dining in while eating out

I'm considering transplanting myself from San Francisco to New York, but if eating out here is already pinching my wallet, eating out in there is gonna be worse. Even though my friends and I can make delicious food ourselves, eating out is somehow more social, exciting – it is, after all, eating out. So how about a kitchen-bar-thingie where you bring your own ingredients, pay a minimal fee to use a high-quality kitchen, and make your own food communally, with access to a bar? You'd get the best of both worlds: pay less for delicious food and enjoy the eating out experience. Live music would be pretty awesome too.

wine tags

A buddy named Noah Brier started something called brand tags, an application that lets people tag brands with words. What results are tag clouds for brands, i.e. an ingeniously simple way to gauge how consumers feel about different brands. Ever since I started using del.icio.us, I've wanted to do this kind of thing for, well, everything: political candidate tags, musical band tags, and of course, TCHOcolate tags. But a pretty great application could be wine labels, which oftentimes feel irrelevant to the point of satire and are written by only a handful of wine connoisseurs. No offense, they certainly know their wine, but how much more meaningful might wine labels be if they were crowdsourced to consumers via a wine tagging app? A tag cloud as a wine label might not only be meaningful, but beautiful.