TheStreet Search RSS Feed: Jason Notte

5 Memorial Day Alternatives In Troubled Hotspots

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- Does it just seem like America hasn't had a break since the shootings at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater last year, or have we just been swinging from one tragedy to the next for that long?

They've come with very different faces: A multifronted superstorm in Sandy, yet another gunman in Newtown, Conn., outright terrorists in Boston, negligence in Waco, Texas, a Mother's Day shooter in New Orleans and now a rare F-5 tornado in Moore, Okla. When a headline in The Onion sums it up best -- Americans Dredge Up Last Remaining Reserves Of Grief -- it's tempting to just try to run away from it all.

Unfortunately, the last year has many Americans too shellshocked, spent and stunned to move. TripAdvisor , the travel site that tends to keep on the sunny side of life around this time of year, just released a survey that's as dour as the rest of the country now. With Memorial Day weekend coming up, only 30% of folks surveyed by TripAdvisor -- regular travelers, mind you -- have plans to go anywhere during the long weekend. ...

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10 Family Vehicles You Can Still Look Cool In

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- It's not quite summer yet and the kids aren't out of school, but Memorial Day weekend is when the line of minivans headed toward family vacations starts forming.

It's tough to knock the minivan for being good at its job. It's spacious enough to hold the entire family and its gear, comfortable enough to keep everyone sedate for hours on end and has enough power under the hood to slide through lanes of vacation traffic like a sleeker car half its size.

The downside: It's a minivan. When you've resigned yourself to one, you've dropped the veil of illusion. Families weren't driven to SUVs in the 1990s and 2000s because they were more convenient. They were roped in because they weren't an immediate signal to those around you that you had a family, children in the back, potentially a mortgage payment waiting for you when you get home and nothing more exciting than a trip to the theme park ahead. ...

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How Dale Katechis Made Oskar Blues Beer a Can-Do Beer

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- As someone who's spent much of his brewing career pouring big beers into relatively little cans, Oskar Blues founder Dale Katechis has made condensing his life's work.

Katechis founded Oskar Blues in 1997 in Lyons, Colo., and lent his name to its top-selling Dale's Pale Ale. After five years in the business, he started looking for a way to get a bigger return out of his brewing outfit and draw visitors to the small town of 1,400 in the Rocky Mountains where they could get a plate of jambalaya, a shrimp po' boy and a beer at his brewpub. His answer at the time was fairly novel: Put the beer in cans.

Katechis kicked off his packaging operation in 2002 with a one-at-a-time can filler and seamer bought during a trip to Canada, where he noticed that roughly 50% of the country's beer was sold in cans and included seasonal varieties in aluminum. Getting the beer in those cans wasn't difficult, but getting folks to drink out of those same cans was much tougher. From the moment Gottfried Kruger Brewing in Newark, N.J., introduced the beer can in 1935 to the day Oskar Blues pitched its first cans of craft beer in Colorado and at brewers conventions in 2002, Katechis says the common belief was that beer cans held nothing but pale yellow swill with a taste only further degraded by the metallic flavor. Katechis logged a lot of miles and cracked open a lot of beers trying to prove otherwise. ...

Why the End of 'Craft' Beer Is Just a Tax Break Away

Fri, 17 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

Updated with clarification from the Beer Institute regarding its stance on the competing legislation and Deschutes Brewing and Matt Brewing's role in the process

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- Garret Oliver has been brewmaster at The Brooklyn Brewery since 1994. He was the brewmaster at Manhattan Brewing before that and has served as editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Beer, written two other books on beer and continues to make a series of brews that gets all the beer geeks excited.

At some point this year, a person who claims to love beer is going to say that Oliver isn't a craft brewer because of a stance his company took on excise taxes. If that happens in your presence, pull the beer out of that person's hand and pour it over his or her swollen head. They don't deserve it. ...

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10 Reasons to Stop Being a Jerk and Drink a Fruit Beer

Thu, 16 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- There are few things worse than the rambling, pompous, judgmental beer snob, but mention "fruit" and "beer" in the same breath and you'll encounter perhaps the two people in the beer-drinking world who are undisputedly more annoying: The beer purist and the anti-snob.

The first is just incredibly frustrating to deal with. He or she is a variant of beer snob who will think nothing of calling their Imperial India Pale Ale "citrusy" or claim their Russian Imperial Stout tastes like "dark fruits," but turn away from a beer like a vampire from garlic if there's even a hint of apricot, tangerine or (heaven forfend) berry in the recipe.

The second is likely someone close to you whose palate has been weathered by time and countless battles with beer snobs. They insist that "beer should taste like beer" and are the loudest voice in the room when someone disparages a light lager made by Anheuser-Busch InBev , SABMiller, MolsonCoors , Yuengling or otherwise. They'd have the 16th century Reinheitsgebot German beer purity law limiting ingredients to water, barley and hops tattooed on their backs if they didn't think spouting some obscure European beer law would make them sound like a geek. They'd just as soon throw a wedge of lime at you for handing them a Corona as they would break a bottle of blueberry lager over your head just for suggesting a sip. ...

Is The NHL Really Still the No. 4 Sport?

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- The Stanley Cup Playoffs may be enough to remind folks in the sports world that the National Hockey League does, in fact, qualify as a professional sport.

Whether it's still a major pro sport or not is up in the air.

In the case of full disclosure, I'll acknowledge that I was raised as a hockey fan. My father pulled 3-year-old me into the living room and plucked a my sister out of her crib to watch the closing seconds of Team USA's "Miracle On Ice" win over the Soviets in the 1980 Winter Olympics. Four years later, I'd be handed one of my dad's season tickets and would watch my first hockey game -- the New York Rangers vs. the Detroit Red Wings -- from Madison Square Garden's infamous and long-gone Blue Seats. I spent half of my prom ducking into the kitchen on the Spirit of New Jersey to check the score of Mark Messier's guaranteed Game 6 win over the New Jersey Devils and began my last summer before college watching Messier, Brian Leetch, Mike Richter and Alexi Kovalev parade down the Canyon of Heroes after ending a 54-year Stanley Cup dry spell. ...

7 Towns That Really Want Your Sports Team

Fri, 10 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- For every North American city with a pro sports team, there's another green-eyed town just waiting to take it away.

This month, an National Basketball Association ownership committee voted against relocating the Sacramento Kings to Seattle, which lost its own beloved SuperSonics to Oklahoma City in 2008. Seattle businessman Chris Hansen and Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer had bid $365 million for 65% of the team and had made a separate deal with a bankruptcy court to pay $15 million for an additional 7% stake. They were also willing to pay millions more in relocation fees and arena development in Seattle's industrial section to move the Kings to a larger market.

Hansen and Ballmer are still determined to build an arena in Seattle and planning to pitch the NBA's board of governors before it votes formally on the matter Monday. But the league doesn't seem to mind having Seattle around as a bargaining chip to extort taxpayer cash of of cities including Portland, Ore., Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, New Orleans or Phoenix, Ariz., for arena upgrades and other sweet publicly funded amenities. It got $341 million out of taxpayers in Sacramento, Calif., so just consider that your starting point. ...

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5 Old-School Beers We Wish They'd Bring Back

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- Just because a beer drinker hasn't jumped headlong into the growing craft beer industry or the small brewers that bolster it doesn't mean they prefer "bad" beer. It may just be that the good beer they remember doesn't exist anymore, and no "craft" brewer wants to take the time to revive that beer's legacy.

Contrary to popular belief within the craft community, America's love of beer didn't begin when President Jimmy Carter lifted the national ban on homebrewing during the 1970s and breweries such as New Albion and Sierra Nevada started springing up and dumping trailer loads of hops into their kettles. While it's true there were only 80 breweries in America in 1983, and six of them accounted for 96% of the beer Americans consumed, it wasn't as if everyone was happy about that fact.

Despite Prohibition cutting the number of working breweries in America from more than 2,000 in the late 1800s to zero from the 1920s into the early 1930s, there were 750 breweries in operation across the country by 1936. Regional brewers were everywhere and breweries such as Ballantine and Sons in Newark even produced porter, stout and a product it called India Pale Ale, which was somewhat less hoppy than today's IPAs but bitter enough to serve as a direct ancestor. ...

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5 Apps to Take Out to The Ballgame

Mon, 06 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- The 2013 Major League Baseball season has begun and fans' wallets are all the lighter for it. Fortunately, smartphones and tablets can help prevent some of the loss.

While we've tried to present evidence baseball is the cheapest professional sport in the land, teams keep hiking beer prices and ticket costs seemingly just to prove us wrong. So why aren't fans running for their high-definition television shelters?

Basically because baseball is one of the few sports that's figured out how to enhance the live game experience through technology instead of using that technology to make live games obsolete. Also, do you see how many games there are on the schedule? Even if games against a rival are sold out and going for exorbitant sums on the secondary market, there's always that midsummer stretch of games against cellar-dwellers or late-season games when either the playoff picture is set or all hope is lost. Baseball's free market takes, but every so often it gives as demand wanes. ...

10 Best Lawnmower Beers of Spring 2013

Fri, 03 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- Before beer lovers go slurring a canned, light, low-alcohol beer as "lawnmower beer," push a mower around for an hour or so on an 85-degree day and then tell us what beer you want sip on to help the job along.

We've really never understood the phrase "lawnmower beer" since, quite frankly, a beer is probably the worst thing you can have under the conditions described above. We do understand its origins, though. In early American suburbia, it wasn't uncommon for the newly minted homeowner to take to their tiny plot of earth on a weekend morning with one hand on the mower and the other wrapped around a can of Pabst, Ballantine, Stroh's, Schaefer, Narragansett, Rainier, Olympia or whatever was on hand. They're not thought of as great beers today, but in their original formulations they were light and refreshing without being reduced to yellow rice-fed fizz.

They were the offspring of what the English called "small beers," low-alcohol brews workers could drink to keep refreshed and not have to worry about working while impaired. In Belgium, it was known as saison -- which was drunk by farmhands and was the low-alcohol predecessor to today's far more potent beers of the same name. ...

10 Greenest Cars of 2013

Wed, 01 May 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- The nation's blacktop is looking greener by the moment.

With new mileage restrictions coming just a few years down the road, more than two dozen vehicles in the U.S. are achieving more than 40 miles per gallon in combined mileage. Costly trips to the pump are about to get less frequent just as reaching for the plug becomes more commonplace.

The folks at Kelley Blue Book still have a fondness for calling such gas-sipping vehicles "green" and came up with 10 such cars that hit the roads at 40 mpg or better in the city and on highways. While General Motors is banking on its Chevrolet Cruze to hit that mark without any electric help, a slew of new hybrids and plug-ins are getting the job done just as efficiently. ...

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10 Biggest Summer Blockbusters Without Superheroes

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- With Robert Downey Jr. recycling his red-and-gold armor on Friday for the release of Disney's Iron Man 3, American moviegoers kick off yet another superhero-laden summer blockbuster season.

After Iron Man jets in, picks up his cash and leaves, there are no fewer than nine comic-book-inspired films waiting to swoop in after him and pick off what little expendable income remains. Moviegoers get less than a month to catch their breath until Superman reappears in Man Of Steel in June. Hugh Jackman stops singing his lines and reinstalls his adamantium claws for 20th Century Fox's The Wolverine in July, while everybody's favorite blonde Norse god returns for Thor: The Dark World in November. Throw in some second-tier titles such as Universal's R.I.P.D., 2 Guns and Kick-Ass 2 and The Weinstein Co.'s long awaited Sin City sequel and hero sagas are doing more than their share of Hollywood heavy lifting.

According to BoxOfficeMojo, comic book adaptations have brought in $11.2 billion at the box office since Christopher Reeve donned blue tights and a cape in Warner Brothers' original Superman film way back in 1978. Not only have the nine top-grossing comic book films of all time been released in the past decade, but comic book films have topped the summer box office four times during that stretch: Spider-Man in 2002, Spider-Man 3 in 2007, The Dark Knight in 2008 and The Avengers just last year. ...

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10 Major League Towns Where Baseball Doesn't Cost a Bundle

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- Major League Baseball is the most cost-effective sports ticket money can buy, but there are definitely teams out there providing more bang for the buck than others.

MLB ticket prices average $27.48 this year, according to Team Marketing Report. That said, we're not going to sit here and pretend that the sport that calls itself the national pastime is only about as costly as some peanuts and Cracker Jack. Major League Baseball's top-money tickets can fetch an average of $50 or more, and that's before you get into the ballpark, where the smallest size of the cheapest beer in the place goes for what you'd pay for a six pack of IPA anywhere outside the stadium.

Still, baseball's admission price is little more than half that of NBA ticket ($50.99), slightly less than half the cost of a ticket to an NHL game ($61.01) and well below the price you'd spend on any given Sunday in the NFL ($78.38). So what if it's also 1.8% higher than last year? There are still roughly a dozen teams in the league with average ticket prices less than $25. ...

10 Most Expensive Trips To The Ballgame in 2013

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:30:00 EDT

PORTLAND, Ore. (TheStreet) -- Major League Baseball may be still be one of the best values in the land, but that doesn't mean fans are getting off light.

As we've noted before, baseball hasn't had a strike since its World Series-canceling work stoppage in 1994-95 and hasn't locked out players since 1990. Even the NBA (which locked out players in 1995, 1996, 1998-99 and 2011) and the NFL (which locked out players in 2011 and referees last year) can't say the same. Fans, meanwhile, have been rewarded with ticket prices that average $27.48, according to Team Marketing Report.

That's a little more than half the price of an average NBA ticket ($50.99), slightly less than half the cost of a ticket to an NHL game ($61.01) and well below the price you'd spend on any given Sunday in the NFL ($78.38). It's also 1.8% higher than it was last year and includes a few teams pricing their tickets at nearly double that average. ...

Where Music Gets Physical: A Boston Memoir

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:30:00 EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The first time I set foot in Newbury Comics on Newbury Street in Boston, I was about 20 years old and still half a decade or so away from the digital music era. That made that two-room shop between Mass Ave. and Hereford Street something close to heaven.

Whether I drove up from New Jersey or took the Fung-Wah bus from Chinatown up to Boston for the weekend, Newbury was a mandatory stop. It had all the H2O, Sick of It All, Dropkick Murphys and Bad Religion CDs I was really into at the time, but also had early cuts of Letters To Cleo's first album, The Sheila Divine's latest screamer and steampunk album covers made by a strange little band called the Dresden Dolls. Most importantly, they had records -- bins and bins of records tucked off to the side where older heads could thumb through them in peace.

It was, above all else, a tactile experience. There was something comforting about flipping through all that tangible album art and coming across the one record you'd been hunting down for months. There were hours of pacing, flipping, stockpiling and thinning -- of walking up to a counter with a stack of 10, but whittling it down to about four just so you could eat later. The way that fluorescent light disappeared behind the counter, those new releases scrawled in multi-color chalk, the step up to the second room where you're just about always guaranteed to run into someone streaking toward you with a bag full of buttons, a box with a doll version of Bender from Futurama inside or a Black Flag shirt. Also see: Dr. Dre Is Taking SKUL to School >> ...

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