This was the scene this morning at Moffet Field in Mountain View. This huge thing is our new Zeppelin NT from Airship Ventures.
Wouldn’t you like to be Aloft in a Zeppelin? Read the trip report here.
Via the Telstar Logistics Photostream
Click to expand.
It’s now, it’s wow. It’s the brand new Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT (Neue Technologie) and it just arrived gestern.
Read all about it here, here and here, (but of course Terence Chea of the Associated Press should take note that the Hindenburg was fueled with diesel, not “by flammable hydrogen“). Our new dirigible is fueled with gasoline and lifted by harmless helium so everybody should be very safe, unless they try to take out James Bond with the Golden Gate Bridge or something.
The NT04, shown as it looked above Monterey the other day, has a plain Jane appearance right now. The bottom of it says, “TO FLY: 650 969 8100.” Click to expand:
Look and see our our new Zep owning the snooty Ritz-Carlton, Half Moon Bay. (Man, that bus got totally pwned!) See more shots like this on the official blog.
So, look to the skies. You just might end up seeing the largest zeppelin in the world.
ProtectPlace.com is a little outfit being promoted by Washington D.C.-based PR firm Chlopak Leonard Schechter & Associates, which does work for the confusingly-named Office of Champagne, USA. This unholy alliance is once again trying to manipulate Bay Area consumers through online advertising.
They are now pushing the Declaration to Protect Wine Place and Origin, which promotes concepts thoroughly debunked here and here.
But, there’s more trouble:
“Trouble is, the Office of Champagne USA isn’t the federal government, which permits winemakers to use the word “Champagne” on wine labels as sort of a generic term, but only as long as they note where the wine was actually made. Hence “California Champagne,” or almost as famously, “California Chablis” and “California Burgundy.”
Let’s think back to happier times, before the French hired flacks to manipulate us:
You see? French Champagne is made in France and American Champagne is made in America. Some terms have become “semi-generic” in the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Freedom Fries. Should the French wine industry have the only say in how wines made and sold in California should be labelled?
You should certainly be wary of what our European corporate overlords have to say. Don’t listen to the apologists for the troubled French wine industry, which has so much oversupply sometimes they turn wine into industrial alcohol. And does the Champagne region still have a nuclear waste dump? Yes. How’s that for terroir?
So, when the experts tell you to stock up on $100+ bottles of French Champagne, as they did last year, sit back and watch prices fall. And when they tell you to worry:
“People are really worried about the next six months when they should worry about the next 10 to 15 years,” says Charles Curtis, product management development director with Moët Hennessy USA.
You shouldn’t worry.
These days, a meal at The French Laundry restaurant up in the Napa County town of Yountville can set you back $240 or so, before adding such extras as a nice tip for the waitstaff [see UPDATE below], or a $100 “steak supplement,” or wine, or whatever. And that assumes you can even get into the fifth best restaurant in the world, as reservations can be hard to come by.
But check out this entry from a pristine 1987 copy of the Zagat San Francisco Restaraunt Survey (the Yelp of its day). Click to expand:
That’s right, Tim and Nina had an “estimated price of dinner” pegged at $29. (Compare that with Nob Hill’s Fournou’s Ovens, listed at $31 in the same 1987 guide.)
So you see, you had your chance back in the 1980’s, back before Pixar’s Ratatouille, and back before Thomas Keller ate an ortolan bunting songbird at a secret chef’s dinner in Bourdeax, France.
Oh well, c‘est la vie. Is there a relatively inexpensive place you can go to now in the bay area that will be internationally famous in the year 2029? Think about it.
Happy hunting.
[UPDATE: Commenter Chester has two valid points that explain some of the price inflation. Well played, Chester.]
Per the New York Times, Businesses in Bay Area May Pay Fee for Emissions. That’s because the government agency that regulates sources of air pollution within nine San Francisco Bay Area Counties, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), is trying classify carbon dioxide, among other gasses, as a pollutant.
Can the BAAQMD pull this off and have a new law operational by July 1, 2008? Signs point to NO. But they’ll give it a shot anyway.
Of course you yourself are a greenhouse gas emitter because you expell carbon dioxide with every move you make, every breath you take. What if you were charged at the same rate as proposed - how much would you get charged (or taxed, it’s all the same) per year?
At the rate of 4.4 cents per ton of carbon dioxide emitted you’d be on hook for 1.5 cents a year, assuming you exhale 704 pounds of Co2 per year. You could afford that, right?
How much would this factory have to pay? Lots and lots.