ASSWAD

        If you’ve been reading Coffee and Scotch regularly, like my mother, you’ll know I have a little peeve with cliched expressions in our vernacular. We tend to overuse these popular sayings to justify or guide our actions. This week I’ve been thinking about the adage, “cleanliness is next to Godliness” for some reason. Have we been quietly waging a warm on germs over the last decade with an arsenal of specialized weapons of mass destruction? If we’ve won a few battles are we closer to winning the war? I set about to create a special UN Commission to investigate America’s Super Secret War Against Dirt (ASSWAD).

        While I’m pretty sure I am immortal, as well as omniscient and omnipresent, I count my age in earth years as thirty-three. When my life was in it’s relative youth, I have fond memories of playing outside in the dirt. I don’t say this in order to segway into yet another long winded diatribe about growing up without cell phones or computers, I simply want to establish historical precedent for dirty kids. We played all day and well into the evening and we got good and damn dirty doing it. In fact, I think the quality of the days of my youth were often measured in the layers of mud and grime I had caked onto my skin and clothes by the time the street lights came on and I had to be home. Kids today are different. If they’re allowed out of their bubble and beyond the gravitational orbit of their parents, they certainly are not allowed to go outside and get dirty. So by my reckoning, Operation ASSWAD began sometime in the 90’s.

        Like many of today’s modern wars, ASSWAD is being quietly fought on some surprising fronts. The bathroom has become a primary battleground in the war on germs. This isn’t about whether or not you should wash your hands before you handle your equipment or after, that’s a debate for another day. This is about our increasingly maniacal obsession with brushing our teeth. It’s not that I don’t condone proper dental hygiene, it’s just that things have gotten well out of hand. When did the dentists finally break through our Maginot Line of common sense and wear us down with their propaganda campaign? You don’t need to arm yourself with a toothbrush the second you lay down your fork and knife people. Every time I see someone after lunch in the bathroom at work, packing a duffel bag worth of dental equipment and sand blasting bits of spinach out of their mouth, I want to do them a favor and kick their teeth out. My completely uneducated guess would be that our diets are ruining our teeth and that our Pattonesque stance on brushing is not the answer. Don’t get me started on mouthwash, I’m fairly certain government scientists created Listerine to use up our stores of Agent Orange after we withdrew from Vietnam. Incidentally, the same guys created Ethanol a few decades later.

        I’ve uncovered another major component of Operation ASSWAD, which is far more insidious than the anti-dentite propaganda campaign. With the success of the Agent Orange program, aptly named Free OJ, the government started a similar operation to dispose of the growing quantities of nuclear waste which were becoming problematic to store. The latest program, code named Wipe Pluto, was designed to re-purpose spent plutonium into a new class of consumer product called hand sanitizer. However, when secret government documents were leaked to the media and Wipe Pluto’s name was discovered, a cover-up story was launched to reclassify the planet Pluto, successfully diverting public attention. Hand sanitizers kill germs through micro doses of radioactive plutonium gel. Notice how hand sanitizers look exactly like the stuff from The Manhattan Project movie? The alcohol smell is added as a sensory diversion. Do we really need personal bottles of hand sanitizer? Do we need it mounted outside the doors to our office and next to the sinks in our bathrooms? Are soap and water not good enough anymore or are we too lazy to use them regularly? Why do we continue to let media fear-mongering drive us like the consumer cattle we have become? Like it or not, we’re on a crusade to wipe germs, bacteria and dirt from the planet. It’s up to you to stop being an ass-wad.

Smoke and Mirrors

        Here on Coffee and Scotch I expound about beer frequently. I think the most obvious explanation is that beer is the nectar of the gods and I would hate to think I’m pissing them off somehow by not honoring it properly or guiding my flock in its proper enjoyment. As much as I love to love beer, I also love to hate it as well. We have entirely to much mainstream bullshit piss-water being brewed and consumed in this country. When your beer of choice needs to hide behind millions of dollars in marketing and hype, chances are it’s lacking in substance and quality. I’m reminded of Absolut Vodka, whose brilliant marketing campaign carried its low quality vodka into every home in America. We love funny commercials and witty advertising more than we love decent, honest products in this country. Unfortunately for us, there is a correlation between the craptasticness of the beer and the creativity of the marketing. What happens when even the best advertising executives in the world can’t salvage the watery, disgusting taste of your beer anymore? Send in the engineering clowns.


        One secret to making even the most horrid of drafts somewhat more palpable is serving it cold, very cold. Hearken back to yesteryear with me and remember the pinnacle of stadium bathroom accessories, the trough. The trough ran the length of the bathroom wall and was a communal urinal of sorts. The very best troughs were filled with ice. Why the ice you ask? Well, cold piss smells a lot better (or at least a lot less) than warm piss, just like cold Coors Light tastes a lot better, relatively, than warm Coors Light. It stands to reason that when you’re producing one of the foulest beverages the world has ever known, it’s in your best interest to make sure your audience is drinking it as cold as possible. My guess is the same guys who engineered the trough, engineered the Coors Light cold activated cans and bottles. Ironically enough, just one degree of cold activation wasn’t enough to overcome the stale piss taste of Coors Light, so they needed to add an even colder activation state in the hopes that beer drinkers the world over would freeze their taste buds to death before realizing they were drinking the sweat from a Sumo wrestlers balls. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Busch Light is following suit with their own cold activated packaging. Do the bums and wino’s that drink Busch Light even have access to refrigeration?


        Not to be outdone by the wizards over at Coors, who are ingeniously employing technology that was a big hit on novelty t-shirts from the 90’s, the MIT grads working over at Miller designed their own technological breakthrough, the vortex bottle. Another beer that tastes like piss can swirl into your mouth with the same motion it swirls down the toilet like God intended it. I think it’s safe to say that we need the Miller Lite vortex bottle about as much as we need, well, Bud Light Golden Wheat for starters. How many ways can you manipulate the flavor of this crap? Someone with less IQ points than they have teeth left, is working on deep fried Bud Light Lime for next years Kentucky State Fair, you just know it. On some level it feels like these companies understand how bad their beers are and they’re blatantly mocking us. On the whole, the usefulness of the Miller Lite vortex bottle seems on par with the DvD re-winder. I’ve been thinking in the back of my head that this is a bit of form over function but in reality I’d classify it in the “lipstick on a pig category”. No amount of marketing gimmicks or technology can make beer taste good, in fact, I’d say the secret to good beer is exactly the opposite. Stay thirsty my friends.

The Continuum

        Life is a giant problem made up of thousands of smaller problems that need constant solving. If life is like the universe, than the problems are the stars. The meaning of life, therefore, is to navigate and solve as many problems as possible, in order to achieve happiness. Some of the problems are unavoidable, almost destined to happen, and some are completely self inflicted, like a Plaxico Burress gunshot wound. Throughout my distinguished life I’ve had cause to create two, trademark pending, theories which have acted as guideposts to help me navigate a couple of specific issues I’ve faced. My hope is that by sharing my Coffee and Scotch Jewelry and Beverage Continuum’s, you can navigate the stars and grab life by the short and curly’s.


        If we’ve established that life is the universe and problems are the stars, dating is like a giant black hole slowly sucking the entire cosmos into it. Is there a more perilous time in a relationship’s infancy than an occasion that calls for a gift? Just started dating a girl in November, what the hell do you buy her for Christmas? The first gift is absolutely critical to the tone of the entire relationship. First, let’s clear up some misconceptions about women straightaway. **Attention women (particularly my wife) stop reading here and jump down to paragraph three.** Men, I’ve learned something very disturbing over the course of my life...women are a completely alien species. Not the awesome kind with three boobs, like in Total Recall, but a terrifying and horrible kind with two hungry mouths. They have a normal mouth which eats chocolate and drinks wine and never shuts up; but they also have a “second mouth”, which feeds on a special diet of gold and diamonds and almost never opens. What we’ve been fooled into thinking was a vagina all these years is actually a very greedy mouth, which needs to be fed constantly to work. Unfortunately for us, the second mouth goes on strike a lot and asks for constant pay raises. The bottom line is, if you’re not buying jewelry as your primary gifts, you’re doing it wrong and you’re probably going to wake up to the sound of the trash compactor running with your severed penis in it. So that brings us to the Jewelry Continuum (JC), the penultimate guide for male gift giving.

“For every occasion in a woman's life, a man should buy said woman jewelry of a composition and value proportionate to the amount of time the two have been in a sexual relationship together.”

        Deciding where on the jewelry scale to start buying can be a little complicated. You need to factor in your age; if you’re older than 20 for instance, I don’t recommend starting below gold jewelry. If you’re younger than 20, by all means, work with silver for a year or so before you move up the scale. Also, if you’re making decent money, you need to consider your entry point carefully, but I think plain gold jewelry is a good place to start for the most part. It should be noted that watches, depending on the value, can be used as a replacement in almost any step of the Continuum, in order to mix things up a bit.

        Now, as implied by the name of this blog, I tend to enjoy a cup of coffee and a good glass of scotch from time to time. Actually, coffee has become an addiction for me, like midget porn and peanut butter Captain Crunch. I walk into the office and get my first cup before I do anything else. Consequently, over the course of thirty-three years of trial and error, I’ve perfected the Beverage Continuum. The Beverage Continuum (BC) is my way of gauging the “success” of my day, in terms of relaxation and enjoyment. My particular drink choices may not apply to everyone, but the concept is adaptable. After five days of work, I like to unwind on the weekends. When I’m not too busy skeet shooting, hang gliding, or volunteering down at the soup kitchen, I like to take it easy. Some of my simplest pleasures are enjoying a cup of fresh coffee in the morning, a cold beer and a baseball game in the afternoon, and a good quality scotch on the rocks at night. To that end, the Beverage Continuum was born.

“The quality of a day can be measured in incremental beverage stages; starting with coffee, progressing to beer, then to scotch, and on some occasions back to coffee.”

        This concept is a simple one. It’s about waking up on a Saturday morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee. It’s about the taste of an ice cold beer when you come inside on a hot day. It’s about the warmth that spreads from your lips to your toes with that first sip of scotch on a cool fall evening. Truly, the best things in life are the simplest things. Stay thirsty my friends.