Archives, eh
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# Links for 2008-08-29
WorldChanging: Paper from Wheat, not Wood
✴English Grammar 101: All You Need to Know
✴Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django reviewed. – By Grady Hendrix – Slate Magazine
✴Watchmen, Tintin, and…Drakmar?
✴Mad Magazine’s War on Bush collection – Boing Boing – Mozilla Firefox
✴0xDECAFBAD – UbiquityCommands
✴Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / My love-hate relationship with fantasy
“I hate it because I have read too much of it and the new stuff isn’t different. I hate it for giving me the exact same fix over and over.” <- This ✴ -
# Starbucks
I must be a bit unusual; I am sort of, kind of disappointed to hear that Starbucks is going to be closing down most of it’s Australian stores. Why? Why on earth?!? It’s not as if I like particularly like Starbuck’s coffee. I don’t for all the usual reasons: burnt milk and too much of it, and bland blends. I appreciated Starbucks when we were in the US earlier this year because while it was sub-par espresso-based coffee, at least it was espresso-based coffee. It wasn’t drip brewed coffee. We had trouble finding any other outlet selling the kind of beverage we call coffee; even in Manhattan I only ever found one other place, a yarn store in the Village.
Why then will I miss Starbucks? Because where I live – Ingleburn – I’m basically in the same position. There’s not a great deal of demand for quality espresso in Ingleburn; you can’t mix it with Wild Turkey, you see. Well, actually I guess you could, but coke is cheaper and comes pre-mixed in the tinnie. There are no doubt espresso machines there, but they’re operated by the same guy that puts your battered
sharkfish in the oil.Well, them and Gloria Jeans. D drinks Gloria Jeans coffee. I stick with iced chocolate for pretty much the same reasons I don’t drink Starbucks coffee. Earlier this month though I made a resolution not to buy anything from them anymore. I’m tired of feeling awful knowing that however tiny a fraction of my money was being used to support their charity, the one that is just vile enough to occlude anything that might otherwise have achieved. I felt like every time we went into the Ingleburn store I was lining up for just one spin of the prayer wheel to a death cult.
I kept holding out an always forlorn hope that Starbucks would expand out from their Campbelltown outpost – fifteen minutes away in decent traffic – so that I could at least be insulted with poor coffee by people I am comfortable with. Sure, they’re whores. But at least they’re corporate whores. I don’t mind corporate whores. At least they money-grub for mere greed rather than spread hate against their fellow man for the sake of bronze age scribblings.
