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While Valentines Day and football get the majority of publicity during February, theres more to this month than love and sports. You may want to consider changing up your typical happy-hour order this weekend to celebrate an unconventional holiday. Saturday, February 22, is National Margarita Day. This refreshing beverage has a long history of making those who imbibe forget their troubles for a while. Let’s take a look at the invention of the drink and some fun deals to take advantage of. What’s in a classic margarita anyway? While many variations of the beloved drink have popped up over the years, in its purest form, a margarita is comprised of tequila, lime juice, and Cointreau or Triple Sec. Traditionally served in a glass with a salted rim, its sweet, salty, and sour elements make for a delicious flavor combination to sip on. Who invented the margarita? There are conflicting stories about the creation of this cocktail. One version credits Carlos “Danny” Herrera. Necessity was the mother of invention in this version. In the late 1940s, Herrera, who owned the Tijuana, Mexico-area restaurant Rancho La Gloria, wanted to make something for customer Marjorie King. The young actress was allergic to all alcohol except tequila but didnt like to drink the spirit straight. Never one to back down from a challenge, Herrera started experimenting and landed on the flavor combination we now know and love. He called the drink a Margarita (Spanish for Marjorie). Another story asserts that Margarita Sames is the real hero. This Dallas socialite claims to have created the drink while entertaining at her Acapulco vacation home in 1948. As this story goes, Tommy Hilton was one of her guests and liked it so much that he brought the drink to his hotels. But her claim is discredited in Anthony Dias Blues The Complete Book of Spirits, which states that the first importer of Jose Cuervo to the United States used the tagline, “Margarita: it’s more than a girl’s name,” in 1945. What are some deals for National Margarita Day? Chilis Grill & Bar and Lifetime have teamed up for the big day. They released a 15-minute romantic comedy film starring Maria Menounos and Taye Diggs about a powerful big-city lawyer who comes back to her rural hometown for the holiday. You can stream it here, then head into the restaurant for $5 Tequila Trifectas at participating restaurants or a StrawEddy, the Margarita of the Month. If you find yourself in California, head to your local El Torito on Saturday. Participating restaurants in this Mexican chain are offering $10 Margarita Flights. Variety is the spice of life after all. Those in Atlanta can head to one of three Tin Lizzy Cantina locations. They are offering $6 House Margaritas and $8 Casa Noble Margaritas. TexMex chain Chuy’s is also offering drink specials. Finally, the New York Daily News has a roundup of Margarita Day deals in and around the Big Apple. However you celebrate the boozy holiday, make sure to say Salud!
Category:
E-Commerce
Kate Aronowitz tells me she first set out in graphic design because it felt like a discipline that helped her bring order to things. Many years later, she has a love-hate relationship with being labeled a creative because the creative process, as she sees it, is not just about art and designits as much about solving problems as it is building things from scratch. She also believes everyone can be creative under the right circumstances. As portfolio operations lead at Google Ventures, Aronowitz has collaborated with some of the worlds most inspiring and hardworking founders. And now she has the opportunity to shape and inspire the next generation of students at Savannah College of Design as the schools newly minted executive in residence. I usually am the first one up. I go downstairs with my dog, George, make coffee, and we go outside. I like having quiet time outside. Ill walk him or go to Pilates. I read the news. As much as it pains me, I like to know whats going on. Im not naturally an early riser, but if I approach the day with a clear mind, my work is better. Im a big believer in reading a room. I think its more my predisposition. Even when I started my first design role as a junior designer, I often worked as a translator. When you get a design person and a businessperson together, they are often butting heads. Im always the one saying, Actually, I hear this. Listening to what people are saying, watching their body language, seeing how much people speak upits just being a very keen observer. Im fascinated by people, and UX design is about solving real peoples needs. A lot of the time, they cant express what they need; you have to listen for it. I dont create well in total silence. I like a lot of white noise. If I have to write, I prefer to write on an airplane or in a café. Silence is very deafening. I go to sleep listening to podcasts. I find it hard to design and create if I put an hour on the calendar and say, Youre sitting and doing this thing. My best ideas come to me if I can get the questions I need to work on a week in advance. Im good at having that run parallel; Im processing in the background. Whether Im at the mall or watching a movie or baking, ideas pop into my head. I find using my hands to be very helpful. Even if its business-case kind of stuff. I find it hard to be creative and type at the same time, so I handwrite a lot out. I find typing to be very constricting. I work with really interesting founders. And I see my role as a designer more so now almost setting the stage and curating the conversations that allow creativity to happen. I am helping make founders ideas real. A lot of my day is being a really good listener and figuring out what problems need to be solved and figuring out how to do it quickly. Im an optimist. If you look at a problem long enough, you can truly come up with a solution that will delight people. I dont believe theres any problem thats not solvable. I rarely get frustrated. I trust the process. If you iterate, put the right people in the room, and ask questions, you will learn something and you will move things forward. Im interested in expanding what creativity means. Creativity has been put in this place where you either are or arent, or theres creative time and there isnt. Its thinking about a problem in a different way. Everyone has the ability. Im so much more open now to who is in the room. I hate when people are labeled creative. When you label a person as a creative, it limits it so that this is the only person in the room who can be creative. Im a big list-maker. I break it into things. I am very strict about what fits onto my first list. I keep a running notes doc. I have a 2024 doc and its all the calls I was on that year. At any point in time, I can go back and pick up a thread where I left off. A lot of it for me is documenting and list-making so I dont have to keep it in my mind. I can go back and check things. I need my alone time. Driving or walking the dog. Time with a whiteboard. If Im really feeling lost and Im not sure what to do, if I just put a pen in my hand and draw out what Im thinking I find it really helpful to just get out whats in my head. Im very bad with distractions. I love doing the NYT crossword every day; its hard not to be following whats going on [in the news]. Im not great at tuning things out, but I have other outlets. I love baking and cooking. I started sketching again on my iPad. I have one of those expert Apple pencils. Even if its useless stuff like drawing a weird apple on my iPad, it centers me. If you can sit and noodle over the shades of red for an hour and a half, its good for your mind to be a better observer. The rut I find myself in is more like self-doubt. I am a bit of a perfectionist. That is what drew me to graphic design in the first place. I was never attracted to fine art. I liked graphic design because it brought order to things. I hold a high bar for myself and always want to make sure Im bringing value, so I do question myself. I have to remind myself this is part of the process: Knowing that sometimes things dont work and thats okay, and what can you learn from it. You have to get small wins every day. A lot of what we do with founders is help them prioritize. Some problems can be pushed off. Just ask yourself, whats keeping you up at night now? And how can you solve something immediately in front of you? A lot of it is taking big problems and breaking them down into bite-size chunks. Its so important to close out the day and feel like you made some small steps in progress.
Category:
E-Commerce
I dont know about you, but I tend to think about my favorite tech tools as being split into two separate saucepans: the classic apps weve known and relied on for ages and then the newer AI apps that have shown up over the past several months to serve some super-specific purpose. More and more, though, Im realizing that the most effective apps are the ones that seamlessly blend those two concepts and create a whole new recipe with the best of both worlds. Thats precisely what the tool Ive got for you today manages to do. Its a brand new app released just moments ago thats basically Google Maps combined with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Wikipedia, and more. And goodness gracious, will it bring some fascinating new flavor into your life. Be the first to find all sorts of little-known tech treasures with my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. One useful new discovery in your inbox every Wednesday! A modern mapping mashup Let me back up for one quick second: A moment ago, I told you todays tool is a brand new service. And it isjust released days ago and almost certainly something you havent yet seen. But its also connected to a standout service weve discussed in these quarters before. The service is called PamPam, and we talked about it last May and then again in December, when I featured it as one of my favorite finds from 2024. At the time, I described it as an AI map app thats actually worth your whileand thats still true today. But now, PamPam is even more useful, thanks to a massive upgrade that introduces a whole new ocean of actually-handy AI possibilities. Specifically, PamPams gained some really slick integrations that bring data from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Wikipedia, and other smart sources into its interactive map-exploring experience. So what does that actually look like in practice? Lemme show ya. When you open up the new PamPam app, youre prompted to describe what exactly you want to do or see. You can type out anything, in plain English and without any complicated formatting requirements. PamPam prompts you to ask anything, with a slew of new sources powering the results. By default, the service will pull info from ChatGPT and Wikipedia into its results. If you click the little pill area with the logos, though, you can also bring other info sources into the mixincluding, so far, Perplexity and Foursquare. Wikipedia, ChatGPT, Foursquare, and Perplexity are now a part of the PamPam picture. For one example, I asked the service to suggest stuff to do and places to eat for a day in Pasadena with a family of fourincluding a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old. In a matter of seconds, it served up all sorts of thoughtful and specific suggestions, with info available in a sidebar and locations visible in a large interactive map. PamPam’s results pull data from all your selected sources into a simple, map-embedded guide. Clicking on any item in the map or the sidebar pulls up more detailed info from Wikipedia, along with more suggestions for subsequent questions from ChatGPT and any other activated sources. You can keep asking more questions from all of your selected sources as you go. Everything happens right then and there, in that same single screen and without any external windows or sign-ins. Its about as polished and pleasant of an experience as you could ask for, with all sorts of helpful touches pulled from the different sources and presented in a sensible-seeming, streamlined setup. PamPam’s interface is a whole new experience that brings a blend of different info into a single map-centric spot. PamPam does require you to sign in with a Google account in order to use the service, but it takes all of seven seconds to doand youll be off to the races and exploring your results in another few seconds from there. The possibilities are practically endless, and best of all? It doesnt even cost a dime to try. PamPam works entirely on the web in any browser, on any device. Its completely free to use for these purposes, with evolving limits for the external sources. The site offers an optional Pro plan that raises those limits and unlocks extra features related to some of its other functions. (The company has a variety of corporate plans, too, which seem to be where the bulk of its money is made.) PamPam doesnt require any personal info beyond your initial Google sign-in, and its privacy policy doesnt include anything unusual about how it handles the limited amount of data involved. If you love these types of tools as much as I do, check out my free Cool Tools newsletter. I’ll introduce you to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in delightful waysthen send you another new off-the-beaten-path gem every Wednesday!
Category:
E-Commerce
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