One’s champagne birthday, also called a golden birthday, is the day when the age someone turns is the same as the day in the month he or she was born. It is also common for the birthday individual to have champagne, thus champagne birthday.

Of all the Golden Birthdays to have, 30 is a pretty damn good one. And this explains the gigantic bottle of champagne I got.

I’ve been catching up on podcasts from the Commonwealth Club and the Commonwealth Club INFORUM. I’ve had the Commonwealth Club podcasts in my iTunes for a while. INFORUM is a relatively recent addition. The whole idea of INFORUM just tickles me. It’s “a division of the Commonwealth Club by and for people in their 20s and 30s.”

I just listened to one on internet privacy called “2007: Is it 1984?” hosted by Annalee Newitz whom I’ve actually met before! At the BlogHer meetup at SXSW ’07. She’s super cool and smart as hell. Great discussion on the differences between common understanding of privacy vs the legal definition and whether or not privacy policies carry any legal weight. Missy and I both made the observation that it’s really interesting how privacy infringements are always made in the name of (national) security. “It’s in your best interest.” How Big Brother.

I just listened to one on hot young sommeliers in the Bay Area and it totally reminded me of my friend Tony who, of course, I consider to be a hot young sommelier in the Bay Area. I totally got lost once they started rattling off varietals, but they did have some good comments on restaurant offerings and your expectations as a diner. Takeaway #1: Don’t obsess over what you think the (low) price of your wine choice might say about you; if it’s on the wine list, it’s recommended. Takeaway #2: Never be afraid to ask the sommelier for help, regardless of how much you do or don’t know about wine. Some guidelines are helpful, e.g., “I’d like to spend $30 on a bottle to go with this dish.”

Now I’m listening to a second installment on the future of music. The host kicked it off with a summary of five copywrongs – things the recording industry government, corporations, and other bodies have done or are doing as a result of their inability/refusal to embrace the changes that are occurring and that are completely unreasonable and jeopardizing the future and the business of music distribution.

1. manipulation of copyright law. e.g., eliminating Fair Use which would require you to purchase a separate copy of a song for each device you want to put it on
2. Targeting internet radio with royalty fees
3. criminalizing attempted copyright infringement (i.e., the Copyright Protection Act)
4. “outrageous lawsuits against ordinary people” which “amount to extortion” and for which the “justification is public education through intimidation.”
5. lawsuits against popular internet companies; e.g., Prince suing eBay/YouTube/The Pirate Bay instead of fans that violate the law

There’s something new and great on a huge range of topics and current events almost weekly. In the iTunes store: [Commonwealth Club] [INFORUM]

I know there are all kinds of biologically good reasons why Aunt Flo comes every month and I know that your body gets really unhappy when you muck with that. But damn, that is a pain in the ass, especially if you have no intention of reproducing.

But if I could use all that shedded material to make muscle cells, that would be pretty damn cool.

Scientists obtained menstrual blood from nine women and cultivated it for about a month, focusing on a kind of cell that can act like stem cells.

Some 20 percent of the cells began beating spontaneously about three days after being put together in vitro with cells from the hearts of rats. The cells from menstrual blood eventually formed sheet-like heart-muscle tissue.

The success rate is 100 times higher than the 0.2-0.3 percent for stem cells taken from human bone marrow, according to Shunichiro Miyoshi, a cardiologist at Keio University’s school of medicine, who is involved in the research.

Separate in-vivo experiments showed that the condition of rats who had suffered heart attacks improved after they received the cells derived from menstrual blood.

So they’re not actually stem cells, but they can be made into particularly good muscle cells. And keeping your own menstrual blood for future cell generation eliminates the risk that your body will reject treatment.

Science is awesome.

I love Clarence‘s t-shirt. I want to know what the rule is, though.

(And I kinda keep wanting to refer to Missy as “the wifey.”)

MIssy cracks my shit up.

While we were in Costa Rica, Missy took to calling me “mi poquita piña” (“my little pineapple”) or “Piña” for short.

I came home from work one day to find this little guy on the counter.

I don’t consider the Minneapolis Metblog and MNspeak to be direct competitors. I don’t even have a good sense of whether folks out there consider us to be competitors. We both have the same basic goal of talking about what’s going on in the Twin Cities. The format’s different. The approach is different. Whatever the hell the metrics are of a “successful” site (metrics are debatable anyway) I don’t have enough data on either site to draw any comparisons.

I, for the most part, enjoy MNspeak. Let me just get that out of the way. I only started paying real attention to it near the end of the Rex Sorgatz era (Rex created the site). I think Max has done as fine as job as he can do in his duties as editor.

Why am I even talking about this?

Due to non-updated credit card information, MNspeak’s domain name expired yesterday and the site was down for the better part of the morning.

A comment at the Minnesota Monitor suggested that this misstep was indicative of the state of things behind the scenes at mnspeak. And I agreed.

Tom Bartel, who publishes The Rake and whose son, Matt, owns MNspeak, hopped in the comments and got snippy with me. He responded directly to me (not to the original commenter). And that’s what lead to this comment. I’m not mad or threatened. I’m just saying. Tom got touchy even though, when it’s convenient, he likes to remind people that he doesn’t actually own MNspeak or have anything to do with the operation thereof. That’s just how Tom is, I’ve learned. Blustery and cranky. That’s cool.

I’ve… expressed opinions about MNspeak [1] [2].

I still feel badly about the public accusation of bad netiquette on Max’s part. It just doesn’t seem like something Max would do, from what I know of Max. At the same time, anyone can post at mnspeak. Matt Bartel was in charge of daily posting for a long while. I still firmly believe that links which came through Metblogs (and other places) ended up in a mnspeak post without attribution and that one was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Today, rounding up the techier side of City Pages’ annual Best of the Twin Cities issue, Paul Schmelzer notes that “MNspeak hasn’t implemented any site updates since [Rex] sold it in 2006; by outward appearances, at least, that still seems to be the case.”

My point here is that on several occasions I’ve brought MNspeak up as a topic on Metblogs and there was an outpouring of opinions on MNspeak in the comments. The users have something to say about the state of the site.

As a Metblog captain, I have sympathy.

I have control of and responsibility for certain things. But there are certain things that I have no control of at all. This was most abundantly clear over the 6 months in which the new WordPress backend for the Metblog network was “almost ready.” Where we felt the pain the most in Minneapolis was new author sign ups. Every once in a while you have to recruit new folks when old folks get bored or busy. And previously those signups went through Metblogs “corporate.” We had no local control over account creation, and account creation was a manual process. So while we desperately needed new accounts created, we couldn’t do it because of the state of the backend conversion and the availability of folks responsible for account creation.

I do realize it was a massive technical undertaking with somewhat limited resources. I know a lot of that was a necessary evil. I really do. Doesn’t mean it didn’t still hurt us.

MNspeak and Metblog don’t necessarily have the same problems, but I can understand how it might be a little frustrating to have one’s hands tied.

While MNspeak may not be broken, per se, (okay, the local blog aggregator is totally broken) you need a little refresh every once in a while. Create some news. Classic marketing. The fact is that all outward appearances indicate that behind-the-scenes at MNspeak is murky. I’m a little bored with it. I read the posts, but I don’t hang out in the comments like I used to.

MNspeak, for better or for worse, gets lots of public feedback. I have yet to come across more than a thumbnail sketch of what Minneapolis Metblog might be doing right or wrong. Maybe folks don’t pay us that much attention. I can tell you what I have on my to do list (whether or not it’s actually getting done). I can tell you what I think of the new design and the new features (including those which have not yet debuted). But my perspective is different from y’all’s. And that’s a whole ‘nother post.

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