As we approach the holidays our attention turns to getting together with friends and relatives. Much of the holiday season is spent enjoying great food and wine. This week Al is joined by Pat Stotesbery, proprietor of Ladera winery in Napa California. Pat shares some simple ideas for getting the most out of your food and wine match-ups. He'll even offer advice as to purchasing wine for gift giving. Airs Sunday evening, November 21, at 10:30 PM.

New words and concepts like “unparticles”, “Anthopocene” , “qubit”, “mashup”, and “cloud computing” seem to be generated every day and become common parlance in science, computing and technology circles. Where do these words come from? Why do some words succeed in becoming popular while others just fade away? Tonight’s guest is JONATHON KEATS, an artist and writer, who writes the Jargon Watch column for WIRED magazine.

Horatio Nelson once wrote: “I cannot command winds and weather”. But for hundreds of years, people have been trying to do exactly that: to make it rain; chase away storms and change the climate of our planet. Even today, certain geo-engineers are proposing vast schemes to alter our climate to stave off global warming. But as historian of science and technology, JAMES RODGER FLEMING, shows us, all these ideas about changing our weather are rooted in “hubris and tragedy”. Many of these climate altering schemes, new and old, are also quite bizarrely funny and farcical.

The first great highway system in the United States was the Boston Post Road, a network of two roads that connected Boston to New York City. Beginning as a hodgepodge of Native American trails, by the early 1700s, this was the only connection that towns like Providence, Springfield and Worcester had with the big cities. The nation’s first regular newspaper was delivered to the taverns along its route, and news of the Revolution was spread rapidly to the towns found along its muddy roads.

He provided the soundtrack for several generations of Americans trying to navigate the rocky shoals of romance and grapple with love and heartbreak. And he became one of 20th-century pop culture’s quintessential men of contradictions: the bullying tough guy whose singing could radiate a remarkable tenderness and vulnerability; the ring-a-ding-ding Vegas sophisticate with an existential outlook on life; the jaunty urbanite who could deliver a torch song like no one else.