Hunter Thompson saved everything. When he hand wrote letters he’d always use carbon paper to create a simultaneous duplicate (if you’re under 40, it was a messy but effective low technology). By the time I met him at the bar at Elaine’s, in the early aughts, he had worn a visible recording device on his lapel constantly for years. He recorded everything, mostly because he could have someone else transcribe his conversations, and have another someone edit them down into something resembling cohesive prose. As a Thompson disciple, and a letter writer, I have also tried to save copies of everything, even going so far as to scan postcards I’ve written (front and back) before sending them. One never knows from whence a golden nugget may fall, and it would be a crime to misplace even one. So being posed with the high probability of having lost 95% of all correspondence from the last 30 years was deeply disquieting. Spoiler alert: we were able restore the deceased laptop to an old iMac that had been wiped clean, eventually recovering (almost) everything, right down to the tabs that were open on that fateful day. Though there are still about 6 days of missing new docs from the intervening chaos, but it’s a drop in the bucket of what seemed lost forever. And I had fully reached the acceptance stage of grief before it appeared that any of said data still existed at all.
It’s been an emotional roller coaster of a week, here on the Range. Tuesday, I was speaking to detectives before I got my key in the door to open the shop. There had been a hit and run, and they wanted to see the angle on our front window camera, which doesn’t face out into the street. But we were also visited by some of the finest folks in Brooklyn, two of whom cleaned us out of Van Winkle Family Reserve 12 year bourbon (padding those days’ receipts). And for those who are wondering, the best Pappy whiskeys are the 12 Year Lot B and 15 year bourbon(s), and the almost unattainable 13 year Rye. Pappy 20 and 23 are overkill, and are strictly for those with too much to spend, and something to prove. For 1/3rd the price of Van Winkle 12, Elijah Craig 18 is also worth every penny, as very few bottles in that price range are. But I digress. We’ve also officially added two new team members to the shop crew. Derek and/or I will still be here most of the time, but Nikita and Jessica will be helping out regularly. Derek took two consecutive days off last week, and moved into a new apt with great light, and I took my first full day away from the shop in longer than I can remember (even if it was largely spent in data recovery mode). And a lot of fine folks tossed kind words of support in our direction, both digital an IRL, as the kids say. Thanks for that.
As of 11:48pm on Thursday, I have access to the vast majority of my previously MIA data, and I feel like a barbed corkscrew thorn has been removed, with surgical precision, from the cockles of my soul. And while I was tasked with a bit of the grunt work, the heavy lifting and fifth dimensional problem solving was accomplished by my old buddy, Eric, who is the first human I ever heard make mention of building his own computer (decades ago), and is the undisputed coiner of the popular ‘90s term “Ridonkulous”. So, upon completion of the computer rescue unit project, I bestowed upon him the first annual Henry Aaron award for heroic excellence, which is to say that I gave him a barrage of hearty thank you(s), a bunch of nice wine, and a 1972 Hank Aaron Topps baseball card. In the previous year, Aaron batted .329 with 47 home runs, a monster year by any metric (in any era) and arguably the best season in his unprecedented career.
But seriously, Apple, think different my ass. More like: Think different… until you’ve attained profound market share, the world’s most captive audience, and over a billion in cash on hand, then act as the sociopathic non-person entity you were always born to be! Even Andrew Jackson– an unrepentant murderer, and the Orange Orangutan’s favorite president- didn’t trust the intent or future of American corporations. Apple’s whole thing has always been customer service, and then at some point the number crunchers realized that customer service was costing them more than anything else deemed expendable, and they began cutting their best in class hardware, discontinuing service for those items, and disavowing all responsibility, to save a fistful of pennies. When I walk into any Apple store, a rep can pull up my entire history of hardware purchased for the last 20 years. Yet this last week and half of data loss turmoil could have been prevented had they chosen to send a single e-mail (which costs them nothing) to all owners of Time Capsule/Time Machine hardware when they changed the underlying platform format of all new OS’ to one that wouldn’t recognize the previous (even if you kept your firmware up to date). If not for all the wonderful nerds posting to public forums, we would not have been able to solve this at all (without lengthy, costly, and not guaranteed data recovery services).
We’ve always promised never to send you lazy, generic marketing about what you’re supposed to be drinking based on the season, but these crazy heat swings lately are something different. So while you’re more than welcome to wear white in our shop after Labor Day, and we’ll be happy to help you pair a grilled steak sandwich with a lovely rosé regardless of the date, you should also check out or top picks for 90+ degree days, which is the subject of this week’s online only sale. This pack starts with 1 can each of our favorite local single-serving cocktails, St. Agrestis Spritz and Greenhook Gin & Tonic, and 1 can each Brick & MortarBlanc and Rosé (375ml = half bottle). Derek tells me that rose possesses cooling properties and about half an ounce of Dillon’s Rose Gin Liqueur spritzes up nicely in a glass of crisp CivetaProsecco. The heatwave pack is rounded out by two of our crispiest French wines: Peyrassol’s bright, dry, peachy Provence rosé, and Maison des Ardoisières Silice Blanc. For those nerds with the frame of reference, the latter drinks across between an Arbois and a Silex, for everybody else, that means it’s piercingly clean, dry, and shows deep, but unobtrusive minerality. And I’m not interested in what autocorrect has to say on the matter, ‘minerality’ is absolutely a real word.
