Bloggle

Remember that note a few days back where Starbucks was closing up shop for a few hours to retrain its staff? The good folks at Coffee Klatch (Hi, Mike! Hi, Heather!) cleverly decided to offer free coffee while their neighborhood Starbucks shops were closed for a remedial course in coffeeology… and in so doing accidentally started a movement.

“First our announcement started circulating on coffee discussion websites and blogs, then our phones started ringing and email messages of support poured in from coast-to-coast,” says Mike Perry, Coffee Klatch president. “I was shocked to see that our local promotion to demonstrate how much better our coffee is than Starbucks had turned into a nationwide uprising of independent coffeehouses.”

So walk right on in to Coffee Klatch, or a fine, independent coffee house near you, order yourself a cappuccino, and hum a few bars of Alice’s Restaurant. With feeling.

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Over the summer (when it was warm and there was no snow on the ground… did I mention it’s snowing in Vermont today? Already? Again?) filmmaker Amy Ferraris dropped by to comment on a post (Where Are the Great Good Places?) and suggested a few places *she’d* found to be both great and good in the course of making her latest documentary, The Perfect Cappuccino.

Now dangling a film title like that in front of a professed cappuccino hound like me is much akin to teasing a RenFest junkie with a frozen turkey leg — amusing, to be sure, but slightly sadistic. At the time she pledged that a movie trailer would be available soon… and the rest was silence.

Fast-forward to today… when I learned that the trailer has been out for two months, thus dashing my hopes that Bloggle had become the clearinghouse of all things coffee. (Hah!)

Nonetheless, I like what I see. Amy’s style is quirky, her writing sardonic; clearly she’s getting behind the counter and talking to folk both interesting and authoritative in the specialty coffee trade. I look forward to be able to screen it. Soon. (Hint, wink, nudge… saynomore, guv.)

P.S. Amy has a blog, too, which she updates far too infrequently. Not that I’m one to hold that against anybody.

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It’s fair to say that, on this side of the pond, Heather Mills doesn’t get much attention. Who? Oh, you know… married the Beetle. No, not that one. The other one. There you are.¹

In the UK, however, Heather gets the same sort of air-time and intense media scrutiny as, say, Britney, and for similar reasons: their lives are high-wire acts that could come careening down — in a tragic yet altogether riveting manner — at any moment.

But now she’s done it.

During another typically bizarre day for Heather Mills, the former model yesterday urged people to try drinking milk from rats and dogs to help save the planet.

First of all, just try to *not* imagine milking a rat. It’s rather like trying not to think about pink elephants, albeit on a much smaller scale. And second, it’s just the kind of nonsensical declaration that gets people, like Laura Barton at the Guardian, to pondering, “…how does one milk a rat?” and, “Would rodent milk make a decent latte?”

“I would imagine she was thinking that any mammal produces milk,” says Juliet Harbutt, chairman of the British Cheese Awards, kindly. “However, if one would like to envisage, just for a moment, the difficulty of actually milking a rat, perhaps it would provide the answer. It would probably be easier to milk a whale. They’re bigger.”

According to Harbutt, the milk of goats, sheep, buffalo, reindeer, camels, horses and asses is used to make cheese, and theoretically one could milk a pig. “Though again,” she adds, “milking a pig could only be described as a challenge.”

No kidding.

As to the latte angle… your typical coffee bar serves more milk than they do coffee. Lots more. Three to five times more. Behind the coffee bar the choice of milk is serious business… business that you might routinely dismiss with your preference for 2% or 1% or — for pity’s sake — soy! And in the rarefied atmosphere of world-class barista competition, finding just the right milk is critical (if, occasionally, somewhat more serious than it appears.)²

But reindeer milk! Weighing in at a whopping 22% milk fat, reindeer milk is pretty much a brevé on the hoof! Consider that for your Christmas cappuccino!

Notes and Links

1. Honestly, I don’t think she’s got any air-time here since she did on that C-list celebrity dance-off thing, and even then we only tuned in to see if her prosthetic leg might come flying off during a particularly dramatic dance move. It didn’t, otherwise we’d still be talking about it. ↩
2. You really have to watch the video. Really. Do. ↩

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What’s not to love about Steve Wozniak?

Think of the steps that a human being has to do to make a cup of coffee and you have covered basically 10, 20 years of your lifetime just to learn it. So for a computer to do it the same way, it has to go through the same learning, walking to a house using some kind of optical with a vision system, stepping around and opening the door properly, going down the wrong way, going back, finding the kitchen, detecting what might be a coffee machine. You can’t program these things, you have to learn it, and you have to watch how other people make coffee. … This is a kind of logic that the human brain does just to make a cup of coffee. We will never ever have artificial intelligence. Your pet, for example, your pet is smarter than any computer.
— Steve Wozniak

I have no doubt that robots *can* make coffee. I’m certain there are coffee-making robots in Japan right now. But I’m pretty confident that they’ll never consistently make, say, a really good cappuccino. There’s just too many variables at play.

Now, however, thanks to Woz I hold out some hope I can teach my dog to make a decent cappa. Right after I can teach her that my socks really aren’t chew toys.

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