The modern man’s pockets are more crowded that an Apple product launch.  The Timbuk2 2Way is a great way to free up some real estate in your bulging pant sacks.  It attaches via a Velcro band to the strap of your shoulder bag or backpack and can hold most modern smartphones close enough to your chest that you can still feel it vibrate when you have a call.  It even has an extra pocket which can hold emergency cash or an ID. The Ballistic fabric construction gives it the look of something that Jack Bauer would use to hold one of his implements of freedom, but in black, it is reasonably understated as well.

OK, I know what you’re thinking.  “Hemingway?  That’s a boring oldie-tyme book!  Why would I want to read that?”  Well I’ll tell you.  For Whom the Bell Tolls an kick ass story about an American  man on a mission to blow up a bridge during the Spanish Civil War.  It is written in Hemingway’s unflinchingly sparse prose and bounds along at an incredible clip to a pulse-pounding crescendo. The story is a heartwrencheng look at the horrors and insanity of war sprinkled with insight into the human condition, machine guns, sex, and bullfighting.  In short, read this book.  It’ll put hair on yer chest!

Remember when you were a kid and you used to doodle with one of those 4-color Bic pens.  Well modern multi-pens are still extremely popular in Japan and as it turns out they are surprisingly useful in your grown-up day job. They are great for sketching diagrams in multiple colors, marking up documents with vicious redlines, or annotating TPS reports with color-coded passive-aggressive edits.  One of our favorites is the Platinum Double 3- Action Multipen which has both red and black balllpoint pens and a .5mm mechanical pencil.  It’s gunmetal grey body looks completely at home in the board room and the weight and mechanical action exudes precision.  If you want more colors, there is the Zebra Clip-On 1000 4-Color pen which features a hefty metal body, black, red and green ballpoint pens and a .5mm mechanical pencil.

Al Gore cries a little every time you throw out a plastic water bottle. Fortunately there is an alternative that looks good and doesn’t kill baby seals. Sigg water bottles will change your life.  Everyone we know who has started carrying one wonders how they went without it for so long. Despite Nalgene’s claims to the contrary, plastic bottles eventually do get gross - absorbing flavors, mold and other unpleasentness.  Siggs are made from aluminum and are specially coated so they don’t absorb squat.  They have a plethora of designs that range from fruity to badass.  Our favorites are the simple ones with the Active Touch finish which is a textured matte outer coating that gives the bottle a tacticle grippy feel so you won’t drop it when wet.  The best thing about Sigg botttles is that they’re Swiss which means they are great for hiding your Nazi gold!

Expensive sunglasses are great right up until the point you sit on them or they get crushed in your bag after jockeying for position on the subway.  If you’re going to shell out undisclosed sums of money of a pair of fancy shades it would be nice if you could put them in something that could survive your irresponsible lifestyle.  The Oakley Vault is a felt-lined aluminum  sunglasses case that you can throw in a messenger bag with full confidence that your vintage Wayfarers will be safe. If you’re the clumsy-type who often regrets shelling out enough money to inoculate a village in the third world on a pair of sunglasses that you subsequently break, then go donate some money to Doctors Without Borders and get a Vault.

We’ll be honest, Laphroaig (pronounced La-froyg) isn’t for everyone.  It is one of the peatiest single malts out there as it hails from the northern Isle of Islay.  The flavor is best described as standing on the beach on a cold night next to a raging campfire with the briny smell of sea air wafting about. It’s a perfect whiskey to sustain you through a chilly winter (or a foggy summer in San Francisco).  At 10 years in the barrel, many malts haven’t mellowed quite enough, but the Laphroig 10 is superb.  We can’t wait to taste the 15.

McMafia is a survey and history of worldwide organized crime - from the to the back alleys of Odessa, to the slums of Mumbai and the streets of Johannasburg, Gleny offers a series of stories that are better than anything found in thrillers on the big screen. The book opens with a story of senseless murder in London and the pace never slows as the books pulls you into the world of organzied crime with stories that are terrifying, facintaing, and quite often funny.  The criminals, far from being the sterotypical mustashe-twisting villans are characeters of surprising depth, and complexity and the relationships among the players form intriguing webs of power. Tales of drugs,  guns and prostitution are peppered with Gleny’s dry english humor and offer unprecedented insight into the nature of the of criminal enterprise. Misha Gleny gave a brief talk on the book at a lecture at the RSA in London.  The lecture is available on a U-Channel Podcast, here. 

I’ve long touted the Sony MDR-EX51LP Headphones as the best 20 bucks you could spend to radically improve your iPod experience.  They arguably have 85% of the quality of The premium Shure E2Cs at a third of the price.  Sony recently released the  Sony MDREX85LP as a mid-tier offering for those of us who can’t justify the price of their high tier MDR-EX90LP model.  The 85s are just outstanding!  They have all the deep bass one would expect from an in-ear model, but they also bring the crisp highs and a crystal clear midrange that rivals those large studio headphones that make you look like Princess Leia.  The design is sort of hit and miss with the peculiar proportion that makes them look like they are somewhat broken, but the detail of the chrome aluminum turned face is quite elegant.  Now if only they could come up with a naming system that didn’t make their products sound like evil supercomputers from the land of Zod.