"Retirement Plan."

An Oscar-nominated short, by John Kelly:

And here's David Sedaris brilliantly admiring it, in "The Dream of Finishing One’s To-Do List in 'Retirement Plan'/In John Kelly’s animated short film, narrated by Domhnall Gleeson, nothing’s off limits when it comes to thinking about the future—particularly when there’s so much left to do" (The New Yorker):

"A lot of people have a misconception that the Boomers are drinking less... It’s not because the Boomers are drinking less, it’s because there are less Boomers."

Said Jon Phillips, a Sonoma County wine manufacturer, quoted in "California winery owner gives hottest take yet on why industry is dying" (NY Post).

Why wouldn't the next generation step up as consumers of wine?

“[Boomers] were the people that were really responsible for joining wine clubs and Gen X that came after Boomers just weren’t really into wine to the same level that the Boomers were into wine,” [Phillips] said.

Gen X never wants to do anything. Phillips is waiting for Millennials and Gen Zs to mature into the wine-drinking way of life. I guess I should hope he's disappointed. 

"I saw people who were downcast, who can take no more, who are at the end of their tether. Even a revolt is beyond them."

Said Joël Boueilh, chairman of the winemaking co-operative federation, commenting on protesters who want the French government to help the wine industry.

Quoted in "French wine industry is withering on the vine as drinkers go dry/A collapse in demand — particularly for the heavy reds produced across southern France — coupled with climate change means the end of a way of life for many" (London Times).

Boueilh adds: "France was the land of the good life where people spent a lot of time drinking and eating. But today society is changing. People may have a drink in a bar but they don’t open a bottle of wine when they sit down to eat at the table."

Is it necessarily a loss in devotion to "the good life" or did people change their conception of the good? But he didn't say "good," did he? He would have said "douceur": "« La France était le pays de la douceur de vivre, celui où l’on prenait son temps pour manger et boire ensemble autour d’une table. »

There might be other ways of being "good," but are there other ways of being "sweet"? And more important, there is a tradition of experiencing the sweetness in a particular way, with a bottle of wine on the table at meals. 

Ah! That's for France to decide! Boueilh represents the wine industry. Of course, he's going to dramatize the centrality of wine. If I buy into that, I'm just an American accepting the most easily available stereotype.

That is, it's the stuff that belongs in the new Dictionary of Received Ideas: The French: They think the good life is sitting around drinking wine all day. 

ADDED: I wanted more depth of meaning for the word "douceur," and got excellent help from Grok. 

"Cannelloni arrived. Sausage. The sommelier poured orange wine from Virginia. Then more food, more wine. 'I’ve always loved good stuff, because I grew up with so little'..."

"Mr. Shteyngart said. His 2014 memoir, 'Little Failure,' is a chronicle of ill-fitting clothes and disapproving parents who seem convinced that he is not going to meet their traditional immigrant expectations. His father hits him at home. At school, bullies await."

From "Is Gary Shteyngart One of the Last Novelists to Make Real Money From the Craft?/Mr. Shteyngart was once told he might be. With his sixth novel, 'Vera, or Faith,' out now, he’s spent the last few years spending it well" (NYT).

About that new novel: "In an era when the charge of cultural appropriation still carries professional risk (though perhaps not quite as much risk as five years ago), Mr. Shteyngart’s decision to write in the voice of a tween Korean American girl was a bold one. He said he was partly motivated by his own son’s experience. 'He and his little friends, they mention Trump all the time,' he said. 'And when you’re growing up and you have to think about the Great Leader all the time, that’s always going to stick with you.'"

"Occasionally [Balzac] took a boiled egg at about nine o’clock in the morning or sardines mashed with butter if he was hungry; then a chicken wing or a slice of roast lamb..."

"... in the evening, and he ended his meal with a cup or two of excellent black coffee without sugar."

That was while writing a book. When he was done, “he sped to a restaurant, downed a hundred oysters as a starter, washing them down with four bottles of white wine, then ordered the rest of the meal: twelve salt meadow lamb cutlets with no sauce, a duckling with turnips, a brace of roast partridge, a Normandy sole, not to mention extravagances like dessert and special fruit such as Comice pears, which he ate by the dozen. Once sated, he usually sent the bill to his publishers.”

From "A Hungry Little Boy/Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar)" (NYRB).

Here's a tightly edited 9-minute montage of lavishing praise on Joe Biden for not pardoning his son.

All of it done, I presume, with an intent to influence the 2024 election. All of it bullshit. By the midpoint you'll have lost the capacity to take the phrase "rule of law" seriously:

One of the best supercuts ever.

President Biden won't pardon Hunter because Joe Biden is a man of great character! 🤣😂pic.twitter.com/lM8aTRGrq5

— MAZE (@mazemoore) December 2, 2024

My favorite nugget: "There's a kind of old-school, sort of flinty core to his conception of how you are to be in the system — how you are to be as a person, a moral person...."

Flinty core!

(I googled the phrase "flinty core" and setting aside a couple descriptions of a singer's voice everything was about wine, where I hear it as a fancy/bullshit way to this tastes like a rock.)

"Producers of juice-inspired alcohol say they’re not targeting kids at all, but instead adults who are perhaps nostalgic for the familiar flavors of their childhood."

"Even if they don’t drink actual fruit juice much anymore, adults might still feel affection for those colorful cartons and bottles. BeatBox co-founder Brad Schultz says... 'It’s comforting... The majority of people look at the past as a positive, and they look back with fondness.'"

I'm reading "'Juicy' is suddenly what every beer, wine and seltzer wants to be" (WaPo).

Apparently, there's a "juice-ification" trend that includes "multiple brands of 'hard juice,'" "spiked versions of juice-based beverages, including Simply Peach and SunnyD.," mystifying requests for "juicy beers," and wine that doesn't even try to imitate serious wine, but might call itself "party punch."

 

Meanwhile, nonalcoholic fruit juice is declining in popularity — as more and more people come to realize it's not a healthy option. It's loaded with sugar. You'd think people would also want to avoid extra sugar when they're drinking alcohol, but perhaps they're on a vacation from health concerns when they're drinking.

When you're dying of thirst and the only beverage is wine, should you drink it?

I'm reading "Lost woman survives 5 days in the wild on a bottle of wine" (WaPo), and I'm glad the lady survived, but did the wine help?

From a BBC Science article "On a desert island, would it be better to drink wine or go thirsty?":

"This is a story about French liberty and bureaucracy. It is about different visions of the countryside and nature."

"It’s about fire management, fights between neighbors and Brigitte Bardot. But mostly, it is about goats. No one knows exactly how many goats are in Ms. Corbeaux’s herd. From atop her homestead, around 20 miles from Narbonne, Ms. Corbeaux says there are 500. Down in the vineyards below, her neighbors say many have gone wild, and multiplied.... Ms. Corbeaux... grew up in Paris’ gritty 10th Arrondissement, and ran a computer-software company..... She moved [to]... southern France, determined to work as an energy healer. But then she clapped eyes on two baby goats at a medieval fair. 'I was hypnotized,' she said... ... Ms. Corbeaux believed she was bringing back the eco-pasturage tradition. She began receiving European Union grants for the work....  Her neighbors call her irresponsible and a 'pseudo-ecologist'.... The foundation of Brigitte Bardot... offered... 40,000 euros to build a fence... to keep the goats in.... She is grateful that a solution was found, but it brings her to tears. 'I’m in love with my billy goats, frankly. I don’t think we have the right to do whatever we want — not to kill them, nor to castrate them.... We should respect them more than that.'"

From "The Great Goat War of Southern France/A former Parisian moved to the country, fell in love with goats and let them roam free and multiply. Her winemaking neighbors are not enchanted" (NYT).

"But of all the backward ass campaign cliches to be visited upon the American public, none is more pernicious than 'beer track/wine track.'"

"What an utter abuse of metaphor. Look, I'm a liberal who lives in Manhattan. In my fridge-right now---you can find a six of Red Hook. I love beer, and instantly distrust anyone who doesn't. In fact, in college, I refused to date any girl who didn't drink beer. None of that Midori Melon and a salad bullshit for me; Nothing says sexy like a Sam Adams and chicken wings. I don't think I have a single friend (who isn't a recovering alcoholic) who doesn't like beer. Most of them drink wine too, but the official drink of young Manhattan liberals is beer, no question. Moreover, I detect a hint of racism here. This false analogy leaves no place for the many tribes of black voters--'The Hennessey Track,' 'The Curvosier [sic] Track,' 'The MGD Track.' Once again the media conspires to keep black folks out...."

Wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2008 (in The Atlantic). 

I ended up there after reading this new article at Politico, "Trump’s beer track advantage over Ron DeSantis":

Images of beer-drinking and wine-drinking in Osaka.

My son Chris is taking photographs in Japan: