Tag Archives: Wikipedia

Rangtang

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photo credit: Kyle May via photo pin cc

I was a the bar the other day, drinking a beer, and looking at the various vodkas with Laura Miner. She noticed that, strangely, both Belvedere and Grey Goose had similar bottles—frosted glass with an image on the back-inside. We wondered who was copying who, so I decided to look them up on Wikipedia. Belvedere is a Polish vodka that’s been around since 1996 and is sold worldwide and advertised as “The Worlds First Super Premium Vodka.” I was a little surprised to find that the idea of “premium vodka” was so new. It turns out Grey Goose has only been around since 1997 and while made in France, was created by an American billionaire (in his 70′s no less, also credited with creating Jägermeister) and is only made in France because of (and I know I’m quoting Wikipedia) “the notion of French manufacturing having an inherent link with high perceived quality.” Not that I should be surprised by that last piece of information, a company basically tricking people into thinking something is of higher quality.

We then noticed a row of Three Olives Vodka and saw that it also had the same frosted glass bottle design. Looking that up, I discovered while being produced in the United Kingdom, it was not sold in the country but rather imported to the United States. Another example of a vodka marketed as from another country (presumably to make it look like higher quality) but is basically made just for consumption in the U. S. Well, I’m not really a big vodka guy myself and I know most companies are trying to trick us into buying their stuff. That being said, I’ve always known Three Olives has a lot of flavored vodkas including cherry, vanilla, raspberry, and (my personal favorite) root beer. But upon looking at their full list of flavors discovered they also have a tomato flavor (ew?) and also one called Rangtang which is the most ridiculous name for a flavor ever. Upon further inspection I discovered this was short for orange and tangerine. And upon even further inspection, it’s something much dirtier (NSFW).

Burying the Lead

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This might be one of the least funny blog posts I’ve written (or will write) but I was tweeting about this the other day and I had to let this out.

Print is dying. Not a novel idea, everyone knows at this point that newspapers and magazines are struggling. Borders is even closing all their stores. Everyone has a computer and people are going green. There is one battle, however, that people may not be aware of, journalists vs. bloggers. While I’m sure many bloggers consider themselves journalists, it should be noted that generally there is a difference between the two.

First of all, anyone can be a blogger (look at me!) so there is a lot of garbage to rummage through (look at me!) but a good blogger can go up against a good journalist any day. The main part about becoming a good writer is just writing a lot and bloggers can do plenty of that.

Then there is the other difference: volume. Bloggers just put out more material. It might be shorter in length, but good bloggers post often. Now some may say quality over quantity, which may be true, but what quality might be lost with blogs I argue is made up with timeliness and precision. Timeliness is obvious, bloggers can just post whenever they want and if an editor is involved for some reason, they know to act fast. It’s the precision which inspired me to write this blog post. You might have heard the term burying the lead before, which refers to a writer taking the most pertinent information (the lead) and putting it too far down in the article (therefore burying it). Journalists try to avoid this. For proof, go read an article about something that spans five or more paragraphs. You’ll notice (generally) the article starts getting pretty boring near the end of it. That’s because all the juicy stuff is at the top of the article. The ultimate example of this is reading a headline of an article on The Onion and realizing that’s all you need, the funny quip at the top. Bloggers don’t have this problem. Since they pump out so much volume, the articles are shorter and to the point with the boring stuff cut out. It doesn’t feel like a chore reading the whole thing. If you want the boring stuff you click on a link in the blog or check Wikipedia.