Oh, I'm SO Gonna Get Sued (Coffee Musings)

There's been some action over at my Facebook page ever since I posted links to my Impossible Xmas List, specifically regarding coffee wants and needs. Here's the most recent three-way (which may actually be a two-way since I strongly suspect DR and TZ to be a single life form):

DR: Thats an incredible Xmas list you have there, but for coffee may i suggest the exotic coffee beans that have passed through the digestive tract of a small mammal; it adds a certain flavor and expense to the coffee beans as it has to be collected by hand.

GW: At SML we shall now make coffee only from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of Scarlett Johansson! Beans ground by the crushing action of SJ's thighs!

TZ: Thats actually a very marketable idea...who wouldn't want coffee made from SJ's butt beans???

GW: That's what I'm sayin'! Hell, I'd settle for a bag o' beans held between her silken thighs for 30 sec., but then, I'm easy.

TZ: I'm tired of celebrity perfumes, lets have celebrity coffee, like maybe she just passes her hand over the coffee beans.

GW: TZ, we get this thing going and we'll make a fortune! Of course, securing SJ's cooperation might be tricky, but I'm guessing she'd rather do Celebrity Coffee than another tired Celebrity Scent.

DR: All we have to do is CUT OFF HER HAND and take it to our bean facility.

GW: ‎"Beans Blessed and Caressed by the Sacred Mummified Hand of Scarlett Johansson!"

And then I fired up Paint.net:

Let's see now... unattributed quotes used without permission, unlicensed use of a celebrity's likeness, implied threats of bodily harm, copyright violations, a non-existent product... I fearfully await the Stormtrooper knock of the local constabulary.

Previously.

Your Saturday Evening WTF?

While waiting for Cliff at Crossroads Coffee I had a Close Encounter of the Disturbing Kind:

But I guess that's to be expected at a place with the motto, "Keeping the Oral Tradition Alive through Social Intercourse."

And a lampshade like this:

Once Again, Alone and Unsupervised...

In my previous post I mentioned The Black Blood of the Earth triple-cold-extracted supercoffee concentrate and then proceeded to generate a sales slogan for 'em based on a few anecdotes from their website:

When Subject 1′s cup of unadulterated was half empty, he grabbed his water bottle and poured the remainder into his clear glass coffee cup. He looks at it and then puts his hand up because He Needs An Adult. He said with concern, “I added water but it didn’t change color.” We all wandered over to peek into the dark heart of his mug. Even diluted to 50% of the original strength, it is still as black, oily, and potentially lethal as a tar pit.

While accurate, this can’t merely be called Scientific Coffee or even Weapons Grade Coffee. My brain went searching for terms that accurately described this creation. While the tar entity that killed Tasha Yar in ST:TNG came to mind, John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble In Little China” is what stuck. This coffee is the Black Blood Of The Earth (or BBotE for the sake of brevity).

No less an entity than Warren Ellis wrote:
The day {TBBotE} arrived, it went straight into the fridge, hissing slightly and frightening the other bottles. The next day, I had an early start, had to head into London — and found that I was out of energy drinks and was too fucked up to attempt making coffee because it involved operating machinery. So I dumped a big shot of The Black Blood into a glass, probably in the region of 100ml, mixed it with about 250ml of chilled almond milk and threw a bit of caramel syrup into it. (I like my coffee sweet, and keep a rack of Monin syrups handy.) I slung the glass back in the hope that it’d at least keep me going until I could get a Red Bull in London — which could have taken anything up to two hours.

Four hours later, I realised I hadn’t had or wanted a Red Bull.

That in itself is both magical and disturbing, given how much caffeine my system needs to tick over.

I’m fairly sure that more intensive doses could activate previously dormant areas of my brain, possibly giving me special mental powers.--The Black Blood of the Earth: Early Results

And then later:
Sleep? Sleep is for YOU OTHER PEOPLE. You UNMODIFIED people. I will swap MY ENTIRE BLOOD VOLUME with the Black Blood, and develop POWERS.

Also yes probably also death BUT STILL.--received goods 22nov10

And with those I became inspired.

Here's their current logo.
Here's my suggestion:

Why, yes, Bryan; I do have too much time on my hands!

If It's Black Friday, It Must Be Time For My Xmas List!

Dear Santa,

First, as I do every year, let me remind you of how incredibly good I've been (relatively speaking):

I've fixed no elections, fomented no revolutions, nor have I overthrown any governments this year, despite almost overwhelming temptation to do so. I haven't engaged in mass murder, no serial killings, no random acts of violence, no choke sex (hell, no sex at all!), no waylaying of strangers to harvest their body parts, and only minor, completely excusable corruptions of youth. I've refrained from kidnapping any heiresses, selling any government secrets, disrupting the ozone layer, or even holding the planet for ransom. I haven't tampered with things man was not meant to know... much... and that annoying human sacrifice thing is now in the dim, dark, distant past. I've limited my stalking activities to the online realm and I haven't propositioned any of my female associates to do that...thing...with the Shetland pony and the Waring blender in quite a while.

We'll conveniently ignore the fact that my being good wasn't entirely by choice; after all, at my age (and income level) the opportunities to be truly bad are few and far between. Still, we must judge people by their actions and not their motives, mustn't we?

Well, whatever. Here are a few suggestions:

For the more mundane stuff-- books, CDs, DVDs, minor household conveniences such as the Ka-Bar Black Kukri Machete-- I've set up a convenient Amazon.com Wishlist,  BUT... the big news is I now have a Kindle e-reader (like you didn't know that was coming) for which I have a separate Wishlist, since Amazon e-books finally can be given as gifts. Keep in mind that the more items you bring, the more I'm distracted from plotting World Domination-- a bored G. W. is a dangerous G. W., y'know-- and besides, I'm well-armed and I know where you live.

Speaking of well-armed, I need-- yes, need--  an Allied Armament X-91 50-round drum in .308 Winchester for my PTR-91KF carbine. Come the Zombie Apocalypse you'll be glad you brought me one since you violate Rule #1: Cardio. Make it so and I hereby promise to do my best to rescue you from the flesh-eating demon elves.

Recently I've been experimenting with caffeine delivery systems-- coffee makers-- and wouldn't mind a bi-weekly delivery of Blanchard's Dark As Dark and/or Mocha Java beans. They're just across the river and they're all trendy 'n' free trade 'n' stuff. Oh, and even though I have what I think of as a perfectly satisfactory Mr. Coffee electric grinder, the snobbier caffeineistas insist I need a burr grinder, perhaps a Hario "Mini Mill Slim". Too much trouble? Well, feel free to send me case after case of Funranium Labs Black Blood of the Earth superconcentrated coffee extract (their motto should be "Sleep and functioning kidneys are for the worthless and weak"). I'll even allow Mrs. Claus to watch me vibrate and twitch while you and Rudolph... uh... perhaps I've said too much..

Back-up headphones for my Sony Walkman MP3 player would be great; these Sennheiser CX 300s look like they'd fit the bill nicely and they've been reduced from $89.95 to $32.95. Hey, I'm all about saving you the bucks. Incidentally, for some reason I've noticed that the music on my computer is getting harder and harder to hear. Some people say it's an age thing, but I'm thinking it's poor CD QC and I'm thinking I need a Headroom Total BitHead headphone amp. After all, my Ziggy Stardust album says, "TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME"! WHAT? SPEAK UP! STOP MUMBLING!

Though by no stretch of the imagination am I Goth-- Crom knows I'm far too hefty to be a Goth Boi-- I still have Goth-y sensibilities which could best be expressed by a few items of decor, this fine Coffin Clock, for example, or even a nice coffin. transportation-wise, I suppose an Aston-Martin DB9 hearse in basic black with automatic transmission would be a bit out of the question, right? Does such a thing even exist? Oh, well; how 'bout something like Carthedral, the Mobile Gothic Wet Dream? And since the (non-Goth-y) cat has decided my computer chair is his own personal scratching post, maybe Giger's Harkonnen Chair would be spooky-ass enough to discourage him.

Speaking of computers and chairs, well, I talked about chairs here; any one of them would do nicely. Or all, or any combination; I'm not hard to please.

Well, that's about it for this year. As usual, I'll be leaving a little something for your efforts, only instead of milk, cookies, and Fentanyl I figured you might like a change of pace-- you'll be finding a couple of bottles of genuine (and now fully legal in the US!) absinthe on top of the television set: Kubler for you and Lucid for Mrs. Claus, so put on your best Bohemian garb, grab a sugar cube or two, drink up, get nekkid, and see the Green Fairy! Leave the cat alone; he's touchy and liable to rip out certain valuable portions of your anatomy.

Have a Merry Newtonmas!

(adapted from this)

Happy Birthday, Boris!

Well, as usual, I'm a day late (and more than a dollar short). Yesterday, November 23, was Boris Karloff's 123rd birthday.

I and my good friend JSaM waxed ecstatic about Boris in this post from last year so I'm going to try (try mind you; not necessarily succeed) not to repeat myself. Besides, there are better tributes all over the web if you care to search for 'em; here and here, for example (the latter being the lead-off for The Boris Karloff Blogathon of 2009).

But the Big Story is a New! Authorized!! (by daughter Sara Jane Karloff) 608 pp!!! biography, Boris Karloff: More Than A Monster, to be released March 14, 2011. From the blurb, "...this new biography dispels the often repeated myths associated with the star - many perpetuated by Karloff himself - and reveals a wealth of new information about {his} private and professional life. See the Boris Karloff Home Page for more.

I hate to use a tired cliché... well, no, I don't... but Boris? You may be gone but you're not forgotten!

Dreaming... Dreaming...

Why, yes, Lauran; I do sleep. Too much under normal circumstances, as it turns out, but this is National Novel Writing Month and I'm trying to generate 50,000 words in 30 days while maintaining some semblance of normalcy (ahem!). It's difficult and whenever brain burn begins to set in (as it often does) I do silly stuff on Facebook and here. Especially here.

But you broach an interesting subject. In that Alternate Universe where I have lots of money and a really nice house, I also have a really nice chair that does indeed act as a central command center. Maybe a modified Ball Chair-- somewhat larger and somewhat deeper and completely equipped with a vast array of electronic digital devices, a mini-fridge, and, yes, maybe a microwave as well.

Or, maybe something a bit more utilitarian, like a C-130 Navigator's Chair and a big-ass C-shaped table to hold all the computers and shortwave receivers and speaker systems and clandestine transmitters (plus that mini-fridge and microwave) I would need to run my Invisible Empire.

 

The padding would have to be black vinyl, though.

Wait! Not a problem! The solution is... The Emperor Workstation!

 (more here)

Svelte, compact, black, complete, self-contained, looking exactly like the command center of an alien spacecraft, and a steal at $40,000! Ah, yes; once the world is mine your deaths shall be swift and painless!

Sadly, these things are unlikely to happen, but they're fun to dream about.

Since we're on the subject of cool chairs and such-- and thanks, Lauran, for triggering the memory-- some years ago I ran across a web page advertising an electric reading chair for approx. $1000. Not a reading chair that's electric; we're talking an electric chair converted into a reading chair! Oh, the Spooky Coolness Factor was just a-oozin'! Unfortunately, I wasn't foresighted enough to bookmark the page nor did I copy the picture. I went searching for it, but the page seems to be long gone. Just use your imaginations-- the head electrode would be the reading lamp.

(Virginia's electric chair, by the way)

Now I just happen to have a  friend-- another high school classmate and Facebook friend-- who makes fine furniture. Really fine. Exquisite, in fact. About a year ago I half-jokingly suggested he get into the Kustom Koffin business. Hey, Gary! HERE'S ANOTHER BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY FOR YA!

This Isn't Goofing Off; This Is Research!

Here's how I know I'm getting old-- I can hear the edits in one of my favorite songs of the 'Sixties, "Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James and the Shondells ("the name 'sounded good'").

Here's the version we Old Fogies know and love, the one they played on every Top Forty radio station in the country (ahem!) over and over until we wanted to scream "ENOUGH!"

It's nice! Gettin' some old nostalgia going there, aren't we? Now wait for it... at 2:21, right after the guitar goes 'bom bom bom bom..." four times--tone change! I didn't think anything of it at the time; it sounded cool and that tremolo on Tommy James's voice was simply riveting (Hey! It was 1968! Gimme a break!). Now listen to the long version:

Right there at 0:52-- awkward edit!-- and at 1:58-- insert edit!-- and again at 2:29-- splice edit!-- and at 4:19, the same spot as the tone change on the short version at 2:21, the final edit (noticeable by a non-sound engineer)! You. Will. NEVER. Hear. This. Song. The. Same. Way.

Screw all this high-falutin' Post-Modern Literary Deconstruction nonsense! The fun's to be had dismantling the hits of the 'Sixties!