The New York Times has this interesting essay about the plight of a bourbon-loving woman, trying to get bartenders to fill her bourbon-and-soda with the same bourbon-heavy ratio that they immediately serve to men. I am all in favor of the fairly enthusiastic consumption of bourbon whiskey by both sexes, but confess that I do wonder where the author got this aberrant idea of putting fizzy water in her perfectly good bourbon, which ought to need nothing but a couple of ice cubes (at most) to soften it.

In preparation for next week's season debut, I finished Veronica Mars Season 2 last night, and therefore finally read the comments-threads at Ted Frank's and Amber Taylor's blogs. My defense of Season 2 and other thoughts ensue:

Criticism of Season Two, of which I am staunch defender, appears to fall into four main camps.

Camp One: the collection of assorted technical nitpicks-- arguable procedural errors during the trial of Aaron Echolls or One Angry Veronica, retrospectively odd behavior by Beaver, lots of college-application and computer-security errors, and so on. Some of Ted's comments here and much of the nitpicking thread at TWOP fall into this category. I frankly blow most of these off. One can theorize procedural rules under which the Echolls trials make sense, and I see no reason that shows set in fictional locations should not be permitted to have fictional law, so long as it is internally consistent. At any rate, I don't think the number of validly picked nits in Season 2 was any greater or more significant than those in Season 1, so this is a wash.

Camp Two: complaints about the pacing of the season, in particular the basic problem that "nothing happens" with respect to the bus crash investigation for basically the first half of the season, and then suddenly in the second half, and especially the last two episodes, everything takes off. I don't have much criticism of this complaint, so much as a sheer indifference to it. The pacing of season 1 also had some weirnesses, and the Duncan's baby storyline, the rise-and-fall of Thumper storyline were more pressing problems in Neptune, than the bus crash, which was important but not urgent.

Camp Three: the complaint that important events happen off-screen and are only revealed to the viewer later. (E.g., Leo's financial troubles, various events going to the motivations of Beaver, and so on.) This is true enough, but not as problematic as some people think. It seems to me to mark a vague transition in genre in the show. the first season seemed to adhere more rigorously to some of the canons of the murder-mystery genre, in particular the rule that the reader know nearly everything the detective does about the crime, and vice versa. The second season has been shifting more to the canons of film noir, where unexpected plot-twists and revelations are stock in trade, and part of how the filmmaker keeps the viewer from trusting the hero too much. I see nothing wrong with Veronica Mars moving to the second genre rather than the first.

Camp Four: complaints about the allegedly passionless Veronica Mars of Season 2. As one commenter put it:

The best criticism I've seen of Season 2 is that Veronica just doesn't care about anything. Lilly drove her the first year. This time she's just drifting and taking things as they come.

"The taste] for what should be called 'slow food' carries with it an attitude that in this country . . . is often confused with pretension or elitism. . . But . . . [b]riefly the opposite is true. You may neglect your diet altogether, but you still have to eat to live, and by settling for the shoddy because it is cheap or quick, you affect the quality of everday materials, processes, and services."

I picked up Christopher Driver's "The British At Table 1940-1980 this weekend while visiting a friend in The Hague. I quote it because it goes right to the debate about quality food that's happening in the comments to my post below. That debate, actually, is an aspect of something I was discussing with my friend in Holland, just as we took our seats at a concert in the Concertgebow, Amsterdam's most famous classical music venue (Beethoven's Emperor Symphony, and something from Prokofiev) In short, why do people who happily spend tons of money on beer or cigarettes or soccer games refuse to do the same for food or music? Obviously, some of those people don't like the food or music in question. They have different tastes, and that's fine. But there are others who like it, who talk constantly about how much they like it, but nonetheless swear off, obtensibly because of the price.

In my view, what's happening is basically what Driver says. In our modern, liberal, cultures, I get the feeling that people are so afraid of being thought pretentious that they'd rather eat crap then get a reputation for being willing to spend a lot of money on food, or music. Other expenditures are fine, because they're things that don't carry that reputation. And there's the bizarre thing. How food or music got reputations for being pretentious is completely beyond me. They're both basic, basic, human things. Food especially is really at the root of everything. It's the indispensable vice. And the music that has the greatest reputation today was made to entertain yesterday's masses. Are there good reaons to eat at Applebee's? Of course there are, and I've done it happily myself. But the reason some people are eating there is because they're afraid of being thought to be snobs.