No. 130: Coffee & Wine and Everything's Fine
⁂ Nashville's Alt-Daily ⁂ Coffee & Wine · Wine & Coffee · Coffee & Wine · Wine & Coffee · Much More!
Good morning, everyone.
In order to reduce targeted "dislike attacks", YouTube announced it will remove the public dislike counter which shows how many people like and dislike a particular video. Presumably, they are removing the dislike counter to protect "smaller creators", but we all know that's a bunch of bull shit. Consider the following:
- Stephen Colbert's The Vax-Scene: 5.8k 👍 / 35k 👎
- Official Trailer for Fauci: 8.2k 👍 / 131k 👎
- President Biden on Supply Chains and the Holidays: 529 👍 / 5.7k 👎
- Official Trailer for Mayor Pete: 1.5k 👍 / 10k 👎
Russian disinformation? Russians with "dislike ray guns"? Chinese infiltration? Fake news? Bot swarms? Clearly, it can't be that the majority of US citizens simply despise these people. That'd mean they don't like them!
Below, we talk about wine and coffee and offer you a nice calendar to guide you through your weekend.
Thanks for reading.
✰ AMERICANO LOUNGE
Nashville boasts of over 100 coffee shops within the city limits. Love of a good roast, which infuses the everyday nuance of American life, adds more to the blend than the buzz of caffeine. The allure of an American coffee shop offers a touchpoint for casual transactions along with an abundance of electrical outlets and free wifi.
Despite the quaint romanticism one associates with a quiet corner cafe, Americans tend to treat them more functionally. While Italians find relaxed socialisation abundant at their aromatic bistros, Americans are often found alone and enveloped in work or expanding their network with a strategic meeting—all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. In America, socialization happens when ties are loosened and hair is let down over a cocktail beyond the purview of a demanding workday, not during a casual mid-day rendezvous. However, there is one place in Nashville where the two are elegantly fused together.
Tucked away in the industrial Houston Station complex, you will find Americano Lounge; a nostalgic cafe that offers a mixture of European and American ambiance influenced by the 1930's World War II era. Nearby, animated train tracks cut through the Wedgewood/Houston historical arts district which play up its early industrial roots.
Baristas pour specialized coffee drinks as well as inspired cocktails while you lounge in velvety sofas gathered around fireplaces, settle in for a posh game of chess, or nestle yourself under the studious gaze of a Winston Churchill portrait. While the unique environment wills each patron to slow down and take a step back in time, it also offers an excellent Espresso Martini to take the edge off the abrupt change in pace.
As the holiday season kicks into full swing, Americano Lounge offers the perfect atmosphere to escape get back in touch with the more wholesome aspects of life, the camaraderie of friendship, and the enjoyment of enriching experiences.
HEADLINES
- Lee will sign COVID rules bill, but says it needs changes (Center Square) Changes would allow people to visit COvid-19 patients in end-of-life situations. Something currently prohibited.
- TDOT targets wish list with $6.5 billion from Biden’s infrastructure bill (WSMV) TDOT intends to widen Interstate 65 from the Kentucky state line to Nashville and improve Interstate 40.
- Former House Speaker Casada to retire amid FBI scrutiny (TNJ) Casada stepped down as speaker in 2019 following a text messaging scandal with his former chief of staff, Cade Cothren, and a revolt among Republican lawmakers over his heavy-handed leadership style.
DEVELOPMENT
- MarketStreet turns massive profit from Gulch land where tower is planned (Biz Journal)
- Trevecca starts work on $42M residential hall (Post)
- Miami developer pays $22M for Gulch site on Division (Post)
- Austin company pays $28.6M for Lebanon Pike apartments (Post)
✿ WHY WINE IS GOOD
What came first, the wine or the city? A different kind of chicken or egg question, but bear with me. Was wine a product of human flourishing and development, or was the city a product of people's love for wine? As many of you know, grapes are unique for their possession of natural yeasts and sugars that make them ideal fruits for fermentation.
Prior to the cultivation of wild yeasts for use in the production of various alcohols, grapes could sufficiently provide all the yeast and all the sugar needed to produce an effervescent, alcoholic drink. In the more Northern regions of the world, honey possessed similar qualities for ancient tribes of men and hence you had mead. To our knowledge, there are only two naturally occurring substances on Earth that possess the correct balance of yeast to sugar as grapes and honey that allow them to produce a sufficiently active fermented concoction without additives.
Once grapes and honey are met with a sufficient amount of water, the fermentation process will start naturally without any human intervention. As such, it's reasonable enough to assume that ancient man could've discovered the pleasures of alcohol quite by accident when, say, a beehive fell into a puddle, or some grapes left in a hollow got rained on. Days, weeks, or months might go by before another man passes the site to observe the chemical reaction taking place.
Drawn by the "living water" which bubbles and fizzes like seafoam, he would bend over, taste a grape or taste the water in which the honeycomb sits and notice something distinctly alien. Lacking any experience with the intoxicating effects of alcohol, he would feel elated.
He might not know immediately, but slowly over time, he figures out what caused this "reaction" and produced this "taste" that made him "feel" a certain way, so he begins to organize members of his clan in order to produce more of it. They cultivate grapes and divert water to irrigate the vines. They create cisterns and containers to hold the wines and allow for their development. All sorts of tools, techniques, and organizational principles emerge in response to their love for wine. The vines need be guarded against pests and foreign encroachment, and so permanent encampments form in the vicinity of the grapes.
For the residents of the Greek Isles, for example, as they settle into their lands, they fashion rituals and monuments to express their unbounded wonder and appreciation for this magical concoction. They produce elaborate pottery with intricate mosaics to contain the wine. A diety emerges who embodies the "madness of the vine"—Dionysus—and from this diety come festivals in his honor. These festivals slowly become more sophisticated and culminated in the creation of a primitive art form, the Ancient Greek Tragedy. The explosion of Greek Tragedy in Athens in the 5th-century BCE marked the highwater line for Athenian culture. Sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of Athens, Euripides, Sophocles, Socrates, and Plato all wandered the streets of Athens around this time. Plato is noted for saying, "There is truth in wine and children" and it's doubtless true that he, like the rest of Athens, took full advantage of the bountiful gifts offered by the drink of the vine—wine.
Things to Do
🖼 Medieval Bologna: Art for a Universal City opened at the Frist on Friday. It's the first museum exhibition in the United States to focus on medieval art made in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Home to the oldest university in Europe, Bologna fostered a unique artistic culture at the end of the Middle Ages (Info)
Today
🎸 Dinosaur Jr. @ Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, 8:00PM, $27.50, Info
🤠 Dylan Smucker @ Acme Feed & Seed, 5:00PM, Free, Info
🎺 Freddie T. Holt and the Mix @ Bourbon Street Blues & Boogie, 10p, Info
Tomorrow
🎻 Sam Bush @ City Winery, 8p, $40-$50, Info
🍔 Fall Food Truck Park + Flea Market @ The Marketplace East Nashville, 11:00AM, Free, Info
🐉 Godzilla (1954) @ The Belcourt, 12:50PM, $11.50, Link
Sunday
🎹 Rudy’s Jazz Jam @ Rudy’s Jazz Room, 9:00PM, $10, Info
🌾 Old Time Jam @ The American Legion Post 82, 7:30PM, Free, Info
🐉 Godzilla (1954) @ The Belcourt, 12:50PM, $11.50, Link
Around the Web
◉ You Are What You Eat — and Invest The premise for investing is pretty simple: to grow your money. It’s as simple as the reason for eating: to satisfy your hunger.
✪ What Is Texas? What Is Texas? The fight over the Lone Star State’s identity
Political Theater Highlight Reel
- Joy Reid claims future Republican electoral victories shouldn't be trusted
- Kamala Harris Uses a Fake French Accent to Talk to French People
- NYC Black Lives Matter Threatens Bloodshed, Riots in City if Anti-Crime Units Reinstated
Words of Wisdom
"There is truth in wine and children"
Plato, Symposium