A Day Late, a Five Cent Deposit Short

I felt like I'd shown up five minutes late to the Duran Duran vocalist audition to find Simon Le Bon already in the band. I was devastated, crestfallen, inconsolable.

For a good two years I'd been crafting this concept of a website: a user-driven, wiki-style index of if and where (relative to your zip code) anything and everything can be recycled.

Have a copy of George W. Bush's A Charge to Keep that you no longer want, but no one will take, let alone buy? No problem, your nearby facility, City Carton, just added book recycling to its repertoire. Does your company go through loads of ink cartridges that are ending up in landfills? Well, this company will pay you to let them recycle those. These are but a couple of the potential success stories I envisioned.

Anyway, I had the concept, the desire, and even a badass web design company to help make it happen. All I needed was a name.

And then, about a month ago, it came to me: Recyclopedia.

There it was. I felt like a schoolboy again, I was so excited! Within minutes, I called a friend to ask him if he was interested in helping. He was. From there, I began to brainstorm the logistics (possible costs, etc). But then, on a whim, I googled "Recyclopedia", which led me to THIS.

Recyclopedia.net? With a mixture of horror and wonder, I read the site's description:

This is a website to help you find information on how to correctly dispose of things. First choose your location and then find what you're trying to get rid of on the list. We'll tell you whether it can go out with the trash, in your blue box, to a charity or if it needs special attention.

That there was a website out there whose mission so closely paralleled my own, that I could believe. But that it literally had the exact same name, that was just eerie.

Well, for the last month I sulked—like a big, bitter baby—about being beaten to the punch. After more reflection, though, I now realize that all that matters is that someone has put this idea into effect. So, if your city/county is missing (like mine is) from Recyclopedia's small but growing database of participating areas, please join me in heeding their call:

If you don't see your location listed, drop us a line and we'll tell you how to get your area online.

Yellow Beer Challenge

Between the ages of 18 and 24, I made the unlikely transition from bar-shunning teetotaler to pub-rating beer enthusiast.

While my taste in beer has no doubt become a bit snooty—take my infatuation with imperial stouts—I like to think myself less a snob than a fan of the craft as a whole.

As such, it was an absolute privilege to partake in the first ever "Yellow Beer Challenge" (YBC), held on Jun 28, in which myself and seven other imbibers faced off in a blind taste test of various American light beers.

When asked why he created the YBC, the event's founder/emcee (code name: "Seamus O'Chihak") put it this way:

Look, any geek off the street can tell a Surly Darkness from a Lindemans Framboise. But if your palate's refined enough to distinguish an Old Milwaukee from a Michelob Golden, well, then you've shown me something.

The rules were simple. First, O'Chihak unveiled his five mystery brews, each in its own unmarked container; and second, he handed each participant a list of nine possible brand identities. We then tasted, described and guessed the identity of each beer. Finally, when all five had been sipped, we ranked them from 1 (best) to 5 (worst).

The results are summarized below (beers listed, from left to right, in order of presentation). Included in the data table are the percentage of raters who correctly identified each beer; the final YBC rankings; and, for comparison purposes, each lager's rating on the "beer connoisseur" websites Beer Advocate (BA), given in letter grades, and Rate Beer (RB), given in percentiles from 0/worst to 100/best:

As you can see, despite being the clear "critical" favorite, LaCrosse could only muster a disappointing tied-for-third finish. Rather, the event's big winner turned out to be PBR, which basically "blue" away even its closest competitor, Bud Light, which itself managed an impressive Silver despite a "0th percentile" rating from Rate Beer.

Interestingly—nay, fascinatingly—while our panel of eight deemed PBR best and Busch Light worst, an astounding 63% of judges wrongly identified the taste of Busch Light (the worst beer) with the name of PBR (the best beer)! By contrast, not one judge correctly identified PBR as PBR. This finding suggests an intriguing phenomenon. Namely, while people seemed to intellectualize PBR as being the worst (e.g., "This beer tastes like crap—it must be PBR" or "This beer is great—it can't be PBR"), their more primal instincts (i.e., taste buds) told a different story altogether.

Equally captivating were the judges' descriptions. For instance, one rater described LaCrosse as "an unfortunate beer, with a hint of misery, that finishes despite your best effort", while another judge, in reference to Busch Light (which he mistook for Icehouse), remarked, "I'd pay $18.95 a case and drink it in high school".

On a personal note, I was proud to learn that I completely mixed up my three favorite lagers: identifying PBR as Busch Light, Busch Light as LaCrosse, and LaCrosse as PBR. Call me crazy, but in the perfect symmetry of such a failure, I can't help but feel like a success.

Netflix Maintains the Right Profile

Countless couples Clash concerning cinema. While one digs romantic dramas like A Place in the Sun, the other prefers classic westerns like Red River, and so on. But riding to the rescue in recent years has been Netflix, the DVD-rental-by-mail service whose "Profile" feature offers an ideal antidote to film-related fighting (aka "flickering").

In brief, Profiles allow couples (or families, roommates, etc) to join Netflix under the same account (in terms of billing), but maintain completely independent sub-accounts with unique queues, friends, ratings and tailor-made recommendations. This way two friends, as an example, can split the cost of the 4 DVDs at-a-time plan (for $12 each/mo) without sacrificing any of the personalized features they'd get if they each purchased separate 2-at-a-time plans (for $14/mo).

As beneficiaries of said service, Brumpelstiltskin were absolutely gutted when, on Jun 25, Netflix announced intentions to eliminate Profiles. Our finance guru, Greenspanke, responded by downgrading Netflix stock to "Triple Sell" whilst MC Gallagher even threatened to "join the fooking competition".

We were not alone in our angst. Indeed, a chorus of disgruntled fans of the service sounded off on blogs and forums, while others banded together via both an online petition ("Save Netflix Profiles") and a Facebook group ("People annoyed that Netflix is eliminating profiles").

And lo and behold, it worked. On Jun 30, Netflix sent its members an email, the first line of which simply read: "You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles". Within minutes, the usually cautious Greenspanke upgraded NFLX straight past "Don't Buy" all the way to "Risky".

On its official blog, Netflix further clarified both their initial decision and the subsequent about-face:

Because of an ongoing desire to make our website easier to use, we believed taking a feature away that is only used by a very small minority would help us improve the site for everyone. Listening to our members, we realized that users of this feature often describe it as an essential part of their Netflix experience. Simplicity is only one virtue and it can certainly be outweighed by utility.

Call us naive, but such language is welcomely candid coming from a big business: the original "sin" seems to have been genuinely well-intentioned; the apology, gracious and humble. But such actions should also boost profits: not only has a great service to customers been spared, but in the process great customer service has been proven.

In others words, while it was only balk/bluster to begin with, we won't be joining the competition any time soon.