In February, I had a post about the Bronx and the neighborhood I grew up in. I mentioned The Bronx Ale House. I was under the impression that the Ale House had taken over an old Irish neighborhood bar, The Punch Bowl. Today I was actually in my old neighborhood and saw that The Punch Bowl is still there on the corner of 238th and Broadway. The Bronx Ale House is also on 238th, a couple of doors down. Now all I have to do is to go to both and see if The Punch Bowl is still the same and what kind of craft beer the Ale House has.
Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category
The Punch Bowl is Still The Punch Bowl
Friday, August 20th, 2010News
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010I recently got a yearlong appointment as a Five College Women’s Studies Research Center Associate. I actually found out in April but I have been very busy and a little reluctant to toot my own horn. I got the associateship because of my new project, Dames, Dishes, and Degrees. I also will be giving a paper at the History of Education Society 50th annual meeting in November and I will be giving a poster presentation at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours putting the above information on my website. That felt a little strange because of course my website is entitled Amy Mittelman Brewing Battles. I have many questions about how I will maintain a focus on beer and Brewing Battles and move towards prompting and discussing the new book.
I have been on Twitter for about six months and I am one tweet away from 100. As if have probably said before I feel twitter is best for things I probably would not blog about. I also like that you can follow a conversation about trending or immediate events. It is a lot of fun to follow #Yankees during a Yankee game.
I still have not really figured out how my various online activates connect or should connect. I had decided to keep tweeting and the blog separate but I am rethinking that. I also do not really see how to keep the website vibrant since most of the new content winds up on the blog. One idea I have is to put my twitter feed on the website, but I am not sure how to do that. I also think it would be nice to give my readers the opportunity to tweet about the blog. Again, I will have to figure out how to do that.
Getting the Associateship is a wonderful opportunity; I am most excited about having a Mount Holyoke College library card. I feel motivated to think about new directions for both my work and my online presence.
7-Eleven Beer
Friday, April 16th, 2010Alan McLeod has an interesting link in his A Good Beer Blog today. Apparently, 7-Eleven plans to sell premium private label beer at budget prices. The full story is here.
City Brewing Company will produce the beer for the convenience store chain. City is located in La Crosse, Wisconsin in the old Heileman brewery. In the past, they brewed beer for Boston Beer in the Rolling Rock, Latrobe, Pennsylvania brewery.
The key demographic group that 7-Eleven is trying to reach is young men, 21 to 27. The name of the beer is Game Day. I predict sports themed marketing.
Forty-Eight Tweets and Counting
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010I have had twitter for a while and I have adjusted to using it. It seems good for things that I would not have felt could be a post as well as political alerts and short statements. Using it for politics is particularly good since that is not something I have done that much of on the blog. I have figured out how to use a # mark and I enjoyed being part of the conversation during President Obama’s health care summit last month. I tweeted three times that day which is my record.
In the beginning, I was worried about getting people to follow me but I have completely relaxed about that. Right now, I have seven followers, which is fine. Like most things on the Internet, building a following will take time.
Now that I am tweeting regularly, I have also realized that my blog posting and twitter are two separate activities. I do tweet whenever I have a new post but that is about it. I thought I wanted real integration of the two with tweets being automatically generated from posts and vice a versa. I have discovered I do not want that at all.
On my website, amymittelman.com, I have a pretty, blue bird with the Twitter symbol. I thought I wanted that on the blog also, but again I do not. Part of my reluctance to merge the two things is that my wordpress blog is quirky.
Wordpress.com does not really recognize my blog. That was part of the explanation for why it took me so long to find out that there were site statistics for the blog. For a variety of reasons, I have to log in as “admin”. I certainly would not want posts that were authored by “admin”.
The low tech and separateness of my current practice for blogging and tweeting turns out to be just right.
The Bronx
Sunday, February 14th, 2010Today’s New York Times has an article about the Kingsbridge neighborhood, in the Bronx. I lived in this area from the age of eleven until I went to college. I have been in every place mentioned in the article many times. I have also traveled on the No.1 train more times than I can remember.
No. 1 Train (Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times)
I first saw this article on the website, Bronx News Network. One of the places mentioned in the article, The Bronx Ale House, was the feature picture of the BNN in November and will be the site of a fundraiser for the website.
Years ago, the Bronx Ale House was The Punch Bowl, a standard Irish bar like many others in the Bronx during the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I hope to visit the Bronx Ale House, which is now a craft beer bar, the next time I visit my family or go to a Yankee game.
Bronx Ale House
The Times article also mentioned S&S cheesecake. This is the best cheesecake I have ever had and I highly recommend it.
This post is my 100th post on word press. If you count the thirty-eight posts I did manually on my website, amymiittelman.com, I am closing in on 150 altogether.
Federal Beer Tax Decrease Unlikely
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Every day I get Google alerts about the brewing industry. Today I got one that linked to a Northern Michigan TV news story about a possible decrease in federal beer taxes. Apparently the proposed legislation would cut the small brewers tax in half and reduce what large brewers pay by one-ninth.
The video showed an earnest craft brewer, at his plant, indicating how he could use the extra money to grow his business. It also showed an appealing pint of beer.
Craft Brewer
I thought I should see if anyone else was talking about this so I typed into Google “federal beer tax decrease.” Google responded, “Did you mean to search for: federal beer tax increase.”
I think that tells the whole story. It is very unlikely, in this economic climate, that beer taxes will go down. It remains more likely that beer and other “sin” taxes would go up to help finance health care reform and other projects of the Obama administration.
Comments,Spam, and Statistics
Monday, January 4th, 2010On New Year’s Eve, I downloaded a plug-in for wordpress that compiles statistics about my blog. Doing this was a bit of an adventure since wordpress.com did not recognize my blog or its existence. I did finally get it to work but the information might not be worth all the effort. There is the most data on what people search to get to my blog. Julie Andrews is, by far, the most frequently used key word string. This is a little surprising since I wrote about Mary Poppins and Julie Andrews once. You can read that post here.
Do a lot of people wake up every morning and decide to search on Google and other search engines for what is up with Julie Andrews? Since I usually think that hardly anyone really reads this blog, it is possible that the thirty-five people who searched for Julie Andrews yesterday and wound up at my site are not real. This information could be recording some kind of spam.
Getting comments is great because it is concrete evidence of readership. I am always thrilled when I get a comment. Unfortunately, more often than not, the comment is also spam. I have another plug-in for my blog, akismet, which filters and monitors spam comments. Apparently, it has already protected me from over 400 pieces of spam.
Akismet lets me look at each comment it has identified as spam and decide whether to accept or not. It is very easy to reject the ones that are in a foreign language. The more difficult ones are those that say nice things about a post but still Akismet says it is spam. I usually try to see what the commenter’s website looks like and if they have a “real” blog or not. By real, I mean if they have ongoing posts, categories, and things like that. I never accept a comment if I think that another person reading the comment on my blog would wind up being directed to a site that is selling things or is inappropriate in language or display.
No one commented on the post that talked about Mary Poppins but its existence seems to draw many people to my blog. That is if you can believe the wordpress statistics.
New Year Plans
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009My friend Jan, who blogs at Restaurant-ing Through History, has an excellent post with ideas for her blog in the coming year. I like what she did so I thought I would do the same.
I hope to post more about our recent research trip. On the way home, we stopped at Gettysburg and I have few things to say about it. We are planning more research trips so those will probably generate posts as well. One place we are thinking of going is Chicago, which would certainly enable me to compare another big city with New York.
I also hope to post more about my new project, Dames, Dishes, and Degrees. The upcoming political year promises to be very challenging so it is more than likely that I will have something to say about that.
I also plan to change the look of musings a bit. Some blogs will be leaving the blog roll and new ones taking their place. It is nothing against the ones I am removing; I just feel it is time for a change. I am now on twitter and I am hoping to display some of my tweets.
I wish everyone a healthy and happy New Year. Cheers!
Write Angles 24
Friday, November 27th, 2009Last Saturday I attended the 24th annual Write Angles conference I have attended this conference several times before and it is always a good experience. This year the two keynote speakers, Leslea Newman and Roland Merulllo both spoke about different aspects of the writing process. The theme of this year’s conference was “staying inspired.”
I had the opportunity to meet with a literary agent for fifteen minutes. I am at the beginning of my new project so my query letter and book proposal are not as detailed as they will be further along in the process. It was still good to try to pitch Dames, Dishes, and Degrees to her.
I attended three panel sessions at the conference. The first was “Self-Publishing Success” I have often thought about self-publishing. Depending on who your publisher is, as an author you may have to do a lot of marketing, publicity, and even editing on your own. Small publishers and university presses may not have the same access to the large chain book stores as large publishers do. According to Jason Rich, one of the panelists, if you self-publish you will not get your book in Barnes and Noble.
Self-publishing is appealing because you would retain control over your work and have the potential to realize greater earnings from the sale of the book.
Apparently Apple will be releasing an e-book reader in the near future and Jason felt that this would lead to greatly increased sales e-books. It is very inexpensive to self-publish an e-book.
I also attended a session on blogging and one on “How Agents Think.” The panelists who talked about blogging included Jeannine Atkins, Kathryn Hulick, B. J. Roche, and Victoria Stauss. All of them mentioned that blogging is work. Jeannine, B.J., and Victoria all have blogs that have a different focus from their websites. I would find it very difficult to maintain two completely separate web entities.
Jeannine’s blog is about the writing process; her website promotes her books. B.J. has a website, Fifty Shift for mid-life women which is not exactly a blog. Victoria runs a website, Writer Beware and blogs there. She also writes fantasy novels. These two different types of writing conflict. I have found that writing this blog helps my overall writing but it is also true that sometimes there are not enough hours in the day for both the blog and my research.
The main practical thing I took away from the conference was that I should finally take the plunge and start using social media. I have signed up for Twitter but I have only tweeted once. Stay tuned for further developments on that front.
This and That
Monday, November 16th, 2009Here are some interesting links from around the web. They are mostly alcohol related but I couldn’t resist this story about giant jellyfish.
Giant Jellyfish Washed Ashore
My favorite part of the article is that the Japanese are trying to make consumable products out of these creatures, including ice cream.
This past weekend there was a brewers festival in Manchester, New Hampshire. It was the first year and it sounds like a lot of fun.
Carla Champion, The Beer Babe, talked at a seminar entitled, ” I Wished My Girlfriend Liked Beer.” The subject of women and beer seems to have become a required element of any beer festival. As someone who has been drinking beer since I was eleven, on some level I don’t get it. I think more women probably like beer than is commonly known. It is more an advertising and marketing issue.
Roger Protz, beer-pages.com, has an interesting post about the Scottish brewer, Brewdog. Apparently they are in an issue of a newspaper, appearing lewd and drunk. He thinks this is bad for the image of brewing.
The final item is also from Scotland. The Scottish drinks company, Whyte and Mackay is drilling in Antarctica to recover 100 year old Scotch. The liquor was left there by explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. It is not clear whether they plan to drink it or not, but they do plan to see if it would be viable to start distilling it again. Didn’t McKinlay and Co., the original distillers keep records?
