CNN reports that Jay-Z (presumably among others) is boycotting Cristal champagne because of comments made my Roederer’s managing director in The Economist:

In a special summer issue of The Economist magazine, Frederic Rouzaud, managing director of Louis Roederer, said the company viewed the affection for his company’s champagne from rappers and their fans with “curiosity and serenity.”

Asked by the magazine if the association between Cristal and the “bling lifestyle” could be detrimental, Rouzaud replied:

“That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”

CNN also quotes Jay-Z:

“It has come to my attention that the managing director of Cristal, Frederic Rouzaud views the ‘hip-hop’ culture as ‘unwelcome attention,”‘ Jay-Z said in a statement released Wednesday. “I view his comments as racist and will no longer support any of his products through any of my various brands including The 40/40 Club nor in my personal life.”

Now, the phrase ‘unwelcome attention’ came from The Economist’s writer, not anyone at Roederer. Jay-Z is still pissed off. He’s still crying racism.

Because, you know, it must be because of skin color. It cannot possibly be because these people are lowlifes, or at least try very hard to appear to be what I would consider lowlifes.

Super-luxury brands like Cristal, Bentley, etc., etc. all depend on maintaining some illusion that their product is in fact much, much better than lesser competitors, and that discerning consumers (with the cash) are willing to pay several multiples of the ordinary price for a similar product because their palate is so refined that they just can’t bear choking down White Star or Veuve Cliquot.

This is necessary because nearly everyone with the money to buy Cristal — and this includes Jay-Z and Sean John “Puffy” “Puff Daddy” “P. Diddy” “Diddy” Combs, pictured above enjoying the fruit of his labors — has worked hard and made some very shrewd decisions to get to the point where spending several hundred dollars on a bottle of champagne seems plausible.

You absolutely must have the illusion that this is a product for super-connaiseurs because spending several hundred dollars on a bottle of champagne is never a reasonable proposition. In Anglo-American culture, at least, spending money solely for the purpose of being seen to spend money is gauche at best. White bankers who drink Cristal are doing it for precisely the same reason as Jay-Z, but for the product to achieve the same effect for the banker — i.e. to send the message ‘I am so successful that I can spend several hundred dollars on a bottle of champagne, when a $50 bottle is almost indistinguishable’ — it is of the utmost importance that his purchase is able to be seen, at least by himself, as not purely conspicuous consumption. Otherwise, he’s not saying ‘I’m successful’, but rather ‘I’m a chump’.

So the conspicuous-consumption culture of much of the rap world these days not only threatens the super-luxury brands because that world is all about overt conspicuous consumption, but because the highest-profile representatives of the culture go out of their way to appear uncouth to the mainstream. They want to be seen as pimps, hustlers, and thugs, motivated only by the basest things.

This is not going to help sell Cristal to the vast majority of people who can afford it: the banker doesn’t want to be associated with the pimp/hustler/thug culture, he doesn’t want to be seen to be conspicuously consuming, and he doesn’t want to be seen as merely following a trend — especially a trend set by people like Jay-Z.

But morons like Jay-Z et al. choose not to see this, or even to see that the Roederer guy was in fact very circumspect about his company’s feelings. Jay-Z instead prefers to see everything as being about his skin color. People who judge him by the color of his skin are bigots: and even if somehow they weren’t, there’s nothing that Jay-Z can do about the color of his skin. By claiming that everyone who criticizes him, or who even seems to criticize him, or who doesn’t approve of him 100% (i.e. anyone who doesn’t ‘celebrate & discover’ him) as a racist (or at least a ‘hata’), Jay-Z essentially exempts himself from criticism.

This might work well enough for Jay-Z, because he goes home to a giant pile of $100 bills every night (usually I would mean this strictly as a metaphor, but I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to find that he has a Scrooge McDuck Money Bin somewhere in his house). It’s a disservice to a lot of people who take him seriously, though, because it’ll discourage them from self-improvement of any kind, and thus keep almost all of them from ever being able to afford Cristal at all.

Starting this morning, I have consciously been attempting to take a lot of cameraphone pictures, uploading them to Flickr as soon as possible.

Most of these pictures come from my Treo 650, even though the PPC-6700 has a superior camera. The problem is that the PPC-6700’s e-mail client and other software is so horrid, user-hostile, and bug-ridden that it’s on balance better to use the Treo’s inferior camera and superior everything else.

Note that the Treo is also horribly buggy: it’s just that the PPC-6700 is even worse.

You can see the pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/tinotopia — I will keep this up for as long as I can stand it.

This morning, we decided to go to Burger King for breakfast. Don’t knock it — they have very good coffee, and the basic ingredients of breakfast are the same no matter where you go.

We got there at 6:58 a.m., or two minutes before Burger King opens on a Sunday. So we waited. When they didn’t open on the dot of 7 a.m., one of the other would-be Burger King customers left. We decided to be a bit more tolerant.

When they didn’t open at 7:05 — and when the employees clearly visible within ignored knocking on the door etc. — we, too, left. Our decision was based not so much on indignation at the sheer effrontery of them not opening on time — though you’ll note that they’re not willing to cut you any slack, either: they won’t serve you breakfast at 10:35 a.m. — but on the theory that we didn’t want to deal with Burger King employees who so clearly demonstrated their disdain for the customer.

We still wanted Burger King for breakfast, though, so we headed off to Maplewood. We had to go to Maplewood because the next nearest Burger King to us was closed: like, closed for good, boarded up, presumably because it hadn’t been profitable. Interesting, that.

When we got to Maplewood, it was 7:20 a.m.

When we got to Maplewood, the Burger King there was still not open.

When we were leaving the parking lot there, I saw the manager of the place through the drive-thru window, and I pulled up. Before I said anything, she said ‘We closed!’

I said that the sign on the door said that they were supposed to have opened twenty minutes ago. She gave me a dirty look — a look so dirty that I’m pretty sure she wished me dead. She then turned and walked away.

It is further interesting to note that Burger King went public last week. Who the hell would want to buy stock in this company? Today’s experience was extraordinary, but not particularly surprising. The Burger King corporate culture, at the retail level, seems to consistently see customers as an unwelcome inconvenience.

After leaving Burger King, we went to the McDonald’s around the corner and got breakfast with a minimum of difficulty (they only made my bagel wrong twice before getting it right).

The BBC reports that the deputy chief constable of the North Wales Police has said that flying the English flag in Wales — which is apparently being done a lot just now because of the World Cup — ‘could lead to racism and violence’.

Mr Wolfendale, who is English, said there is a place for flag-waving during the World Cup.

But he believes that in the weeks before the tournament, the sight of the English flag being displayed on cars “frequently and overtly” is “unnecessary”.

Mr Wolfendale said: “I’m an Englishman and I’ll be supporting England during the World Cup campaign and if I was at the game or in and around the stadium there’s a fair chance I might be waving the flag.

“But I think there comes a point when weeks before the tournament the incessant use of these symbols is a bit in your face and I just wish people would sometimes reflect on the impact that’s having on others.”

That’s actually quite a reasonable and intelligent statement: People should reflect on the impact that their actions are having on others. It’s absurd only in that it should be so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said.

He said that displaying the flag was not illegal but that in Wales it was a “matter of courtesy and of decent behaviour” for England fans not to do so.

He added: “There’s no doubt about it that this can be the precursor to behaviour which is much worse than flag waving - it’s violence, it’s racism, it’s hooliganism of the very worse kind.”

More sage words. In the United States, everyone waves flags all the time; the U.S. is easily the most flag-happy democracy on the planet. In England, I get the impression that flying an English flag — particularly as opposed to the Union Flag — seems to be about differentiating yourself, often in a pugnacious way, from the Scots, Welsh, Irish, wogs, etc., etc.

So I’ll assume that Mr. Wolfendale has his head screwed on, and that he’s not trying to suppress the culture but to call on people to be considerate. Good on him.

Why, though, have we heard no general warning from the government about the inadvisability, the rudeness, and the potential incitement to violence, of things like this:

So it’s getting on six months since I’ve had anything to say here. Actually, that’s not true. It’s been almost six months since I’ve had the gumption to say anything here. There are two reasons for this:

1. Busy (30%)
2. Movable Type — the system formerly used to run most of this site — sucks (70%)

Amazingly, there are only 103 Google matches for the phrase “Movable Type sucks”; this must be because everyone who has come to believe that Movable Type sucks isn’t able to let anyone else know abotu this, because their websites are all dead because, well, see #2 above.

The particular way in which Movable Type sucked for me was that comment spammers — of whom there are a lot — would regularly DOS the whole server when they started trying to post ten comments a second. I had to turn off comments for the whole site, and even though I only got about two non-spam comments a week, I found that without this feedback mechanism most of my motivation to write anything here disappeared.

So I’m busy. Not necessarily too busy to hold forth on the important issues of the day like Why Those Bastards At Burger King Should Be Flogged, but too busy to smoothly switch everything to some other system and also hold forth etc.: so to hell with smoothness. All the old stuff is still at http://tinotopia.com/log/, as well as in WordPress. As time permits, I’ll come up with some kind of original look instead of this canned theme, and set up redirects so that everyone comes directly to the posts as presented by the new system, In the meantime, I have complaining to do.