Growing up in the shadow of Monticello, I was raised on tales of Jefferson's taste for wine—after all, the estate had its own vineyards, distillery, and acres of crocuses for saffron. What had us all buzzing were the acres of hemp—local heads maintained that TJ never missed a hemp harvest. Right.
Don't recognize the name? He's the guy who brought you Two Buck Chuck's. He 's a bit of a bully and he's crude—and, as Joel Stein notes, that's when someone with a notebook is following him around.
"'Music's first offering, an eclectic, disparate, but mostly functional compendium of influences from 5000 B.C. to present day, hints that this trend's time may not only have fully arrived, but is already on the wane,' [editor in chief Ryan] Schreiber wrote. 'If music has any chance of keeping our interest, it's going to have to move beyond the same palatable but predictable notes, meters, melodies, tonalities, atonalities, timbres, and harmonies.'"
I grew up in Charlottesville, VA, where E.A. Poe briefly attended college without matriculating. I used to visit Poe's bedchamber, which has been preserved as a memorial,and gawp at artifacts that almost certainly had no connection to him. Somehow I had the impression that we Charlottesvillians appreciated his gothic world view more than other folks.
It's funny, but everybody knows the Edsel was a flop and a wretched car. Everybody that is, except people who own one. I've known four people who were proud Edsel owners and their cars were all great rides.
Really want to protect New Orleans? Restore the Mississippi Deltaic Plain. The Army Corps of Engineers—those busy little khaki covered beavers—have much more than those sub-par levees to answer for.