I like coffee, but day-um...

Okay, so I’ll cop to roasting my own coffee. Mostly because the stuff you get from the market is old – in some cases, really old – and with coffee, freshness makes such a huge difference. Not to mention that most of the stuff you get from specialty coffee shops still isn’t that fresh, and the style seems to be towards over-roasting (hey folks, real espresso isn’t burnt black and oily so that all you taste is carbon. Unless, of course, you’re a big chain trying to disguise the taste of less than premium coffee beans), and over charging. Premium greens are a couple bucks a pound at most in the quantities that big chains buy, roasting doesn’t cost them that much, and then they charge you $15/lb because they put a mermaid on the front of the bag. Greens cost me about $4-5/lb on average. The occasional, really special lot that would be well over $20/lb in the fancy coffee store might run as much as $7/lb from the greens supplier I most often buy from. I’d say that roasting coffee has actually saved me money over the long run, as well as getting me much better quality coffee than I’d have otherwise.

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Gotta love election time...

For those of you who don't live in the L.A. area, we're having a fairly big election tomorrow (didn't elections used to just be in November, on Election Day, instead of scattered willy-nilly through the year?). At stake are the mayoralty, city attorney, a number of council seats, community college board, and a raft of stupid propositions and other crap all bought and paid for by the usual suspects.

Even if I hadn't been following the news, I'd know because local politicians have discovered the internet and, even more importantly, the charms of spamming.

The most egregious example is an email I received from a candidate for city attorney who wants to remind me that he's not in the thrall of the 'downtown political machine' but a prosecutor who will vigorously pursue all the people that can be gathered together under the code words that are used to signify 'brown'. To top it off, the subject line of this spam is 'Public Safety Message'. I suppose that's to make sure that people read it, 'cause the dam might have broken or something and the city figured that sending out email was the best way to announce it in order to avoid panic. This idiot's name, btw, is Michael Amerian (just like 'American, only without that pesky 'c', 'cause you know there's one of them in 'Communist', isn't there?). Hmmm, I wonder who I'm gonna vote for tomorrow? I suspect I know who it's not going to be.