Anal Probes, Esperanto and You (A Guide to Traversing the Universe)

  So I write this drivel from my sprawling estate here in the rolling foothills of Connecticut. I’m not necessarily proud to be from “The Cut”, but it is what it is. Needless to say, street cred is not an issue for me. However, one of the biggest problems with Connecticut is our unfortunate proximity to New York and the terrible stench that comes with it, or maybe the real issue is Massachusetts, the ridiculous hairdo we’re stuck with forever. I think Connecticut must feel a lot like Donald Trump most days...super rich and powerful but with awful fucking hair. I don’t want to forget Rhode Island, or maybe I do, but let’s just assume it will fall into the ocean like California one of these days. It certainly would be one positive thing to come from Al Gore’s wet dream, otherwise known as "Global Warming".

     So what’s the point of all this? The point is I’ve lived my entire life here in Connecticut and I have no idea how we refer to ourselves conversationally, outside of the glaringly obvious titles like “super elite” and “mega rich”. Are we Connecticutters? Connecticutians? Connect-the-dots? Honestly, I have no fucking idea. At the end of the day, I don’t really care but it got me thinking about the “rules” that govern naming the indigenous people from different places. Who the hell decides these things and why isn’t there any consistency? Not that we don’t seem like a bunch of idiots for a lot of other reasons, but one day when the Martians come and excavate what’s left of Earth, they are going to be confused as fuck trying to figure our dumb-asses out. So Connecticut is anybody’s guess, and New York and Rhode Island are easy, New Yorkers and Rhode Islanders respectively...or dis-respectively depending on who you ask. What about Massachusetts? Aside from obviously being Massholes, what are you guys really called? Massachusettsers? Massachusettsidians? I have no fucking idea.

     And speaking of Martians, how is it that we’ve so eloquently named the hypothetical people from Mars but I have no idea what we’d refer to ourselves as in an intergalactic sense? It’s going to be embarrassing for me when I’m getting anal probed by a Uranusian (alien from Uranus?) and I’m trying to explain I’m Earthian? Or Earthiopian? Or Earthianian? Fuck me, it’s a huge double whammy to be from Connecticut and Earth. At least I’m comfortable being an American, that one is easy right? But what the hell are the rules for figuring it out? If Germans are from Germany, than how the hell are people from Italy not Itals? Can you have two names? How about Spain? Are you Spanish or a Spaniard or both? Is this just another stupid English language thing I can blame on British Imperialization? Naturally, as an arrogant, rich, white American from Connecticut I don’t really even acknowledge people from other countries, let alone their crude spoken tongue.

     It’s going to take some work but I’m proposing that we adopt a unified system for handling this crisis. It would probably be smart if we do it all in Esperanto but I think we’d need government support for that kind of pork laden project. At the very least we’d need to convince the United Nations that it’s a problem worth waging a war against; like tight jeans, Harry Potter, mayonnaise, Justin Bieber, Coors Light, zombies, and malaria.

     I think Coffee and Scotch is going to have to lead the way with this endeavor, so I’m proposing we start with the following rules.

     1) If you’re from some place that ends in a consonant, let's simply add an "er" onto the end. If where you're from has to be difficult and decided it needs an "s" hanging onto the end for some strange reason, let's drop the "s" and make it “ers”. So you Massholes become Massachusetters. Utah = Utahers Japan = Japaners etc

     2) If you’re from some place that ends in a vowel or a “y”, we’re dropping the vowel and adding “ians”. So you Germans are now Germanians. Mexico = Mexicians etc

     3)If you’re from anything that ends in Island, you are an Islander. I think we’re pretty good with that one already. You people seem to get it.

 
    Under no circumstances will any exceptions be allowed, lest we create any more confusion than what already exists in our current stupid ass system. My dream is that one day soon all Earthers will be prepared to greet our anal probing galactic cousins from Unranus (the Uranuians) properly.

Summertime Blues

      With the advent of another summer, I emerge from my hibernation, renewed and ready to once again wield the latent power of my keyboard against the indomitable stupidity of humanity. The news headlines of the last few months have borne the fruit of my premonitions. You may remember my warnings about the impending zombie apocalypse? I told you, my faithful Coffee and Scotch readers, to cast off your tight jeans and repent, lest you become victims of the shambling undead. You heard my clarion call and were saved. Others were not so fortunate. Following the first wave of attacks in Miami, the media skillfully shifted our attention to “bath salts”. My theory is that the errant zombie attack was a government training exercise gone bad...Operation Bieber Drop.The real mystery is, why is the government creating an elite force of synthetic drug induced zombies to kill Justin Beiber? The obvious answer is...who cares so long as it’s the one government program in a thousand that succeeds. It sounds a lot like something I wouldn't mind my tax dollars funding.

      So here we are, the start of the summer of 2012 and everything good that comes with it. This wouldn’t be Coffee and Scotch though, if I was simply reminiscing about those week long, Country Time lemonade, summer Sunday afternoons. This soapbox was created so I could bitch, and bitch I shall. You there, on the motorcycle weaving through traffic down the center of the Merritt Parkway, who the fuck do you think you are? How about you, riding your rice rocket down the street at 11:00 at night, loud enough to wake the dead, who the fuck do you think you are? And you, posting the public service announcements on my Facebook wall about being “aware” of motorcyclists on the roads, who the fuck do you think you are? Don’t tell me how to drive my car, and how to “share” the road, and how to be on the lookout for all the precious snowflakes out there on their custom choppers. Fuck off! I’ll tell you what I tell all the Lance Armstrong wanna-be bicyclists, if you want to share the road with me than take some personal accountability for what you’re doing. And what you’re doing is being an asshat. If you want to be out there with the big boy cars; put your damn helmet on, pick a lane to drive in, and follow the rules of the road. I’m not responsible for you dipshits. You wanna make your fancy little toy nice and loud and drive it on residential streets at all hours of the night, and then plead with me to pay attention to you while I’m out driving my son around trying to get him to fall asleep because he’s running a 102 degree fever? Fuck you. I’m gonna make my car door nice and heavy and swing it open while you’re creeping  by me down the highway, straddling lanes to avoid the traffic I’m stuck in. Traffic that was probably caused by a blood stained patch of asphalt that used to be a motorcyclist like you. Dammit you assholes drive me crazy every summer.


      The truth is I don’t care what you’re driving, I care how you’re driving it. There are just as many idiots out there, driving shitty cars with aftermarket exhaust systems and stupid ass stereos that make my teeth rattle. Mini vans driven by sexually frustrated soccer moms, tailgating everyone and swerving across three lanes of traffic without a thought about using a turn signal. If you want my respect on the road, earn it. I realize that not everyone that owns and operates a motorcycle is an inconsiderate jackass, but it sure does seem like a lot of them are. When I see you out there, doing the right thing, I give you extra room and extra respect. In my world, you reap what you sow. We’re all on the same side right? We’re all driving over to Burger King to try a delicious bacon sundae and bask in the knowledge that bacon, chocolate and ice cream taste fucking amazing together. Which is something I seem to recall writing about last summer. Hey, maybe when the Biebs is gone, I’ll buy everyone on a Harley a bacon sundae to celebrate. Mea culpa.

Murphy's Law versus The Mayans

        So it’s mid-January and I haven’t written anything since November. If there’s one thing I’m good at, and according to my family and friends there really isn’t, it’s procrastination. I have the best intentions with this blog, honestly I do, it’s just that life keeps getting in the way. I had this great December blog idea about an African Santa Claus, dressed in a traditional Kwanzaa dashiki, catching his beard on fire lighting a menorah at a pagan Solstice Festival, but then I got downsized at work. Aren’t corporate euphemisms great? It seems they were looking to save a little money so they hired someone who could show up later than me, leave earlier than me, surf the Internet more efficiently and thoroughly than me, and drink 27% more coffee. It just doesn’t seem possible. Honestly, I thought my skill-set was fairly irreplaceable. Was my mother lying to me when she said I was special? Sometimes I wax poetic about writing Coffee and Scotch for a living, however, it seems my destiny lies in far greater things. I’m starting a new job soon. I think they said I’ll be the Junior Assistant to the Vice President of North American widget operations. Corporate America sure can slip the rose colored glasses on you pretty quickly. It seems a little unfair to be starting a new job “pre-jaded” but it’s not in my nature to be optimistic. There’s only so many times you can be hopeful before the warm bright light of hope fades away to the cold stark darkness of reality. I’m sure my new cubicle will be really great though and I’m looking forward to spending at least nine hours a day in it. Happy New Year everyone!

       I thought it might be a fun way to start the New Year off with some special Coffee and Scotch 2012 predictions. And no 2012 prediction list would be complete without a nod to the Mayans and their zany calendar antics. By now, almost everyone knows about the Mayans and their doomsday prophecy. But what the Mayans didn’t factor into their premonition is the most powerful force in the universe. If you were thinking gravity, you must be new here. I’m talking about Murphy's Law dammit. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. No doubt you’re wondering what the correlation is? It’s simple really, you see life likes kicking me in the nuts, so why would it want to stop? Put another way, life as we know it will not cease until the universe is done making me its bitch. So fear not my tinfoil hat wearing loyal readers, I may be balled up in the fetal position and crying like a little girl, but I’m still drawing breath.

       In line with people getting downsized and euphemized, I’m expecting more belt tightening is inevitable this year, what with the global economy being brought to it’s knees by a bunch of uni-browed Greeks who spent too much money of Ouzo and olive oil. I’m not sure who employs Punxsutawney Phil, but the position of Under Secretary of Seasonal Transition Indication sounds like something the government might have on it’s payroll. I imagine the money for Phil’s extravagant lifestyle is earmarked somewhere in the Defense Department budget. It just doesn’t seem appropriate to keep an under-qualified quadruped on the payroll when there are hundreds of thousands of under-qualified bipeds without work. What difference should it make whether you live in a stump or a double wide trailer? Either way, you’re still in Pennsylvania, and it’s hard to make that sound good. It’s like lipstick on a groundhog.

       No conversation about 2012 predictions and under-qualified bipeds would be complete without mentioning the impending Presidential election. I fancy myself an independent thinker and I like to vote along those lines too. I prefer the logical approach of voting for the candidate who I think is best suited for the position, as opposed to blindly voting for whichever idiot my political party affiliation dictates. Sitting back and watching the Republican Party beat itself up in the primaries, it seems clear to me that our current President will retain his seat for another term. I’m personally throwing my hat in the ring with Ron Paul but my track record is pretty consistent with backing losers. This year’s election already feels like a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of situation. If ours is the best Democracy in the world, I feel really bad for the rest of the world. I guess I’m used to losers by now anyway being a fan of the Mets, the Jets and John McCain. I really could use some change I can believe in, maybe 2016 will look a little less cold and dark.

WWJBD?

        This month I’m inspired to write about someone I never thought I’d waste the time or effort on, Justin Bieber. The growing Bieber Baby Mama Drama (I’m copyrighting that) is just too much for me to stand. I’m picturing Maury Povich’s booking manager leaving Justin Bieber about 437 voice mails a day trying to get him on the show. Can you imagine the ratings bonanza that episode would be? The entire free world poised on the edge of their seats while Maury unseals the envelope with the test results like he’s presenting the Oscar for Best Sub Title Translation in a Foreign Documentary. He dramatically unfolds the paper and reads the results, “Justin Bieber, you are not the father”, and the Biebs starts dancing in the girls face. I’m getting a little moist just thinking about it. As funny as the entire scenario is, there is also an underlying issue which has been on the Coffee and Scotch radar for a while now. Is Justin Bieber a 20th century male sex symbol? Are women, by virtue of sexual selection, turning men into women and turning themselves into lesbians?

        Justin Bieber may not be solely responsible for the surge in popularity of tight jeans, but my guess is the closet he’ll one day come out of is full of them. If I ever find the motherfucker who designed and marketed tight jeans for men, my wrath will be unquenchable. Is this what you pathetic lady-boys want? To have your frank and beans sausage-cased so tightly in denim that your balls become sterile? Maybe more relevant to this discussion, is that what you women are looking for? What kind of a man would wear a pair of pants so constricting that he can barely walk, let alone run or jump in them? I for one am looking forward to the zombie apocalypse because you tight jean wearing she-men are gonna be easy pickings. We’re essentially dressing like women in the hopes of attracting women, with the added bonus of strangling our testicles off? As much as I blame the men, and I do, you women are the ones who are encouraging this bullshit and have the power of the mighty vagina to put an end to it. Just say no to bro camel toe. Conversely, my hats off to the good people at Duluth Trading Company whose innovative “ballroom jeans” will allow me to escape the undead hoard with ease. The anti-tight jeans are designed with extra room in the crotch, where real men like yours truly need it. First they came up with long tailed t-shirts to hide plumbers crack and now this, these guys are fucking geniuses and are doing more to save mankind than Al Gore.

        Maybe I’m just jealous because I’ve never really had particularly nice hair, but what the hell is going on with the brofro’s that today's men are sporting? It was bad enough when it was just the Biebs doing his lesbian bowl cut thingamajig, but now we’ve got the perennial Coffee and Scotch whipping boy Jersey Shore jag-offs with their over-primped, guido, gel-spiked hair fiasco’s too. Ladies, are you looking for a guy who spends more time on his hair and makeup than you do? Don’t get me started on all the other bullshit that goes into today's “male look”. A man should smell like sweat, sawdust or motor oil and his hair should look however the wind “styled” it while he was outside wrestling invasive boars and splitting firewood. And while I’m at it, a man should be as tan as his time working under the sun makes him, do you think Clint Eastwood goes tanning? Fuck I’m getting pissed off just writing this. Men, what the hell is going on?

        Does this slippery slope end with men and women changing on a biological level? Are men becoming less “manly” as a defensive mechanism triggered by Mother Earth in response to overpopulation or a generally over-aggressive society? Are we witnessing a major evolutionary development in our lifetime? Could Justin Bieber be Charles Darwin’s answer to World War III and the Duggar family? Is such a thing even possible?

Occupy Elm Street (Halloween Edition)

        If you’ll indulge me this month, I’d like to open with a forgotten quote from the famed Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, “ I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride to make it easier. Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be.” Dr. Piaget spoke these words in his famous address to the United Nations in 1962, where he outlined a stark future for the world’s children based on his predictions of a total global collapse of Halloween, which would preempt an unprecedented worldwide economic meltdown and finally a zombie apocalypse with a small pocket of survivors outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I find it impossible to refute the wisdom and prescience of that speech, but is it possible to save Halloween before the arrival of The Walking Dead? By now your palms are probably getting pretty sweaty and your pulse is quickening, while your impossibly small brain is trying to compute the consequences of your Halloween negligence. The bad news is, your underdeveloped medulla oblongata can’t possibly rationalize what to do. The good news is that I’m here to do your thinking for you, and as an added bonus if things continue to go wrong, the zombies probably won’t bother you because they’ll be distractedly shambling after my enormously delicious cerebellum.

        During my hiatus from writing this fine blog, I started work on a secret project funded by the Department of Homeland Security and powered by Google Maps. I’m endeavoring to provide every child in America with an iPhone app, since you’ve all bought your precious little snowflakes five hundred dollar smart phones which are ironically more intelligent than they are, charting the houses of “extremist childhood terrorists”, who are presenting a clear and present danger to our children’s lawful youthful development by giving out apples and toothbrushes on Halloween. Next year I hope to increase the database to include popcorn balls, candy corns, and black licorice. Get your heads out of your asses people and buy some candy for Christ’s sake. While you’re at it, do your karmic inner child a favor and spring for some full size stuff, not those tiny boxes of milk duds you’ve been giving out you fucking cheapskates. The joy on a child’s face when they reach reverently into a bowl full of checkout-line-size candy is worth the money. I know you’ve got the cash because I see you rummaging through my recycle bin every other week taking my beer bottles. Also, take some fucking time and pick out decent candy, don’t just grab a box of salt water taffy and call it a day. It’s not rocket science, it’s candy. You were a kid once remember? If you ended Halloween night by pouring your candy out on the floor and making a pile out of the stuff you didn’t want, break the cycle and stop buying that shit. One last thought on the candy situation, if you’ve gone through the effort to get the good stuff, don’t abandon it in a bowl on your doorstep with a sign that says “take one”. Guess what the first kid to come along is going to do? With kids today, you’ll be lucky if they don’t take the candy and the bowl you left it in as some kind of gang initiation.

        Alright so we’re getting the adults on-board with the candy, now I need the kids to listen the fuck up. The Halloween costumes are getting really pathetic and I’m about fed up with it. If you want to go trick-or-treating until your 18, more power to you, but god help you if you knock on my door this year wearing a Yankees jersey and hat as your costume...again. Along those lines, your Little League baseball uniform doesn’t count, and neither does putting on some lame ass mask you’ve worn for the last five years, or any of that other half cocked bullshit. That’s just fucking lazy and we can’t continue to reward lazy in this country. There are 67 Halloween stores on the Post Road in Milford alone, get an actual costume. In fact, forget I said that. Learn to be a little creative and make a costume like I did when I was your age. We’re becoming a generation of lazy shits who walk into a store and slap down twenty bucks for Halloween in a nice little package. This year, when your Dad’s rummaging through my recycle bin this Thursday morning cashing in on my bottles of Schlitz, have him grab some cardboard boxes so you can make yourself into a robot or a spaceship or something. I’m going to start rewarding creativity with bonus candy and start handing out homemade candied onions to kids that don’t get the Halloween spirit. Biting into that caramel covered vidalia on a stick somewhere down the street outta leave a nice taste in little Alex Rodriguez’s mouth.

        The last prong in our offensive is kind of a catchall I’ll refer to as Halloween spirit. If you’re not sure what that is, swing by my house this year and have a look at my neighbors to either side with their lights out and their doors closed; that’s me proving something like Halloween spirit exists by demonstrating a total lack of it. It’s kind of like dickhead antimatter. Serial killers don’t start out torturing animals, they start out as kids whose neighbors didn’t give out candy on Halloween. If that’s you, you deserve to have your house egged, in fact it will probably be me doing it. And another thing, I know we live in a hyper-sensitive, bubble your children type of world now but trick-or-treating isn’t something you do at the mall in the middle of the afternoon; it’s something you experience on a cold fall night under the stars, lugging around a pillow case full of candy until every last house light is out. We used to do that with our friends as kids, it was safer then though, so I’d encourage you Occupy Wall Street parents to put your signs down for a day and try Occupying Elm Street, where life’s real battles are won and lost. We can just pretend being a useless dirty hippie is your Halloween costume.

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.

Shared Experiences

        Here on Coffee and Scotch I spend a lot of time writing about the things that make us different, well more like the things that make you different from me, but you get the idea. I’d like to try something else this week, a tribute to the late George Carlin, and spend a little time laughing at some of the things that bring us closer together. I’m talking about the little things that we have in common; the habits, annoyances and nuances of our day to day lives. I hadn’t given these quirks much thought, assuming they were signs of my own unique blend of ADD, OCD and insanity. As it turns out, some of you may have the same special blend of crazy that makes me tick. Here are a few of my personal favorites, let me know if you can relate.

        You know that moment when you’re swimming in the ocean and it gets deep enough where your feet can no longer touch the bottom? Am I the only one who starts to irrationally panic imagining killer sharks, giant man-eating squid, and possibly Cthulu circling around below me? God forbid something touches your foot...full on panic mode!

        When you’re awake in bed starring at the alarm clock, are you calculating the precise amount of sleep you’ll get assuming you can fall asleep that second?

        How about when you realize the blanket is the short way across your body and it won’t cover your toes, so you kick and thrash at it to get it the right way but it just ends up turning 360 degree and is back the short way again? That might go on for hours until I can get it sorted out.

        Ever have someone aim a rubber band at you and your entire life flashes before your eyes, like the shot could be fatal? I had a boss who used to offer days off if you’d put a miniature baseball helmet on your head and let him fire rubber bands at it. If he missed the helmet and hit you, it was good for a day off. Of course, you’d probably spend that day in a psychologist’s office trying to recover from the trauma. Thanks Rob, I’m still emotionally damaged.

        When you go into the bathroom and the shower curtain is closed, do you look behind it to make sure no one is hiding in the bathtub waiting to murder you while you’re on the toilet?

        Or when you’re in the shower with soap on your face and you’re convinced that the girl from The Ring movie is in the bathroom with you and is about to come through the shower curtain, what’s that about? That seems perfectly rational.

        Ever get into the shower at a friends house or a hotel and have absolutely no idea how to turn the water on? Fuck you and your fancy college engineering degree, I’m a shower fixture!

        Have you ever been around two people you don’t know, who are talking about something you absolutely love, like a movie or a book, but you don’t know how to maneuver into the conversation and it feels like a lost opportunity?

        How about when there is a conversation going on and you have something relevant to say but it changes topics before you get a chance to say it and you’re stuck with that thought rattling around in your head with nowhere to go?

        Or how about when you’re driving the car and the sun is blinding you, so you pull down the visor and realize that the sun is exactly positioned so it streams in the half inch gap between the visor and the edge of the window? How the hell does God always manage to pull off that little miracle? He must own stock in Oakley.

        Ever watch a video online and think it’s hysterical, then show it to some friends and suddenly it’s not even remotely funny anymore? “Keep watching guys, it gets funny!”

        How about when someone says hi to you in the hallway but you don’t realize it until they’re gone? Nobody wins in that scenario, especially when it was a hot chick.

        Or when you try to plug a USB device into your computer and it doesn’t fit, so you flip it but it still doesn’t fit, so you flip it back to it’s original position and it goes right in? Time to call the Geek Squad.

        Do you ever get really self-conscious when you’re leaving a store without buying something so you feel like you have to act extra carefree and innocent to prove you aren’t stealing anything? I’ll often fake a cell phone call too so it looks like I’m being polite by stepping outside to talk on the phone...nice cover.

        That’s it for this week, normally I pride myself on original content creation but this was more about gathering some fun things I’ve read here and there and bringing them together. Every one of the above made me laugh and reflect on how bizarre and irrational we are under certain circumstances. I hope you can relate.

Words To Live By

        You hate that guy, you know you do. He can’t make it through one conversation without peppering you with sanctimonious, bullshit, cliched expressions. Inside every office, every circle of friends, every family, every team; there exists at least one. Usually, I’m lucky enough to sit next to that guy at work and if he sees me staring out into space he’ll helpfully chirp, “penny for your thoughts?”. How about I make it an even buck for a falcon punch in the junk you jackass? I’m always interrupted at the least opportune moment too, like when I’m on the verge of a daydream breakthrough about my new cologne idea Sawdust, Motor Oil and Unicorn Sweat. That guy is as bad as my alarm clock, jolting me awake right as the midget hops onto the bed with a peacock feather and a set of jumper cables. A lot of these stupid sayings are commonly taught to us as children, presumably to help tune our morale compasses.Recently, I’ve been thinking about a few of the more commonly used expressions and worrying that they are conveying the wrong messages.

        Let’s start with the Golden Rule, as I’m sure it’s the one people think of first and seem to preach about the most. Heck, it’s got to be important because it’s been labeled with the gold standard, and at a whopping sixteen hundred dollars an ounce, this hefty rule must be worth it’s weight in gold. Punny, right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s an elegant, simple, religiously grounded maxim about treating people well. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly good advice. Hey, I’d like everyone I meet to hand me twenty dollars, should I walk around with my wallet open and start handing out money? I realize that’s a bit of an extreme example, but assuming people are inherently good and treating them in kind,is a surefire way to get stepped on and abused. I suggest we adopt a new rule, the Silver Rule; “do nothing unto others and in turn expect that they do nothing unto you”. You may not make any new friends today, but you’re less likely to get Ponzi schemed out of your life savings either.

        Another saying I’ve been thinking about lately is, “one in the hand is better than two in the bush”. Now, there are times when I think the concept behind this is justified and it’s downright good advice. However, people seem to treat the kernel of wisdom as a hard and fast rule to live by. Success is often a direct result of risk taking. I look at the “one in hand” as a euphemism for mediocrity, an excuse to take the easy path. I think many of our great leaders, soldiers, thinkers, teachers and inventors have often opted to let go of the “one in hand” and go after the “two in the bush”. I think “nothing ventured, nothing gained” is better advice, if you insist on being that guy. Let’s teach our children to be smart risk takers, so that our next generation is full of winners, not simply participators.

        Finally, I give you the absolute worst axiom to live by, “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”. Whoever thought this was good advice and passed it into our collective vocabulary was an idiot and obviously didn’t know anything about books. Walk into a book store, if you can still find one, with no preconceived idea of what you want to buy. You will undoubtedly walk around looking at the covers of books and making judgments about whether they might be worth your time to read or not. It is of vital importance to our safety that we size people up as we meet them as well. If you see a guy in line at the bank with “Fuck You” tattooed on his forehead, I think you have a pretty good reason to consider leaving and coming back after the robbery....err later in the day. If you see a guy in line at the convenience store at three o’clock in the morning with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream, a bag of Funions, and blood shot eyes, chances are he’s stoned. The bottom line is, it’s perfectly normal to judge books and people, by their covers. Nature has given us that tool to aid us in our survival, don’t be an idiot and not use it. Teaching our kids not to judge people based on their appearance is dangerous, politically correct bullshit. We don’t have to create a generation of racist bigots, but we do have to acknowledge that when red touches yellow, you're a dead fellow; but if red touches black, you're all right Jack.

Baseball, Sex, and Jelly Donuts

        I’m writing this blog on the heels of one of the slowest sports weeks of the year. Major League Baseball has been mostly dormant, with the exception of the mid-summer classic, and the rest of the professional sports leagues are slumbering or locked in contract negotiations.The FIFA Women’s World Cup is going on supposedly, but I’ve become desensitized to watching women on TV or the Internet engaging in anything other than pornography, so that’s out. The New World Order has successfully removed the top black athlete from the PGA, so golf has lost it’s scant appeal. It’s back to the usual, “which boring rich white guy in bright green plaid pants will win this week” routine. When is the world of golf going to realize that it needs a little more Happy Gilmore and a little less Shooter McGavin? This athletic dry-spell creates a good opportunity for listening to some very entertaining sports talk radio at least. What better way to ease the misery of my commute home than hearing baseball trade proposals from Sal on Staten Island or fantasy football draft planning from Rocco in New Rochelle. Keeping with the theme, I’m going to focus this weeks Coffee and Scotch rant on three aspects of baseball that need an overhaul and which have been getting a lot of airtime on the AM band this week. For the sake of perspective, I’m a perennially disgruntled Mets fan, so take it all with a grain of salt.

        The major topic of the week has been the MLB All Star Game. The slow decline of the event, from it’s glory days of pride and competition to it’s current state of meaningless irrelevancy, has been well discussed. In recent years, the MLB has tried to inject purpose by having the outcome determine which league gains home field advantage in the World Series. I imagine the same thought process occurred when some unfortunate confectioner decided that powdered donuts weren’t good enough and they needed jelly injected into them. Classic fuck-up. Unfortunately, this tactic has simply not worked and we’re stuck trying to figure out how to scoop the damn jelly out so we can enjoy the purity of the donut again, which is always a shitty mess. Most of today's baseball stars are so delusionally self-absorbed that they can’t be bothered showing up, let alone playing in an “extra” game. The players who do show seem to play the game with no level of passion or real desire to win. It’s like going to work on Friday, sure you go but are you really giving it your all? Don’t get me started about how ridiculous the Home Run Derby is either. The Chris Berman, “back, back, back” home run call makes me want to throw my TV out the window. They ought to nominate an all-star announcer every year and allow them to call the home run derby and the game. Back on point, my proposed solution for the All Star Game is not to add or modify the rewards for the winning team, frankly I’d prefer if they removed any type of artificial incentive altogether. It’s the one time that Major League Baseball allows the fans to control who plays and who doesn’t. Sure, the managers get a few picks as well, but we have the opportunity to tell the prima donna players that we’re sick of their bullshit. I propose that we band together and throw the vote. Let’s send the leagues worst players out there and send baseball a clear message. And what better time to do it than with Citifield as the proposed site of the 2013 game? Hey, at least the worst players in the game won’t have to travel very far to get there.

        My biggest complaint with Major League baseball is the difference in the rules between the two leagues. This topic has been beaten like a dead horse but I want to get my two cents in. Being a National League fan, I’m generally inclined to believe that having pitchers hit is better for the game of baseball in terms of strategy and complexity. However, the designated hitter (DH) allows the sport to more effectively showcase its most popular aspect, the home run. If baseball is like sex, National League baseball is missionary, lights out, don’t make too much noise and wake up the kids sex; while American League baseball is hot, sweaty, spontaneous vacation sex. Home runs are the money shot and the designated hitter is like baseball Viagra. Whichever rule set you prefer is fine by me, my angst is with the simple illogical fact that the two leagues play a different game. The problem is further compounded every year with another baseball anomaly, inter-league play. National League baseball teams cannot compete on a level playing field with American League teams because they're not built around the DH. There is simply no consideration given to a National League team’s roster to carry a player solely for his offensive output. In the NL, bench spots need to be allocated for flexible players who can be used situationally for double switches, pinch hitting and injury replacement. For the sake of brevity I won’t get into the minutea of bunting, the wheel play, the butcher boy, pinch running, pinch hitting, double switching, or the value in clearing the pitchers spot at the bottom of the batting order, but in the interest of fair play can we level the playing field and decide on a unified set of rules?

        My final thought on baseball ties back into the players lackluster feelings about the All Star Game and their level of non-participation in it. Presumably, these guys have gotten to big for their stir-ups, with their bloated contracts and superstar statuses. Obviously, with the players union as strong as it is, major contract and salary changes are not likely to ever happen, but what if? What if baseball adopted a single contract that all players worked under? Every player is allowed to negotiate their base pay and the length of their individual terms of employment with a specific team. The base pay has a league minimum, as it does now, and a maximum “cap” set to something reasonable like five million dollars. Every dollar a player earns beyond their contractual base pay is incentivized, so performance is heavily rewarded. Every game played, base hit, home run, RBI, stolen base, strike out, and saved game are monetarily rewarded. Every aspect of the game is incentivized and built into every players contract. The players have nearly unlimited earning potential, assuming they stay healthy and perform well. The owners only pay for the kind of results that sell tickets and create successful franchises. The fans stop getting screwed by superstars who don’t seem to give a shit anymore. In my opinion, and obviously that’s the only one that matters here in my world, the system would work and would help baseball bring sexy back.

Time Is Money Friend

        I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I consider my time to be an extremely valuable thing and I don’t like other people wasting it. I piss away enough already, as evidenced by my weekly ramblings here on Coffee and Scotch, so I find it particularly annoying when inconsiderate jackasses employ copious amounts of stupidity and self-importance to waste precious minutes of my life. Now, people waste our time everywhere we go; hell I could write for days about how people at work waste our time and how the government wastes our time. The government has a monopoly on wastefulness in general. What has been grinding my gears lately though is the imbeciles who have no idea how to pay for things and manage their finances at the checkout counter. If I didn’t know better I’d think I was stuck behind a bunch of career felons who just got released from prison and were buying bags of topsoil at Home Depot for the first time in their lives.

        The absolute most heinous offense you can commit when you’re checking out is a lack of preparedness. Are people just clueless about the process or do they have a complete lack of regard for everyone else? How many times have you been in line behind some ditsy woman reading Parade magazine while her groceries are being scanned?
Lady, for the love of God, at least start the 20 minute archaeological excavation of your purse in search of your wallet. It’s not like the cash register is some kind of mysterious place where the procedural outcome is clouded in a veil of secrecy. Here’s a news flash for you sweetheart, you need to fucking pay for all that crap and that hitherto unheard of event occurs shortly after the last item is scanned by the cashier. Can everyone agree to get on the fucking ball and pay a little attention? Incidentally, when did we start working for the stores we shop at? What kind of scam is self checkout? How brilliant are the executives who made the decision to have us simultaneously spending money at their stores and also working for them for free? Sure, I’ll ring up my purchases, pay for them and bag them myself. Fuck we’re gullible.

        Figuring out which checkout line to get in has become a complicated science as well. On the surface, sizing up a line based on how many people are in it and how many items they have would seem to be enough to go by. Unfortunately, you need to stereotype people in order to save yourself a headache. Personally, I never roll the dice on old people, especially old ladies. Grandma is the number one perpetrator of the social crime, paying by check in the first degree. Check payers always seem to be pocketbook archaeologists as well, waiting for the last second to start the check book dig. After they find the ancient relic, they need to wait for the GPS satellite to get into synchronous orbit so they can trans-locate the pen in their cavernous purse.
Naturally, the pen won’t work because it was designed for form over function. Who wants a pen that reliably writes when you can have a twelve dollar, craft fair, decorative pen that some art school dropout hot glued plastic crystals onto? If you’re sharp-eyed and lucky enough to avoid the pay-by-checker, beware the stay at home soccer mom with time to kill. Chances are she’s going to pay with cash, which is fine, but she’s gonna screw you at the last second in a move I call “exact change diving”. One sure way to spot a change diver is by looking for signs of early onset scoliosis. Every time soccer mom buys a venti, extra hot, soy, no whip, caramel macchiato, she tosses the change down into the depths of her bag until it’s so heavy it hurts her back to carry it. Later, in the express line at Shop Rite when her box of Tampax costs $6.37, it’s time to plunge headfirst into the bowels of her behemoth pocketbook in search of the elusive exact change. What should have taken 10 seconds turns into minutes as she surfaces for air in order to dive again for the last two pennies.

        So you’ve avoided the grannies and the hunchbacks and you’ve slid in line with your debit card out, ready to rock and roll. There’s still a few pitfalls to look out for, the problem is they are hard to spot. The first problem is tricky but avoidable with a little awareness. Make sure you’re not the guy at the register with an item that doesn’t have a price or a bar code on it. Nothing brings the checkout carousel to a grinding halt like seeing the cashier reach for the intercom and broadcast a price check on your box of Trojans.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of embarrassment, trust me. Next come the dreaded, “Why yes I’d love to fill out the application for your store credit card so I can save 10% on my purchase today” people. This always seems to happen to me when I’m past the point of no return in a line. Once you’ve made it into the cash register on deck circle and you’ve already waited for five minutes or more in the same line, you can’t abandon it. It’s one of the unwritten rules of the universe, like starring at nice breasts and absentmindedly bouncing any tennis ball that finds its way into your hand. Lastly, you need to try and dodge the dreaded key ring rolodex of disorganized store rewards card scanners. Buying a sixty-five cent pack of gum at Walgreens, better scan my card and get the bonus points. Two minutes later they’ve managed to extricate the rewards card mobile from their pocket and they’re hunting for the right scrap of plastic like the school janitor looking for the key to utility closet number nine. Your knew you were in Walgreens, you couldn’t have started that process while you were waiting in line checking Facebook on your iPhone dipshit? The theme of the day here is preparedness. If everybody could take an extra second or two to get organized at the checkout line, we all might be able to get a day or two of our miserable lives back.