Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

OK, now that I’ve seen where Snickers has taken this, I’m not so inclined to laugh it off. When I first saw the ad, I just thought of it as an extension of those Dodge commercials where this yokel is engaging in idol-worship of some manly man with a big Dodge truck, and has buddy-road-trip fantasies that involve a hot-tub experience (with girls, though), but ends with an overextended adoring gaze.  Or, actually, as a send-up of ritual homophobia.
It seems like the Snickers people have engaged in something more mean-spirited, though:

The Snickers Web site also showed video of players from the Super Bowl teams reacting to the kiss.

and the ration they’re getting about it is well-deserved.

The whole episode probably won’t have any effect on Snickers as a product unless it’s really the start of a campaign to Snicker at various segments of the population such as the mentally ill, the homeless, Alzheimer’s sufferers and people dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

And how disturbing can it be as an indication of how marketers view the marketed-to? From PT Barnum forward, advertising has never resembled an acceptance letter from Harvard in terms of flattering the intellect.

I went across the street to watch the Super Bowl at a neighbor’s party.  Since I really didn’t have a dog in the hunt, and it was a social occasion, I probably didn’t give the 2007 ads as much scrutiny as they deserved.  One thing I do know - Snickers is America’s favorite gay bar.

Sometime last week, Mrs. Perils mentioned that a Tom Stoppard play was being presented at a small theatre nearby, so I scored four tickets, and we went on Thursday night with our son and a young/old friend of mine. We’ve seen two other Stoppard plays, Arcadia here in Seattle and Rough Crossing down in Ashland a few years ago, loved both and jumped at the chance to see another.

The play was The Travesties, which was first performed in 1974. Its premise is a hypothetical interaction in 1916 between James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, the founder of the Dada movement, as recalled by an ultimately unreliable narrator late in his life. All three did, in fact, reside in Zurich at the time - Joyce was writing Ulysses, Lenin was in exile waiting for the right moment to join the revolution in Russia, and I have no idea what the Dada guy was up to - but Stoppard isn’t suggesting that any such interaction actually happened - it’s just a convenient setup for cascades of snappy comedic dialog.

And snappy it was, rich and clever, and it kept me in stitches. It was replete with puns, limericks and featured a sorta-history lesson delivered as a strip-tease that I thought would have been right at home in Gravity’s Rainbow - just a lot of nutty stuff. In order to fully comprehend some of the byplay, though, I might have to read up on Dada a bit and (sigh) finally tackle Ulysses.

The theater itself is situated in an old bathhouse down by Greenlake, about 2 miles from the house. It’s pretty intimate, seats 100 people at most. Last year we saw a production of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage there, with a cast of 3 women. The Stoppard play had a 7 or 8, and it seemed very busy by comparison. They pulled off a lot of kaleidescopic action with a single (I believe) scene change. It’s amazing to me the level of talent that you encounter in these small theater troupes, without the resources that the cash-cow repertories have at their disposal. (although they probably struggle to break even, too.)

And, happily, there’s a Stoppard play, On The Razzle, in the list of plays we’ll be seeing this July in Ashland. We purchased our Ashland tickets during the member’s presale last November, and our seats for all the performances just rock. We’re in the first row for almost every play, including the Stoppard.

Update: Here’s a much more coherent review from the Seattle Times

Many of us know Carroll, the Drive-By Blogger (there’s nothing to link to - she doesn’t have a blog of her own.  Instead, she enlivens our comments sections with her itinerant conversation).  She and spouse are off to Maui for the entire month of February, and after reading her email explaining why we won’t find her sacked out in our blog-basements, I started to reminisce about our own trips to the sun-splashed isles.

All three of our trips to Maui occurred before I had a digital camera, so the photos are squirrelled away somewhere in the hundreds of photo-processing envelopes filling our drawers and shelves.  Too lazy to hunt for them, I did a report from Quicken filtered on “vacations”, and there they were, the trips from 1999 and 2000.  I was transported back to the Old Lahaina Luau, the Paia Fish House, Haleakala National Park…

Boy, you know you’re an accountant when ledger entries make you nostalgic.

Not that I have an unhealthy fixation on this topic..but I had to laugh at this bit in today’s P-I by Cathy Sorbo:

I wonder how long the novelty of sexy gals at the drive-thru will last. Forever? Maybe. And why are there no hot and hunky shirtless and bethonged boy baristas available to serve us ladies our coffee?

And if there were, would you have the guts to order a short drip?

And if you think I’m bad, one of her commenters  raised (heh) the idea of breast-milk lattes.

My repaired laptop arrived yesterday while I was working at a client’s. When I arrived home, it was in my chair with an uplifting message courtesy of Mrs. Perils:
Click photos to enlarge

You’ll see that I’ve added the snappy little Snap link previewer to the site.  Anywhere I have a link, “hover” your mouse over the link and you’ll see a little preview of the page.  It might help you decide whether to click the link or not (but you won’t be able to actually read the page in the previewer).  Once you click, I believe it’ll open the link in a new browser tab or page.  At least, it does on my Firefox browser.

Let me know if you like this, or if it annoys the hell out of you.

In fact, it looks like espresso stands generated more crime last week than hip-hop venues:

But none of that prevented a masked robber from pointing a gun at a barista late Thursday inside the 10-foot-by-12-foot stand. The thief made off with an undisclosed amount of cash and prompted outrage from customers and neighbors.

You’d think that a Seattle blog with an alleged interest in coffee would have picked up on this phenomenon before now:

To stand apart from the hordes of drive-through espresso stands that clutter the Northwest’s roadsides, commuter coffee stops such as Tukwila’s Cowgirls Espresso are adding bodacious baristas, flirty service and ever more-revealing outfits to the menu.

At Port Orchard’s Natté Latté, baristas sport hot-pink hot pants and tight white tank tops. Day-of-the-week theme outfits ranging from racy lingerie to “fetish” ensembles are the dress code at Moka Girls Espresso in Auburn and at several Cowgirls Espresso stands in the area. Bikini tops are the special at Café Lorraine on Highway 9 in Woodinville, and the women of The Sweet Spot in Shoreline pose provocatively in Playmate-style profiles on the stand’s Web site.

I drive-commute sporadically and to scattered locations, and when I do, I load up a travel cup with a quad-shot macchiato like the one that wrecked my laptop last week, so I’m pretty oblivious to the whole drive-through business. I hate the idea of sitting in line with my engine running. I imagine the looky-flirty transactions at these places would make the wait even more intolerable. But if you guys insist, I’ll go out and take pictures as a service to you.

Ironic, too, that the above article is published the same week as this story about a stalker, fixated on a Starbucks barista, being detained after attempting to purchase a gun, presumably to carry out threats he’d made. I’m not saying there’s any causal connection, but I’d be a little bit worried, if I were one of the steamy sexpresso baristas, about the clientele attracted to those places.

I’ve gotten a bunch of stuff installed on Mrs. Perils’ computer, and have been able to do most of what I do on my laptop (with the exception of Photoshop - I’ve misplaced my installation file, and since I downloaded it instead of getting a cd, I’m SOL for now) except when I’m at a client’s or slacking at a cafe.

Maybe it’s my imagination, but the house seems a little cleaner since I’ve been hogging her computer.  (That comment springs from the same psychological root as does “suicide by cop“)

The good news: I got a notice from Dell this morning by land, sea, air (at least by cell phone and email) that my laptop was shipped from their repair facility.  They only had it for a day.  So, my long national nightmare scenario will be over, either tomorrow or Monday.  It’ll be interesting to see if they repaired it or replaced it, but it will have little effect since I retained my hard drive.

Dang, if they’d kept it a little longer, the basement might have gotten cleaned.