USAToday has more. Kentucky, in this case, is a notable exception.
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Archive for April, 2008
Like many Wordpress blogs, this one has been attacked by some sort of spam-injectin’ exploit. That’s why, in the RSS feed, there is often a cascade of obscenity and links to pornographic Web sites (or worse, some kind of malware for all PC users who visit the site). I’ve made some changes that I hope will fix the problem. In any case, your patience is appreciated.
… But here’s a hint: We will be having a special advance screening of Iron Man this Thursday. Here’s to hoping it goes over well. In the near future we will be spending a lot of our summer doing elaborate promotions.
I am a fan of Dick Innes. He’s an excellent researcher and former colleague of mine at the Bluegrass Institute. He’s now broken through the technical barriers to bring his message of education accountability in Kentucky to the YouTube crowd. If you care about education in Kentucky, please share these videos with as many educated and concerned folks that you can.
I live in Virginia, where every spirit is bought at wholesale and sold to the public by Virginia ABC (Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control). Virginia ABC turns over roughly $200 million to the state each year.
I’ve found that my favorite spirit, the superpremium Van Winkle Special Reserve Bourbon 12 Yr, sells for $38.95 in all VA ABC stores, which I believe includes the 20% sales tax on spirits. Virginia already has far higher taxes on spirits than most other states, including Kentucky. At any rate, the final price is lower (by at least $5) in Virginia than Kentucky.
Why do I end up paying less for a 750ml of Van Winkle in Virginia than I ever remember paying in Kentucky?
A few possible reasons:
1) Virginia’s ABC has significant monopsony power when buying spirits. By virtue of the fact that ABC can prevent certain spirits from being retailed in Virginia at all, producers sell their goodness at a lower price to the state than they would to a bevy of distributors. Virginia has good reason to “negotiate” lower prices. It allows them to charge their 20% alcohol sales tax without the customer being much the wiser.
2) Virginia’s ABC has significant monopsony power in the location of liquor stores. Perhaps having a Virginia ABC store in your strip mall is an amenity that creates large shopping externalities, large enough perhaps for you to offer cheaper rent. Is ABC is able to get a better deal on rent than independent, licensed stores?
3) No retail distributors means no distributor cut. Cutting out the middleman means distributor rents instead accrue to customers and state government’s coffers.
My memory may be fuzzy, but I recall that a 750 of Maker’s Mark or Buffalo Trace went for $20 in Kentucky (at least at CVS), which is lower than the price I’ve found in Virginia.
Now, I’ll admit, my data are weak (I haven’t compared price lists from Virginia ABC stores and Kentucky CVS drugstores) and my memory is likely fuzzy. Yes, I do plan to investigate further. But what the heck is going on?
I would like to live in a world where carpenters make their money by building things, filmmakers make money by producing movies and kitchens make money by preparing food. Unfortunately this is not the case.
Kern’s Kitchen owns the copyright to “Derby Pie,” meaning they and only they control the rights to produce that specific pie, and only they can refer to their creation as such. If you manage to create a strikingly similar (read: exact) pie in your home or restaurant, you might well be infringing on their legal rights.
Chef Rick Paul found this out this week. Kern’s Kitchen sent a private investigator into his Frankfort restaurant to catch Paul in the nefarious and outrageous act of selling food to customers. The nerve.
Kern’s has promptly gotten the courts involved, a practice they are not at all shy about employing. Having pacified Iraq, stopped global terrorism, bolstered the economy, achieved energy independence and made our public schools the envy of the world, the government now has plenty of resources for pie-gate.
Over the years, Cox said Kern’s has probably filed 25 lawsuits, “and we have prevailed on every single one. We tend to get larger settlements when it’s a second offense.”
At first, “we put people on notice and ask them to sign a letter agreeing not to infringe,” Cox said. “When they sign the letter, we keep a record. The next time, we sue them.”
Kern’s biggest cash award in a court case “has probably been $25,000 or $30,000,” Cox said.
Thus says the Frankfort State-Journal. Kern’s Kitchen isn’t the only one pouring money into litigation as opposed to gastronomy. If you hold a raffle for a big screen TV to watch the NFL’s well known championship game, you better not refer to it as the Super-you-know-what. That name’s copyrighted. The NFL can and will ask you to stop. The same applies to the large college basketball tournament commonly held in the third month of the year.
So if anyone needs me, I will be in my kitchen trying out pie recipes and thinking of popular-sounding names for them. I’m thinking of some kind of lemon custard thing with a light egg foam on top, but nothing is solid yet. I could make a fortune charging other people for the right to sell it…
In the meantime, I will let Chef Paul have the last word, since he usually does anyway:
“I think they probably would be better served going after some of these people on the Internet that are advertising Derby Pie as their own recipe, every day.”
I got home from work at about 3:00 am this morning. I did some minor things around the house, got a snack, turned on a movie and went to bed.
I was still awake at 4:37 am when the house started a strange quivering. It was like the wind from a strong thunderstorm, only continuous. I would guess it lasted from 30 seconds to one minute. It was an earthquake centered in Illinois that I felt all the way in southcentral Kentucky.
You can see a REALLY fantastic seismic recording of the earthquake on this page, for at least a while. See if you can spot the earthquake:
It was disconcerting to say the least.
As Derby day approaches and many Kentuckians dig out their silver cups and refresh their memory regarding their mint julep recipe, I feel a need to fix something. Do not, do not, do not ever follow this recipe, method, or… well, anything really.
The link goes to Jeffrey Morganthaler’s discussion about one very, very wrong way to make a… well, some sort of drink that claims to be a mint julep at least.
However, the young lady in the video was clearly chosen for two reasons — neither of which is her skill or ability.
