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Our neighbors across the street called me in February, 2009 to tell me they were dissatisfied with a new bottle of wine.  The husband refused to drink it.  I was asked if I might want to try as the bottle was only a half glass shy of full.  I said yes thinking that at the very least the wine could go into a crock pot in place of water to add some modicum of distinction.  That evening I poured a half wine glass and tried the wine out.  It did not taste like anything I had ever tried before, quite bad, almost disgusting.  I let my wife try it and she poured her glass out after one sip.  When I first took a sip I think I detected a slight olive flavor but that was as good as it got.  We score wines being average with a 50 score.  This wine was below Trader Joe’s two buck chuck, way below.  We score this wine as undrinkable with a score of 5 out of 100.  It is not even good enough for crock pot use and if you have a bottle, take it back to the store where you purchased it and ask for your money back.

We have no idea how much our neighbors paid for this bottle.  We have tried Sutter Home wines in the past and this bottle seems way below our past experience.  It seemed to me that they tried to blend this wine with some other ingredients and totally blew it.  It might be possble that the bottle, we sampled, was not stored properly or had a defective cork but we rank wines as they come to us as we can not determine prior handling.

Watching Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Federal Reserve, testify before a congressional committee, February 10, 2009, the proceedings raised some concern as to the mechanics of conducting the meeting.  Each committee member is allowed to ask questions within a set amount of time, I believe 5 minutes.  Just about all the questions were pretty darn good and right on target.  At times it seemed each committee member was in competition for achieving that night the best sound bite for TV news shows and including time consuming remarks about how his or her constituents were in pain about this devastating recession.  Many of the questions were painted with conservative vs liberal values which also added verbiage.  At times, the most important, deep in complexity  questions were stated for too long a period so that Bernanke had not time to respond.  The chairman stated that Bernanke could respond in writing which will be hard for you and I to flush out to read.   If one were to sum up the proceedings, the effort seemed to reveal very little new information but became a course in Federal Reserve policy that would be quite nice for high school and college courses.

Three suggestions:

• The committee chairman might ask each committee member to limit questions to two minutes thus giving three minutes for answers.  I am sure that will go over really big with the senators.

• The individual that testifies before the committee is allowed a set number times he or she can go beyond the time limit a personal option that they are allowed to exercise.  This, I think, is a decent middle ground, reasonable solution.

• The most radical idea is to have an individual sit beside the chairman who represents the interest of the people to extend comment periods to another set time limit.  Each activation of this option may only be exercised a few times in total per session or per hour.  This person might come from a rotating list of government watchdog organizations.  This individual can ONLY extend the answer segment and can NOT make any, on the record, statements but remain mute in the process only indicating to the chairperson to extend the witness comments, the answer time.  This idea is too complex to be taken seriously.   It is prone to being morphed into something more or less than it was intended by some of the senators.  It’s recommendation is only put forth here for purpose that the senate might take to it because it is so muddy and prone to being morphed into political leverage that we do not yet see and thus might be honey on a stick and meet some amount of consideration.