Expertise

I’m sitting here in my favorite coffee shop, watching a video of octopi mating—fascinating stuff if you’ve never seen it, and most people haven’t.  I love this coffee shop because it has a Brazilian blend of coffee that is bold without being too bitter.  Brazilian farms are the best coffee farms, because they use this special acai berry fertilizer, and the wind patterns are perfect for the Arabica beans.  Most people swear by Columbian coffee but I switched about five years ago and never looked back.

They serve them in these biodegradable cups that are made from corn, which you’d think is a good concept except that it fuels the increasing demand for corn worldwide because of its use in biodegradable cups and as an alternative fuel source and has driven prices through the roof, and so cattle and poultry prices are up, too, and they get fed with inferior grain and other waste-food, which can bring the nutrient level down, so I don’t even buy anything but free-range anymore, but it has to be up to California standards because the Chicago standards are really sub-standard.

Sub-standard like all of the sequels we’re seeing this summer, which I figure probably stems from the movie studios’ trend toward safer productions.  This really kills the creativity of the whole industry, and even the Sundance festival was less original than in previous years (and forget even approaching the level of the ‘97 festival!).  Of course the whole culture is trending now towards smaller independent films that can be marketed with newer technologies apart from the classic cinema experience.

Newer technologies like the iPhone, even though the new generation has such a problem with the antenna, because it’s built as a wrap-around on the device and can drop the call if you grip it wrong.  Come on, Steve Jobs, we all saw this kind of thing coming, and if you’d paid attention to my tweets the whole thing could have been avoided.  That’s why Google is stealing your market share.  Google has goats that keep the grass short on their front lawn instead of mowers.  True story.

Like the true story about root beer.  Not many people know that A.J. Hines was going to call it root tea until his friend told him that a Prohibition-era drink would sell better as root beer.

Of course Europe never went through that whole debacle, and anyone who’s spent any time there at all knows how their stance toward life and pleasure is so much more advanced than ours.  And their hostel system is great for backpacking, but the Alps in the summer are too expensive, and the Louvre is overrated you should go to Amsterdam, red-light district or even to London and the great pubs we don’t have great pubs here it’s all because of our distribution system and protecting monopolies of weak pilsners don’t even get me started.

But let’s talk about music.