Not a fan

RE*AC*TOR

I'm copying this from http://www.andrewhussie.com/

I check this guy's blog occasionally, he's one of the funniest web-comic guys out there. Here's a recent post on all things coffee...

http://www.andrewhussie.com/ wrote:

Everyone is full of **** on the subject of coffee, and it bothers me. It bothers me more than the kinds of stupidity prevailing in other contentious issues like religion or politics. This is precisely because coffee isn’t a contentious issue. People don’t know they are wrong about coffee and completely full of ****. I’m here to correct that.

Black coffee. Grievance number one. People who claim to like black coffee are full of ****. First of all, they are lying. Nobody likes black coffee. It is categorically, empirically demonstrably God awful. Some say it is an acquired taste, which is another way of saying you have to put the time into deceiving yourself into believing you like it through habit. Nobody takes their first sip of black coffee, smacks their lips a few times, and has their face lit up as if they were a ruddy little gnome in the woods about to grant a traveler three ****ing wishes. It’s ****, and it requires effort to become accustomed to. The only reason to apply this effort at all is to be able to call yourself a “black coffee drinker”. It is the deliberate, semi-masochistic donning of affectation to improve ones image in some way. This is exactly what smokers do when they begin smoking. The difference is, once a smoker realizes it’s a stupid idea, they are addicted. Caffeine, though very mildly addictive, does not have the same vice grip of nicotine. The only thing keeping a black coffee drinker drinking is pure asshole power. They are pretending to like it. You know what they call people who pretend things? Pretentious.


Why are black coffee drinkers so ****ing smug about it? When asked across a room whether he wants cream and sugar, he will always respond in an elevated voice, “No thanks, I take mine BLACK.” In his pathetic fantasy, the room hushes a little, maybe someone drops a spoon somewhere, as the crowd tries in vain to absorb the sheer ruggedness and no-BS kind of swagger attached to this coffee connoisseur. The gesture is approached as if it had the same mystique as James Bond ordering a dry martini. The only thing richer and bolder than the blend of French roast he’s choking down is his sad fantasy life. Would it kill you to add a drop of half and half, you self-absorbed prick?

Coffee was meant to be disguised to the palette as heavily as possible. The reason for this is that it’s an absolutely dreadful beverage concept invented by people so primitive, they clearly were not too far beyond the stage of “try eating these random beans and see if they don’t kill you.” These particular beans didn’t kill them, but were apparently proven so useless, the only remotely passable implementation was to grind them up, soak them in water, and chug the foul elixir in some dark fertility ritual.

Coffee humor. People wear their so called coffee addictions like it’s a ****ing Purple Heart. “I’m just useless until I’ve had my cup of morning coffee!” Sound familiar? You might have even said something like this. Maybe earlier this week. Why? Because it is a totally unique culture of facetious addiction, complete with a codified ****ing playbook on cracking wise about it. The thing about it is the humor is never a one way street. It is an act of collusion between the coffee addict and his/her audience. The recipient of the joke is always supposed to “understand”. “Ha, I hear ya, man. I’m like a corpse without my latte. Just tag my toe and roll me into the morgue already!” LOL LOL LOL.

But why, you ask? As is the case with black coffee drinking, a seemingly benign practice, when you dig a little deeper there is some seriously ****ed up psychological **** happening. People facetiously expose and then advertise their addiction as if they are exposing a legitimate fault about themselves. Some people find, or think others find, that admitting to faults is endearing. It makes them more human, sympathetic figures, and theoretically likeable. It is attention seeking behavior. But unlike admitting a real fault like a cocaine addiction (which by the way is often humorously likened to the coffee addiction for more big time laugh-capades), and having to endure the real pain and humiliation of that, copping to the bogus coffee vice holds no such peril. It’s a safe way to reap the dubious proceeds of self deprecation among your colleagues, and doubles as a surefire way to be the office cutup! You might even ride those lollerskates all the way up the promotion ladder if you keep it up. “Hey, Jane, can we talk about those spreadsheets in my office?” the boss might say. “Oh, yeah, I’ll be right there after I get some coffee. I’m going through serious withdrawals right now. I seriously need to hook myself up to an espresso IV drip.” “Ha, ha, I hear ya, Jane! I hear ya. Take your time, and bring me a cup, won’t you?” The correct response from the boss was, “Hey, Jane! **** you!”

Copping to being a coffee addict is just one self-deprecatory sanctuary for the insecure attention glutton. It doesn’t really work so well if you’re constantly making tongue-in-cheek remarks about your pedophilia problem. “Jesus, it’s so hard to concentrate on all these work orders when I can’t stop thinking about ivory-skinned boys. Seriously, someone register me already! I’m just no good in the morning before my first ten year-old.” You might find the lively office back-and-forth a little more sluggish on that one. There are other safe avenues of giving yourself a lovable kick in the nuts in front of others, like lamenting your computer skills. Or saying you’re afraid of clowns. Like, OH, you’re so unique and peculiar. They’re supposed to be funny, but they freak you out! Man up. It’s a dude in some makeup you horse’s ass. You know what’s scarier than clowns? Black people. Why don’t you admit that to your friends and wallow in your self-deprecatory ego prostitution? Anyone who says he’s afraid of clowns is a ****ing liar.

Anyway, back to coffee…

It wouldn’t be such a big deal if that’s all there was to it. But there’s so much more to make this phenomenon annoying as hell. Mainstream humorists will always work hard to win the favor of bland-minded office urchins. As a result, nearly every syndicated newspaper comic has at some point, or more likely regularly delved into coffee addiction humor. I swear to God, if you burned every comic which touted the brown brew’s magical, lusted-after qualities in some way, you’d pump enough soot into the atmosphere to kill off all land mammals for the next hundred million years. Any comic involving coffee in any way is such a hokey, rubber-necked nod at a slice of modern life, it makes Bill Keane’s **** look like razor-teethed satire.

I’m pretty sure before Scott Adams draws a comic in his otherwise pretty solid series “Dilbert”, he throws a dart at a board that looks like this.



Maybe he’s contractually obligated to make a coffee cliché comic now and then. (Actually, they may not happen as frequently as the dart board suggests. I just remember reading a few, and that’s more than enough to establish an incriminating pattern for me. Anyway, doing any research on it would have taken a lot longer than making the small doodle above.)

I believe Jim Davis also uses this board before drafting a Garfield. Except replace “office humor” with “inane yet infuriating bull****”. I’m betting the same applies to the comic “Cathy” (though I haven’t subjected myself to the harrowing rigors of finding this out for sure). Just replace the same phrase with “relentless blither from a hysterical sweaty ****”.

Bad coffee. I have found that just about everyone’s opinions on coffee are stupid. Some people will swear by awful coffees and call them great. Others will irrationally decry pretty decent coffees as foul swill. This is different from liking black coffee, which is a matter of affected idiocy. In this case, it’s just a matter of bad taste. Now mind you, I’m no coffee connoisseur. I would be a coffee connoisseur, but it is in diametric opposition to my interest in not being a complete asshole. But it does just so happen that I have better taste than most people on this subject.

Before I go further, I have to clarify. As suggested earlier, all coffee is basically ****. It’s just that the “good” coffees (less ****ty) are capable of being salvaged through an intensive recovery effort involving cream, sugar, and actually dumping out most of the coffee prior to the mixture. Coffees that cannot be helped even in this way we will call bad coffees.

Any coffee from a convenience store is obviously bad. This is incontrovertible. This is because for some reason the assistant night shift manager of the 7-11 is inclined to use his bunched-up soggy bathmat as a filter. Why? Ask him. Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffee is outrageously bad. To get the complete effect, go overcook some popcorn. Take all the burnt kernels, grind them up, and brew them using battery acid instead of water. Serve it at 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Voila.

I’m not going to go on at length about all the bad coffees, or good ones for that matter. I’ll just say Starbucks is pretty decent. I can only assume this is because they employ people who went to four-year coffee university and executed graduate theses in caramel macchiatos and such. There is practically a full-fledged Cirque Du Soleil of drink-slinging behind the counter, involving weird bungees and tethers as they cobble together fancy-ass drinks to the tune of a haunting fiddle. I tend to stay the hell away from all those bizarre concoctions and just go for the coffee.

Here’s how I handle myself in there to leave the store with something tolerable.

dudara

LOL - brightened my day up.

Mr Magnolia

http://www.andrewhussie.com/ wrote:

Why are black coffee drinkers so ****ing smug about it? When asked across a room whether he wants cream and sugar, he will always respond in an elevated voice, “No thanks, I take mine BLACK.” In his pathetic fantasy, the room hushes a little, maybe someone drops a spoon somewhere, as the crowd tries in vain to absorb the sheer ruggedness and no-BS kind of swagger attached to this coffee connoisseur.

LMAO