Category: Humor

Crazy for Coffee?

coffeeI’m not one to grouse about First World Problems.  Yeah, my hand doesn’t fit in the Pringles™ container, it’s hard to find Levis™ that fit and once, they were out of arugula at my Organic Fifty-Mile Food Emporium.  However, I seldom complain about such setbacks.  It’s all part of the game, as far as I concerned.  Actually, I’m usually on the other side of the fence.  For my money, our society is full of overfed, over-medicated, bone-lazy malcontents, constantly whining about stuff that doesn’t matter.  In a more civilized time, they’d have gone under in the first pillage, and stray dogs would be licking their bones.  However, there are a few things in our world that do burn my bacon, and one of them is coffee.

Strictly speaking, coffee is not essential to our well-being.  I know several people who never touch the stuff.  Nor is it scarce.  It grows abundantly all over the world, and you can find it in just about every grocery store.  In fact, like oil and cocaine, coffee is one of the most widely traded commodities on the planet.  However (and this is what burns me) unlike every other product humans use, abuse or devour, coffee simply refuses to obey the basic rules of economic supply and demand.  Let me explain.

Day-to-day, coffee is so cheap that I have no idea what it costs.  I don’t keep track.  I know that, in any grocery store in all directions, I can haul out five bucks and buy enough regular grind to keep me awake for at least a week — so I don’t worry about it.  Sometimes, it’s on sale; sometimes it isn’t, but, like bad Spielberg movies, it’s always going to be there.  That’s one side of the coin.

On the other side, if I walk less than 500 metres from the coffee aisle of my favourite food store into the mall, I run into what can only be described as Coffee Bean Buccaneers.  These 21st century pirates are selling coffee by the cup as if it were the Treasure of the Sierra Madres.  Kiss your five bucks goodbye because that doesn’t even get you a place in line and, oh yeah, you’re going to stand in line.  I have yet to go to a Starbucks, Hortons, Blenz, et al and escape in less than twenty minutes.  Why? Because, these days, everybody from Maine to Malibu is on a 24/7 caffeine bender.

People are lining up, three deep, to get their mitts on a couple of hundred mls. of Kona Soft Blonde or Kenyatta Cool Corona or some other such exotic nonsense.  But it`s not like coffee`s cheap or even on sale.  In the same time period it took cell phones to go from over $800.00 to Here-Take-One-They’re-Free, coffee has gagoopulied in price.  What was once a fifty cent all-you-can-drink morning beverage has become a $9.95 that’s-all-you-get experience.  And the weird thing is, people are getting it poured into a paper cup and they`re walking away with it – happy as a penguin with a fresh fish.  You would think that if you’d just paid a Lindbergh ransom for a beverage that was brewed from handpicked beans, slow roasted over a sustainable rosewood fire and pulverized by union-scale Gregorian monks, you`d want to sit and savour it.  Apparently not, because tcoffee1he world is full of people charging around, clinging to their paper cups as if they were carrying the relics of the saints — with two sugars and one cream.  They`re everywhere!  You can`t turn around without seeing somebody with a cup in their hand.  A person might need a coffee on the bus if they got up late that particular morning, but who needs a coffee at the podiatrist – at 2 in the afternoon, for god`s sake?

I don`t mind ponying up the bucks for a specialty item.  However, I can assure you that the difference between what some people are calling Medium Roast Jamaican El Negra Java, for example, and Good-To-The-Last-Drop Maxwell House is minimal– especially after the selected serving has been drowned in steamed milk, sprayed with born-in-the-bottle whipped cream and covered in cinnamon-flavoured sprinkles.  It’s coffee, folks!  There`re only so many things you can do to it.

Our current coffee cult might be just another First World Problem, but I’m telling you the entire industry is living proof that P.T. Barnum was right.

9 Out Of 10 Dentists…

english3When the Voice-over man on the television advertisement says, “Nine out of ten dentists recommend Brand X,” do you ever wonder what the other guy recommends?  Do you stop for a minute and think maybe that extra guy isn’t just some dumb bugger who should never have made it out of dental school?  Maybe he’s an insightful maverick, years ahead of his time.  Maybe, because of his unconventional views, he’s been losing high-end patients and is now contemplating a move to Africa where dentistry is still practised for the love of the smile.  It’s possible, you know.  In fact, in a hundred years, the Nobel Academy might just award that 10th guy the Prize for Medicine (posthumously) when scientific advances prove he was right, all along.  Maybe they’ll even name streets and schools after him for his courage in remaining true to his oral health principles in the face of universal scorn.  That can happen, also.  Or maybe it won’t go that way.  Maybe he’ll die, poor and alone, in a South African slum-hut village, consumed by Umqombothi* and despair, his unique knowledge unaccepted and lost to humanity for all time.

Or it might just be a gender thing.  That 10th dentist could be a woman, who, as a natural caregiver went into dentistry out of a genuine love for people and their hygiene.  Maybe in dental school she found she had to be that much better than her male colleagues, so now, as a professional, she’s done more research on the subject.  Perhaps she found some significant flaws in the formula for Brand X but was under enormous pressure not to publish her findings.  However, when she was asked to make a recommendation, she felt compelled to tell the truth.  Possibly this is putting a lot of stress on her home life, where her husband, an oral surgeon she met in university, is unsupportive, and she’s having an affair with the podiatrist across the hall.  It could all end in a nasty divorce, and it might take her years to get her life back together when she finally kicks the podiatrist out and returns to her small hometown to assume her father’s family practice.  It’s very possible.

Of course, it could all be a corporate conspiracy.  The original nine dentists could have been specially selected for their moral english1turpitude.  They could have been taken on an all-expenses-paid weekend to the San Marcos Golf Resort in Chandler, Arizona.  Once there, they might have been schmoozed with fast cars, expensive liquor and beautiful women.  They could have played golf all day and partied all night.  Then, on Sunday, they could have been told that the next junket was deep-sea fishing off the coast of Puerto Vallarta available only to those dentists who recommended Brand X.  It would have been an easy choice for weak men.  Perhaps, though, in a complete surprise, dentist # 4 may have fallen in love with one of the hookers.  He might say he’s going to blow the whistle on the whole tawdry scam.  Threatened with exposure, the corporate lackeys might have kidnapped the couple, taken them out into the desert and left them for dead.  However, after days of enduring heat and thirst, the lovers could have reached the border.  They could have smuggled themselves across and are now hiding out in an unnamed Mexican village, where they’ve set up a clandestine, cash-only dental practice.  Meanwhile, in corporate America, the suits at Brand X might have found another dentist and think they’re safe from exposure.  Unfortunately for them, dentist #4 might have just discovered a young girl who, even though she’s been brushing regularly with Brand X, has developed a cavity….

Do you ever think of these things when the toothpaste commercials come on TV?  You don’t?  You should.  It’s fun.

*South African beer

Golf is Not a Metaphor for Anything!

golfI don’t play golf.  I don’t know anything about the game.  If asked, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a birdie, an eagle, two penguins and a duck, or whatever other fowl they use to keep score.  (Personally, I think most games where the lowest score wins are suspect, anyway.)  However, that’s not to say I am philosophically opposed to golf.  I’m not one of those people who wants to dig up all the golf courses and plant potatoes for the poor or anything.  I just don’t see the obsessive enjoyment golfers get from the game.  At the risk of pissing off many of my relatives and most of my friends, I have no idea why anyone would want to spend a Sunday morning stumbling around a pasture in the first place.  Nor do I see the intrinsic excitement involving in whacking a little white ball with what appears to be a medieval weapon best suited for hand-to-hand combat — especially since the purpose is to somehow drive the ball into a tiny hole that’s normally 200, 300 or an inconceivable 400 yards away.  Quite frankly, at that distance, I couldn’t clearly identify a Baltimore Ravens linebacker let alone a hole in the ground that’s the size of a teacup.  In fact, I think getting your little white ball even close to the hole it’s supposed to go into is a matter of out and out luck.  And actually putting it in with any regularity has got to be wizardry at its most occult – Annika Sorenstam notwithstanding.

However, as much as I could badmouth golf all day, the only reason I’m even writing about it is it has one amazing feature which simply doesn’t exist in any other sport – the Mulligan.  For the uninitiated, the Mulligan is basically a do-over.  It works like this.  You’re standing over your ball, rear back and give it a mighty wallop and it goes someplace unfortunate, like into your opponent’s ear or miraculously through the window of a passing car.  Rather than just swear for an hour and get three Budgies (or whatever) on your score card, you can simply declare a Mulligan and do it all again.  Obviously, when the big boys are playing the Interplanetary Championship, it’s not allowed (otherwise Tiger Woods would still be hauling in the hardware) but in most friendly games it’s perfectly legal.  Weird, huh?

Nobody seems to know where this strange scenario came from (It certainly wasn’t invented by the Scots — who are Presbyterian to the bone) but it’s been around since the first part of the last century.  It’s always attributed to some guy named Mulligan.  However, after that, the only thing we can say with any certainty is he must have been bigger and meaner than the fellows he was playing with; otherwise they wouldn’t have let him cheat like that.  It’s nogolf1 wonder that this kind of chicanery caught on, though; golfers are notorious for bending the rules.  Even before Mary, Queen of Scots, took to the links, golfers were kicking sand on each other’s balls and lying about their handicaps (challenges?)  The Mulligan is right up their fairway.  Fortunately, this Mulligan nonsense never migrated into more important sports.  Third and ten, bottom of the ninth, three seconds left on the Shot Clock: none of that would work at all, if every coach could just holler “Mulligan!” and get to do it over again.  (It’s a good thing they can’t, either, or there wouldn’t be a respectable bookie left anywhere from here to Vegas.)

They say sports, like art, imitates life.  We have highs and lows, triumphs and defeats, and all the other clichés in between.  I imagine there are whole battalions of philosophers out there explaining how the game of golf is a metaphor for life and wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just take a Mulligan when we screw up.  Who cares?  For my money, reading about golf is probably just as boring as the game itself.  Besides, does anybody really want a world with every idiot and his half-witted cousin running around going Groundhog Day on life’s well-manicured pasture, forever trying to get it right?