Dog Hates Cat, Demand Media Accounting, Proper Vegetable Cooking, NFL Picks Week 3

We’ve had the dog for more than a year and they still hate each other. Chill out, bros.

• I was talking infamous content farm Demand Media with a coworker the other day and we got onto their accounting fiasco. It seems they faced some deserved scrutiny for their financial practices: Instead of tracking the cost of writing as an expense on the income statement, Demand capitalizes the cost of an article and treats it as an asset on the balance sheet.

  The trickiness here of making profits look higher by taking out the expense is indeed trickiness, and I really dislike Demand for all the junk content it puts out there. (Try going to Livestrong.com and search “lycopene” – it’ll return a solid 30 articles about the exact same thing but with slightly differing headlines.) But in the Internet era of long-tail content, I don’t completely disagree with this idea. Demand articles, centered on health, humor, lists, general info and DIY, “depreciate” much more slowly than a topical article from, say, Slate that’s only relevant in the first few days after a news event. As a result, you can sell ads against it for years, and it’s even designated as “inventory” by ad sales.

  So yeah: creative accounting, but not ridiculous.

• Brussels sprouts have become my favorite vegetable. With a mom who told me for years that brussels sprouts were one of the worst foods on Earth, I believed they truly were until I finally ate for the first time at age 31. (!) Growing up, she always ate them boiled, which truly does sound like the worst food on Earth. Meanwhile, this recipe for grilled brussels sprouts is the best thing that ever happened to charcoal grills and skewers. So my question is: did everyone in America forget how to cook vegetables for 80 years?

  I get the appeal of canned vegetables – they keep forever and whatnot, and that’s good when times are tough. But why did the country forget that there are methods of cooking vegetables that don’t require moisture? Roasted vegetables are the bomb – carrots, corn, peppers, tomatoes, beets, even broccoli – but I don’t think anyone I know ate a roasted vegetable outside of Thanksgiving. If it’s not steamed or boiled, it must not be a vegetable.

  To finish: vegetables + dry heat = greatness.



• The week 3 NFL picks: Slight improvement last week, but still off to a slow start. Home teams are on a roll this year, so here’s hoping the ones I pick keep that going.

  Last week: 6-8; Overall: 12-18
  At Carolina -2.5 NY Giants (doh)
  At Chicago -7.5 St. Louis
  At Dallas -7.5 Tampa Bay
  San Francisco -7 At Minnesota
  Detroit -3.5 At Tennessee
  At Washington -3 Cincinnati
  NY Jets -2.5 At Miami
  At New Orleans -9 Kansas City
  Buffalo -3 At Cleveland
  At Indianapolis -3 Jacksonville
  Philadelphia -3.5 At Arizona
  At San Diego -3 Atlanta
  Houston -2 At Denver
  Pittsburgh -4 At Oakland
  At Baltimore -3 New England
  Green Bay -3.5 At Seattle