The text says "many disappointments," but those links seem to indicate a single disappointment, over and over again.
1 - It was mostly many disappointments from the same guy.
2 - NYC
3 -- would I be unacceptably forward if I were to ask where? I'm always interested in good coffee -- unless this is just a good guy without correspondingly good coffee. That would not interest me as much.
There was a guy at the Starbucks (it was literally across the street) where I used to live who was waaay too nice to people. He was overly friendly in a way that creeped the hell out of me. But, some people really liked him.
In fact I don't understand the point of having a coffee guy at all - until I've had my (preferably two cups of) coffee, I don't want to talk to anyone, much less some random guy...
Maybe I should refrain from commenting further until I've had said two cups.
4 - It's the guy in my building. Believe me, this isn't coffee worth traveling for. I just want to be able to get a cup of decent, non-burnt coffee without going out in the elements (especially with winter approaching) and without having to brace myself for whatever weird mood the old coffee guy might be in.
In fact I don't understand the point of having a coffee guy at all - until I've had my (preferably two cups of) coffee, I don't want to talk to anyone
Which is exactly the point of having a coffee guy! He knows how you take your coffee, so you don't have to talk to anyone before you've had some caffeine. All I have to do is give him a bleary-eyed smile to get your coffee just the way you like it!
(In the afternoon, when I'm sufficiently awake, we do exchange pleasantries.)
Ah. Oh well.
My favorite combination of good coffee and pleasant interactions with the staff is at Oren's Daily Roast in Grand Central Station -- they have like 3 people working there with whom I've been able to forge a small connection.
Slightly related -- I found out what you mean about the Flavia coffee machines -- all this time I've been drinking acceptable coffee from the machine in my office -- but I was in another office that had a different, smaller Flavia machine, and it's output was not drinkable.
He knows how you take your coffee
And that's not a euphemism.
The young sikh guy I normally buy coffee from has some overly friendly tendencies, but I'd come to appreciate these. However, he has recently started to give me shit about the Yankees losing the in playoffs (n=1). This, this I may not be able to bear.
I dance upon the battered corpse of the Yankees.
Your n must be counting shit-givings, w/d, because for recent Yankees post-season implosions n is closer to, what, 6? 7?
Shitsgiving traditionally falls on the second Wednesday in October.
I count implosions differently than others might, but it's at least four. And yes, it's shit-givings by the coffee guy that I'm tallying.
My roommate is completely unable to talk about it. He put $500 on the Yanks, and Jonathan Chait collected. My roommate even yelled at my date last night for cheering the NYY meltdown. So I say, hook 'em Detroit woo!
He knows how you take your coffee
Pray tell, what is there beyond cream & sugar?
what is there beyond cream & sugar?
Why there is a whole world of objects and interpretations out there.
17 - But he knows the right proportion of milk and sugar! Something old coffee guy never got right, after two years of trying. And, if you click the third link, you'll see I had a hard time with him even remembering which hot beverage I prefer.
Anyone who bets $500 on a sports game deserves to lose his thumb! ... sorry, sorry. I just don't get gambling with real money.
the right proportion of milk and sugar
(0)
Wrong. The right proportion of milk and sugar is not "ASCII art floating eyeball".
The right proportion of milk and sugar
Titty!
You guys get so hung up on the fuckin appearance of the characters you don't see what the signify, man.
I have to admit, I don't get the attraction of people knowing precisely how you take your coffee. It's not that hard to i) tell them or ii) do it yourself.
The friendliness thing is good though.
In light of 25, perhaps it was a euphemism after all.
I don't think that ttaM really understands how coffee is delivered from Manhattan carts. You don't get to mix it yourself, for instance.
Fair enough re: not mixing it yourself but there is also the 'bit more milk, please' option.
Perhaps I am still not getting it.
'bit more milk, please'
You guys just aren't getting it.
Either Standpipe B is in particularly good form today or I am particularly malformed. I find both 13 and 22 very funny.
I couldn't say which. But thanks.
You give your order, you pay, and you get ONE chance (maybe) to opine about milk and sugar; then the guy recedes into his cart and emerges with a capped cup of coffee in a paper bag. You're then supposed to take your coffee and go away.
Somehow I read 27 as "how coffee is extracted from Manhattan carts," which I think is actually a superior way of putting it.
On a related note, I would like to discourage any of you from ordering your coffee "regular," for, as I remember well from my coffee serving days, there are several different things this means and most everyone seems to think that theirs is the only one.
Yeah, I totally disappointed one of the moving guys who asked for regular coffee (I offered to do a coffee run) by bringing him coffee, black. Especially since he'd already packed the sugar.
re: 32
That's how coffee carts work here too.Coffee shops, not.
As far as I can tell, regular coffee just means "not decaf" around here.
36: Yeah, see? Apparently in some places it means "coffee with cream and sugar." Which I think of as "kid's coffee."
(Seriously, I actually gave PK coffee w/ cream and sugar this morning because he was being so sluggish. He ended up being late to school anyway, but at least he was cheerful on the walk.)
I have a latent Mormon mother lurking within me, B, who is absolutely horrified by your 37. I'll try harder to smother her in the future.
You're supposed to smother the children, JM, not the mother.
Heh, I was a little horrified myself. Thus begins the prozac nation.
To reassure your inner Mormon mom, I diluted the coffee with half milk, and it was in a v. small child-sized cup, *and* he didn't drink it all. He probably got an ounce, max.
I've given Sally coffee -- she asked, and it's reasonably common for school-age kids in the neighborhood to drink coffee (and my understanding is that there's no particular health reason that caffeine will hurt a kid). But she doesn't ask for it often.
37: B is right about kids' coffe - that's how I had it at PK's age. Mind you, I was taking it straight up by the time I was 7, because I wanted coffee like mummy has it.
You may want to watch out for that.
My inner Mormon mother won't be mollified until we are all smothered in cream-based casseroles.
I've always heard fears about coffee hurting kids but I have no idea why - is it just the caffeine? (And don't most of our kids already drink lots of that in soda anyway?)
Not if you're being smothered by a Mormon mother, Brock.
I didn't learn to drink coffee until I was 20. Your coffee-drinking schoolkids have a great head start on sophistication. So urbane!
I remember vividly the first time I had a full glass of Coca Cola. I was about ten, it was a birthday party, and I bounced off the walls for about two hours.
The story I've heard was that it was at the turn of the century associated with malnourished children working in sweatshops. Well-off children drank milk, ate well, and went to school. Poor kids drank black coffee (cheaper) and worked in factories. Clearly, the health difference between the two was all the coffee.
(I haven't got a source for this, it's a vague memory of something I read.)
My son drinks coffee, w/ cream and sugar, when he needs to get moving. I was about his age, or a little younger, when I first started drinking it. My daughter won't touch it.
I didn't even taste coffee until I was 16. Then I discovered the yum.
I see no reason why kids drinking coffee is any worse than them drinking coke, except for that a lot of kids might think coffee tastes nasty.
I started drinking coffee when I was around 12. Mom and Dad switched from instant to drip right about then, and so coffee changed from nasty bitter stuff to "What is making the kitchen smell wonderful?"
My wife learned an anti-coffee song in the Chicago Public Schools in the '60s. Line I remember goes "Not for children is this Turkish drink..."
47: You've read Dooce's comment about how she had premarital sex before she had caffeine, right?
Apparently in some places it means "snorting instead of injecting." Which I think of as "kid's heroin."
47 - A friend of mine is still like that at age 22. It's almost hilarious. She can't actually drink a more caffeinated soda like Mountain Dew, or else she'll start shaking. Forget about coffee.
As for me, coffee was like beer. I'd tried it as a kid, but never really liked it until I was about the age I should drink it anyway (17-18). I still don't really like coffee straight up, but with just a little bit of sugar or the slightest touch of milk/cream, it's fantastic.
51: Mine went the other way, to freeze dried. My mother still uses it. It fizzes when added to water. But by then I knew it didn't have to taste like that.
56: Extra nice when made with hot tap water, when you're in a rush!
You've read Dooce's comment about how she had premarital sex before she had caffeine, right?
In some circles it's regarded as polite to make coffee afterwards.
Surely coke's much worse? Rots your teeth, they always told us.
I've heard that ounce for ounce, Mountain Dew has more caffeine than coffee does.
Surely coke's much worse? Rots your teeth, they always told us.
Leaving aside the obvious cocaine joke, my most successful science fair project in elementary school proved exactly this. We took all of our collected baby teeth and let them sit in various substances for a couple of weeks. The coffee-soaked teeth were discolored, but the coca cola-soaked teeth had practically dissolved.
59/60- right, that was my original point. Soft drinks are terrible for you, and I'm not sure you're getting that much, if any, less caffeine. So surely, thought I, I'm missing something w/r/t coffee's ill effects on children. Apparantly not.
60 - Nah, it's only 55 mg per 12 oz can, if I remember correctly. Drip coffee tends to be 80 to 120 mg per 12 oz mug. However, Mountain Dew can a lot more bang for your buck, since it used to go for $4 or $4.99 a 24-pack at the supermarket by my dorms pretty routinely.
These are the real things I learned from 12-page papers in high school.
62: That was the story we were told, though I never tried it. I saved my teeth for the small change and drank Dandelion and Burdock.
ounce for ounce
What other way would caffeine content be measured? You caffeine buffs ought to check out the Brazilian beverage Guaranà sometime -- if my understanding is correct, guaranine was the original name of the protein now called caffeine.
43: That's not going to happen.
Good point re. soda v. coffee. Now guilt free! I think the teeth-dissolving is the citric acid, not the caffeine, though. And PK isn't allowed to have coke after about 4 pm because, yeah. Hyper city.
57: It's in her bio: "My parents raised me Mormon, and I grew up believing that the Mormon Church was true. In fact, I never had a cup of coffee until I was 23-years-old. I had pre-marital sex for the first time at age 22, but BY GOD I waited an extra year for the coffee. There had better be a special place in heaven for me."
When I was a lad, I used to have six cokes after I got home from school. I cut back after I got heart palpitations in junior high, and the doctor asked about my caffeine intake. I have almost no caffeine now, because I notice that it makes me homicidal. I also no longer wonder why I got into so many fights as a kid.
"six cokes" s/b "six lines of coke"
32: Why the paper bag? To further disguise whatever the coffee guy did to it?
Also, these are all kinds of awesome.
67: Drink for drink? E.g., an espresso shot = one drink, but it's a lot fewer ounces than a can of coke.
72.--Why the paper bag? An excellent question. My hypothesis is that all drinks sellers give you a paper bag out of solidarity with the winos. Since I'm still Not From Around Here, I always refuse the paper bag, to the sellers' consternation.
69.--Ah, that's where "dooced" meaning "fired from work because of blogging" comes from. I didn't know she was a former Mormon; it sounds like she had it much worse than I did.
70: Note to self: no more coke for PK--it gives you kidney cancer.
75: We're all going to die of something, B, no matter how much pleasure we deny ourselves.
Shit, Dooce makes enough off her blog ads that she *and* her husband stay home?
I have *got* to start taking blogging more seriously.
76: True, but there are less disagreeable ways.
All I know is I want to die fairly quickly and not require extended care in an old-age home. Jesus, those things are fucking expensive. And when you run out of money, medicare pays crap so you have to move to some really depressing place where you share a room with two other bed-ridden old people and are forced to either watch their television shows all day or else spend most of your time sitting in a wheelchair in the hallway.
My dad was mostly deaf so the roommate's tvs didn't bother him. He would read a lot. Three guys died in his room in an 18 month period, I think. He was out of it and it didn't seem to bother him much
Those places are appalling. On the other side of the equation, my SIL, who's anurse, got a job managing one and her first job was to clear up everybody's bed sores. Eventually she improved it to the point where people who'd been expecting to die got better and went home.
So she got chewed out by the owner for losing business.
77: You'll note she doesn't live in LA anymore. Do you really want to make that tradeoff?
All I know is I want to die fairly quickly
I'd like to be shot by a jealous husband on my 100th birthday.
All this talk of mortality makes me think to recommend Ralph Steadman's new book, "The Joke's Over", about his collaboration with Hunter Thompson. I just started reading it and am finding plenty to dig.
Just a bit a go, I read this quote, "Oh, to be 87 again!"
Also: are you guys aware that an airplane just crashed into a building in Manhattan? Does not look like a terrorist attack but it should make people pretty freaked out for a day or two.
If that's the case, Clownae, I am very disappointed in WNYC.
Why, is WNYC not reporting it? Or are they saying they think it's an attack?
Cala links to the NYT on the other thread
It's certainly on CNN Headline News right now
Here's the Gothamist. WNYC just broke in with special coverage. It was the Bellaire building, East 72nd between York and East River blvd. I'm pretty sure I went to dinner a couple of weeks ago in that building.
Man, I hope it's just an accident. The timing's good -- middle of the day, before schools got out -- there's a good shot very few people were hurt.
That's what a friend of mine here said, "is it an accident?" Is that really a possibility?
Well, the plane that hit the Empire State Building in the 40's was an accident, wasn't it? If it's some idiot in a small plane, a screwup seems possible. And it's such a low-value target for terrorism, even the random nutcase sort -- once you're in a plane over NY, wouldn't you head for something more dramatic than an apartment building in the middle of the day?
Yeah, a helicopter on a windy day, I totally buy that it was an accident.
Some reports are saying helicopter, some are saying small fixed-wing craft.
Well, the plane that hit the Empire State Building in the 40's was an accident, wasn't it?
Traditionally, Kong is treated as an act of nature rather than an accident.
CNN is saying fixed-wing plane. But the consensus seems to be that it was an accident.
CNN also says "the homeland" without irony.
NYPD is saying it's a helicopter (according to my coworker who chatted one up on his smoke break).
But the consensus seems to be that it was an accident.
Which is why NORAD has ordered fighters into the skies over several large cities. As a political precautionary measure, of course.
Well, if a helicopter's wings became fixed, it would crash.
CNN is interviewing an eyewitness who says it was a plane. They just asked him to confirm, and he says definitely a plane. He's kind of pissy about it.
The pissy eyewitness is a pilot.
The head of NORAD just said that yes, it's now procedure to scramble planes in these situations.
Yeah, all the news places are saying small fixed-wing plane now.
MSNBC is reporting this weirdness: "The aircraft was flying at 800 feet when it made a radical turn and crashed."
Nobody where I work (myself included) is freaking out over this. Everybody's just kind of wait and see.
MSNBC is reporting this weirdness: "The aircraft was flying at 800 feet when it made a radical turn and crashed."
The pilot/witness said it looked to him like someone trying "expertly" to get back to the airport.
Ask before you post, people.
Yep, even if the plane made a sharp turn before it crashed, that doesn't mean it was intentional. I imagine someone might make a sharp turn if they were lost or had engine trouble or something.
What part of running into a building was expert? I don't get what a plane is doing that low over the East River unless it's intentional terrorism or very very bad flying. He's not close enough to I guess LaGuardia? to need to be down at building level to land.
Engine trouble?
Yeah, I think engine trouble, or some other mechanical failure.
Have I mentioned that I hate cnn.com?
Steiner said fires were burning on the ground. "It looks like the plane just flew into someone's living room there." (Watch the orange flames ravage the apartment -- 1:50)
My honey called the lady we know who lives on approximately the 30th floor in, yes, that exact building. No answer as of yet. Maybe she's out grocery shopping.
Well, the plane that hit the Empire State Building in the 40's was an accident, wasn't it?
Man, I'm not that old.
A B-25, a relatively small plane by modern standards, hit the Empire State Building, on an unoccupied floor, in 1945. The flyers were just screwing around, if I remember correctly. There's a picture from the floor seeing the plane stuck in wall that I've seen.
Also, did y'all see this?
New York Yankees Manager Joe Torre told CNN that the plane that was a Cirrus SR-20 registered to team pitcher Cory Lidle.
Weird.
Yankee-sponsored terrorism? That's just freakish.
Does this mean the Yankees are now officially part of the Axis of Evil?
Oooo... let it be known that at the time 121 WAS POSTED I didn't know Lidle was actually dead. I sort of guessed that this was false info. (How the heck did Torre know before anyone else that the plane was registered to Lidle??). Anyway, I don't generally take cheap shots at the recently-deceased.
Mayor Bloomberg now saying that nobody in the building was hurt. Thank goodness.
But JM, a famous person is dead! That's equal to something like 30 no-name civilians.
Perhaps, but one famous person I've never heard is only worth one-tenth of one no-name civilian who served me curried chicken and let me play with her month-old kittens.
These calculations are complicated, you see.
Has Bloomberg confirmed that the kittens are okay? We may not be out of the woods quite yet.
How many Yankees to kittens, do you think?
I'd say twenty Yankees per kitten. Unless the Yankee used to be with the A's (as Lidle was), in which case ten.
129: But a scab Yankee, like Lidle? Twenty-five to a kitten; thirty if the kitten is especially cute.
True 'nuff. And I didn't account for Giambi, whose A's kitten-worth bonus is offset by him acting like a total dick after he was signed by the Yankees.
So the Yankee-kitten calculus is a little more complicated than I first thought, but ten Yankees a kitten, minimum.
How many kittens is Gold Glove shortstop Derek Jeter worth? That man really plays to win!
132: He is worth an intangible (but fractional) number of kittens, obviously.
The crash interrupted the Sotheby's contemporary auction! OH well.
I didn't start drinking coffee until I was in my 40s
I dance upon the battered corpse of the Yankees.
I felt this, but now I'm glad I didn't say it.
134: Curiously, not the first time a plane crashing into a New York City high-rise has had an impact on the contemporary art world. An engine from the B-52 that hit the Empire State Building plunged into and destroyed the penthouse studio of sculptor Henry Hering.
What part of running into a building was expert?
LB is obviously thinking inside the box.
Welcome to the Thrd Millenium, Liz! The world is flat, but you apparently didn't get the word..
You see, flying airplanes into buildings is like a purple giraffe...
Does this mean the Yankees are now officially part of the Axis of Evil?
'now officially' s/b 'formally confirmed as'
It's spooky how Standpipe can control events like that.
Yeah. Don't piss Standpipe off, people.
God help me, I heard that on NPR today and it crossed my mind for a minute to wonder if the R's had done it on purpose because of the elections.
I need to stop hanging out with Kotsko when I'm in Chicago.
Also, month-old kittens are worth the lives of any number of pro ball players. I am able to say this because I do not, personally, know any pro ball players.
I'm worried about my coffee guy. I needed to get rid of some change this afternoon so I paid him in dimes and five pennies. I debated over the pennies - I could have paid 15 cents worth in pennies but decided just to go with 5 cents in pennies, not wanting to take him for granted, but fretted that any pennies might be considered an insult. When I got there, he greeted me with a big smile and "My friend! Hello!" and made me my afternoon coffee. When I gave him the money, he looked a bit crestfallen and said "Pennies?" Oy. I will have to put myself on a strict quarters-only routine to make up for this.
Yeah paying in pennies generally seems to be interpreted as an act of hostility.
Which is why pennies should be abolished. A coin cannot be good currency when it's use is considered insulting.
(Seriously though, what's his deal? You still tipped, right? If so, cleaning up your change shouldn't cause a problem -- he should be happy to help. Sounds like a jerk. You are obviously nice than me: rather than a quarters-only routine, I would be inclined to offload even more pennies from here on out.)
*its* use, motherfuckers.
And while I'm at it, *nicer*.