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19 April 2007

Coffee glorious coffee
Mmmmm coffee....

I am still trying to figure out exactly how someone "discovered" coffee. When you think about it, it's a very complex process. First you harvest the coffee berries from the tree and remove the actual coffee bean. Then it needs to be roasted, ground, and mixed with hot water to brew. Strain out the grounds, add cream and sugar if desired, and enjoy.

But that's a pretty complicated process! It's not like seeing an orange on a tree and saying, "Hey, that looks good! Let me try to eat that!" One bite of the peel and you realize it needs to be removed first. But otherwise, it's a very straightforward sort of thing.

Coffee is anything but straightforward.

I also read somewhere that coffee helped with the Enlightenment period. Before coffee came to Europe, the only safe way to drink water was by drinking beer. So most people went through life in a half-drunken haze. Coffee instead wired people up and cleared their brains.

My husband does not drink coffee at all. He thinks it's disgusting. He has to be just about the only sailor on the face of the planet that will not drink coffee. Most sailors survive on coffee. Of course, I myself wouldn't exactly want to drink what is served aboard ship. Navy coffee is more like mud than anything else. Ask my good buddy Art about Navy coffee; he's an expert!

Every so often when I was a kid, my dad would invite someone from work over for dinner. My mom would make a nice meal, and for dessert we'd have a frozen pie (slightly burnt in the oven) and coffee. This was just about the only time I was allowed to drink coffee. With both of my parents being Navy officers, it was a bit strong, but with enough powdered creamer and some sugar, it became a bit more palatable.

I can still imagine sitting at my parents' dining room table with the blue Guatemalan tablecloth with my hands wrapped around a very hot mug of coffee while the adults chattered away. Usually I chose the mug with the Cathy comic strip on it while my parents drank out of stoneware mugs from the 1970s. Sometimes the mug my sister had painted for my father at her ceramics class would come out, and he'd drink from that.

Coffee is good.

In other random thoughts, I am seriously pissed off at CNN.com and thankful that I do not partake of any kind of televised news. Since I got a DVR with my cable service, I record all the shows I want to watch (usually documentaries of some kind), and fast-forward through all the commercials. That gets me past the somber faces of the newscasters speaking about the Virginia Tech shooting.

Yesterday the media broke the story about the shooter sending his manifesto to NBC. For hours, from the afternoon through to the late night, the header image on CNN.com was the shooter pointing his gun at the camera.

Hang on here. Is that really the image we want the families to have to see if they stumble upon CNN.com? To see what very well have been the last thing their sons and daughters saw before they were gunned down? Is that really the sensitive thing to do?

Of course not.

But the media doesn't care about being sensitive. It just wants to get viewers.

It also doesn't help I have a weird irrational phobia that at some point in my life I am going to get shot. Why I have this phobia, I have no idea. But it's there, nonetheless. Seeing a gun pointed at me every single time I visited CNN.com was not helping matters.

I stopped checking CNN.com.

It's been two days since the shooting. Two days, and still CNN.com splashes coverage all over its front page. Eight of the thirteen headlines (not including the ones under the main image) on the homepage have to do with the shooting. Under the US News header, at least one headline at all times has to do with the shooting.

And then people wonder why I don't bother to turn my tv to CNN, or MSNBC, or Fox News, or whomever. If they're this obnoxious on their website, I can't imagine how bad they would be televised.

Not to trivialize the tragedy, but honestly, two days after the shooting there IS other news to be covered. Let's let the families and friends grieve in peace.




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