[1342] in Humor
HUMOR: Coffee and more
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Fri Mar 8 11:54:13 1996
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 08 Mar 1996 11:39:02 EST
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 00:08:37 -0800
From: connie@interserve.com (Connie Kleinjans)
WAKE UP AND FIND THE COFFEE
By Ian Shoales
Last week I went into a coffee house to get, you know, a cup of coffee,
only to be told that actual coffee was unavailable. Would I like any
tasty cappuccino, cafe au lait, or espresso? A double decaf latte with
one of those little Italian biscuits that tastes like chalk? They had
those, but a steaming java, a plain ordinary cup of joe? No way.
This mutant coffee thing is getting out of hand. It's even hard to get
a cuppa mud at the local convenience store. It used to be simple: Get
large paper container, put under urn tap, pour, attach appropriate lid,
pay and go. Today, convenience stores all have an Isle Du Cawfay or
some damn thing: It offers cinnamon coffee, vanilla coffee and decaf
Viennese, from beans fresh-squeezed by formerly Soviet virgins. I'm
not against this stuff, but it's not what I look for in liquefied
caffeine: I want a blister on my lips and a knot in my stomach. I
want my coffee black, bitter and scalding. Give me that little
pleasure, America. I promise I won't sue you.
Alas, we're well on the road to tepid exoticism. Have your tried to
find vanilla ice cream at the grocery store lately? You could get
frostbite from rummaging. You have to claw you way past Wally Walnut
Peanut Brittle Supreme, or Cherry Brownie Fudge Syrup Surprise, ice
cream with so much extra junk crammed into its mass it looks like a tub
of frozen glue with chunks of bark floating in it. If you find vanilla
ice cream at all, its usually Milli Vanilla Whole Bean Rain Forest
Saver, with vanilla beans suspended in its depths like boulders in a
glacier.
While we're on the subject, isn't it time to declare a moratorium on
microbreweries? Walk into an upscale tavern these days, and there's a
12-foot wall of bottles behind the bar, floor to ceiling. If you ask
the bartender what kind of beers they serve, you'll die of thirst
before he reaches the end of the list. And all the names have the same
kind of annoying, vaguely macho ring to them: Ugly Alligator Ale, or
One-Eyed Pete's Pale Porter. I'll go mad, I tell you! Mad!
We've got to nip this thing in the bud, my friends. We're on the road
to a world where we'll be able to flavor our foods with cumin, curry,
or cilantro, but not salt. We used to drink water from the tap,
remember that? Then we switched to bubbly water from foreign lands;
now it has to be cherry-flavored bubbly water, or we won't touch it.
We have special shampoos for our individual hair needs. We need
special outfits to ride a damn bicycle. We have call waiting, call
forwarding, caller i.d. -- but when's the last time you actually talked
to a human being on the telephone?
Our new culture is all quarters, no pennies, prayer in school but no
education, all croissants and no doughnuts. We're not smoking!
Tomatoes will stay ripe for centuries.
We welcome space aliens, but not illegal ones. (As Martians carry work
visas.) We used to shoot tin cans from stumps with .22s. Today we
shoot each other with .357s. We used to drive gas-guzzlers, guilt-free;
today we drive little tiny cars with strange names not found in nature.
Do we really feel better about ourselves? Of course we don't.
We're just trying to prove that we can control our appetites. "I don't
have a sugar jones," we say to the world, "I just have a sudden craving
for Huggy-Bugy Sweet 'N' Sticky Health Bars. That's all."
I don't want to alarm you (well, OK, I do), but it seems like we're
ripe for an invasion. Lean and hungry barbarians from the east, take
note. You won't even need weapons. All you need are basic goods:
sugar, coffee, tea, whole milk, alcohol, red meat, tobacco. I don't
want to sound like a traitor, but we're a pushover.
>From the _Funny Times_, November 1995. Reprinted without permission.
