Acquired

Coca-Cola remains emblematic of the best and worst of America. It is a microcosm of American history. Coca-Cola grew up with the country, shaping and shaped by the times. The drink helped to alter not only consumption patterns, but attitudes towards leisure, work, advertising, sex, family, life, and patriotism.

At last he stood on the verge of inventing Coca-Cola. Down in the basement, Pemberton filled his 40-gallon kettle with plain water, which he then heated to a boil over an open fire. Using a wooden paddle to stir the solution, he melted in sugar and caffeine.

Exactly how much cocaine went into the inaugural batch of Doc Pemberton's new soft drink syrup is impossible to calculate more than a century later. But with even a touch of the drug, in combination with the sugar and caffeine, four times the amount in today's coke made Pemberton's concoction quite a stimulating beverage.

Asa made his son memorize the contents of the various containers that were stored carefully in a locked room with their labels peeled or scratched off. For days, with his father standing watch over his shoulder, Howard practiced making the ultra-secret flavoring compound, Merchandise Number 7X, learning to recognize the pungent fruit and vegetable oils by sight, smell, and remembering each was put on the shelf when it came in from the supplier until he knew by heart the proper amounts and the exact order in which to mix them.

Hearthstone, which is basically a, um, uh, video game online version of Magic the Gathering, which I probably lost a year of my life being addicted to and, and have went through rehab and I'm out of it now.

They, they, they morphed into what became, I think things called like Facebook creative labs. And that, I don't know if that group is still around, but that existed for a few years and they birthed Facebook paper, which then became instant articles.

When you get what you want in your struggle for self and the world makes you king for a day, just go to the mirror and look at yourself and see what that man has to say?

He's the fellow to please, never mind all the rest. For he's with you clear to the end. And you've passed your most difficult, dangerous test.

I'm recommending The Dark Valley, a panorama of the 1930s by Piers Brendan.

It's part of, uh, a lot of his posts are, are, uh, basically the pre-writing for a book called Managing Humans that he's got. So I think I haven't read the book yet. It'll probably be my carve out when I actually do read it, but, um, highly recommend it.

But it's one of these books that I probably should read every year. And, you know, I'm just just reading for the second time now. But it's called On Writing Well.

And it's a really great, very enjoyable to read book that harps on the importance of writing in plain English, using one word when you can instead of two or three or ten, eliminating kind of colloquial phrases that are, you know, not adding anything to the piece and really decluttering your writing and having clarity of thought.

But my fiction for the year is actually a whole multiple series of books. But I finally read the entire Isaac Asimov canon. Not not all the books that he wrote, but the robot series, the Empire series and the Foundation series, which are all separate series.

one of the books I read this year was one of the top selling books in 2016 was that the life changing magic of tidying up the Japanese art of decluttering. All about removing physical things that there's there's too much. Many people have too many physical things in their life and you need to remove them.

Michael McCambridge has a great quote in The Beginning of America's Game, where he says, to say that baseball was the number one sport in America is to imply a hierarchy where none existed. Baseball towered above the sporting landscape like a colossus, the unquestioned national pastime, the only game that mattered.