway. The roasteria is at 1005 East Pike Street, Seattle, WA 98122, which is only a few blocks south of Espresso Vivace.


Caffe Artigiano in Vancouver has some of the best coffee I've ever had, so I was surprised to hear they purchase their beans from Intelligentsia in Chicago. Unfortunately for personal quantities that means you either have to live there or buy mail-order and suffer the slightly degraded quality you get when it's not perfectly fresh. But if you ever have the chance to try it, get Luzazatoo Blend, which is excellent for espresso.

Johns in Chicago

The Freakonomics blog mentions a web site where the Chicago Police Department posts photographs of men arrested for soliticing prostitutes.

The point of the site is to embarrass these patrons in a way that simply fining or compounding their cars will not. A glance at some of the photos gives a strange sense of the pathetic.

What was this man thinking?

Freakonomics calculates that if you use official police statistics, there are four incidents of prostitution per year for every adult male in Chicago -- a number which they argue seems awfully high.

Real Simple | Expiration Dates

Real Simple | Surprising Expiration Dates

tells how long various things can go before you have to chuck. For example, did you know that honey can keep basically forever? An unopened bag of marshmellows is good for 40 weeks. A bar of soap is done after 3 years.

SLEEPTRACKER

SLEEPTRACKER - FAQs

A wristwatch that claims to watch your sleep patterns, letting you know when it's optimal for you to wake up.

Too much to choose

Which is more important: a wide variety of products so you can find exactly what you want, or a smaller number so you can easily choose? Sometimes overall sales actually increase when you lower the number of choices people have to make.

Dynamist Blog: Managing Choice explains that some product categories (e.g. cereal, shampoo) balance this well, but other categories offer too much choice (e.g. computers, cell phone plans). I bet cell phone sales would go up if there were fewer plans to choose from.

BBC - Beethoven free downloads

BBC - Radio 3 - Beethoven Experience - downloads

The BBC is doing an experiment, letting people download all the Beethoven symphonies as MP3 files. For a limited time.

Family travel sites

The Wall Street Journal recommends Family Travel Files.com and Family Travel Network as sites to use for planning trips or vacations.

It's one of the most famous images in the world, instantly recognizable by even the least art-knowledgeable among us. Yet few people know that it was painted in the 1930's by Grant Wood, an artist who was traveling through rural Iowa when he saw a farmhouse built in an architectural style called Carpenter Gothic.



Google Print has a book describing the painting, and there's a nice summary in Slate as well.

What time is it?

I bet the kids would like this site that tells the time.

It's from Japan.

Odds of Dying

Here's a chart published by the National Safety Council on your Odds of Dying of various causes.

118 people died last year in animal-drawn vehicles.
13 people died after being bitten or stung by non-venomous insects.