"'I deliver almost every single meal, almost every single day, because I hate to cook and I’m incredibly lazy,' she says..."

"... with a practiced, self-deprecating laugh to her camera, propped against the wall as a portable LED light bathes her in a warm glow. 'It is 10:15 a.m., and my first delivery just arrived, and it is my Starbucks coffee.' The coffee, an almond-milk iced latte with cold foam, two pumps of vanilla, and a pinch of cinnamon, costs $25.18. 'When I really want to rage-bait, I’ll order coffee. People get so mad at me,' she tells me. The Starbucks, after all, is only three blocks from her apartment, and most of the time she grabs it while walking her dog, an English cream miniature dachshund named Linguine...."

From "'You Can’t Just Be Showing Matcha-Pilates-Alo'/Lifestyle influencers used to post cute photos and make millions. Now they have to pivot" (NY Magazine).

"Once upon a time, influencers could post beautiful photos of their lives — their outfits, their coffee, their vacations, their children — and, with enough consistency, amass an audience of followers who looked to them for inspiration or escape.... Now... [t]he only reliable way to reach mainstream or even moderate recognition against all the noise is to either carpet-bomb social media with clips or to enrage wide swaths of the public...."

Am I the only one who remembers this movie?

Wikipedia: "Athanael (Jack Benny), the third trumpet player in the orchestra of a late night radio show sponsored by Paradise Coffee... falls asleep listening to the announcer, who is doing his best to prove it is 'the coffee that makes you sleep.' Athanael dreams he is an angel (junior grade) and a trumpeter in the orchestra of Heaven.... [H]e is given the mission of destroying planet 339001 (Earth) and its troublesome inhabitants by blowing the 'Last Trumpet' at exactly midnight, signaling the end of the world...."

It was released on April 20, 1945 — 8 days after the death of President Roosevelt — and was a box office failure. I watched it in 1964 when it played on "The Early Show" on TV, which means it played every night for a week, Monday through Friday. That gave you and your brother the chance to turn it into a family cult classic complete with commentary and shouted-out memorized lines. 

I love the poster, but that's not a trumpet.

At the Skylight Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

How to eat like Babe Ruth.

"In the book, [Jon] Krakauer describes [Sandy] Hill as a 'millionaire socialite-cum-climber' and claims sherpas carried her espresso maker..."

"... with beans from her favourite New York restaurant, and newspaper clippings about herself to be handed out at the Everest base camp. 'A great many people were offended by her ostentatious displays of wealth and by the shameless way she chased the limelight,' Krakauer wrote in the book, which sold in its millions. [Hill] later said that the 'espresso maker' was actually an eight-inch manual stovetop percolator.... The book also depicted an anonymous couple in the group, referred to as X and Y, who had an affair on the expedition. 'That was me. I am Madam X,' Hill has confirmed, while her partner was a snowboarder. The liaison angered the sherpas as they believed it brought bad karma and caused the storm...."

I'm reading "'Villain' of Into Thin Air breaks silence on Everest tragedy/The New York socialite Sandy Hill speaks for the first time about what happened on the mountain 30 years ago and the depression that followed her ordeal" (London Times).

Coffee time.

Feel the rhythm:

"When did we all decide that sweats and pajama pants were the appropriate attire for air travel?"

"What incentive do we have in such a demoralizing environment?"

"Trump’s brand of politics feeds on the lie that multicultural cities are frightening and chaotic. If he follows through on his threats to deploy National Guard troops..."

"... to Portland, it won’t be for the benefit of the people who call the city home. The intent will be to incite a spectacle of chaos, manufacturing a crisis to retroactively justify the belief that Democrat-run cities are in need of forceful takeover. The provocation will be the point. Don’t fall for it. The Portland of right-wing imagination is a city engulfed by flames and violence, a vivid warning of what will befall other places if they vote for Democrats. 'Unimaginably bad things would happen to America' if Biden were elected, Trump posted in 2020, specifically citing the 'anarchy' of Portland.... The reality is that the problems facing Portland and other cities are nothing that can’t be addressed through normal governance, and that these are on the whole vibrant and quite pleasant places to live. 'Real America' can mean things like biking to get a vegan ube latte from a purple-haired barista, and if you’d like a taste of what makes America truly great, you can find it in a coffee shop—in Portland, certainly, and probably a short ride from where you live."

Writes Jacob Grier, in "100 Cups of Coffee in a City on Fire/President Trump keeps saying Portland is an anarchic hellscape in need of the National Guard. With the help of my bike and a serious caffeine addiction, I set out to discover the truth" (Slate).

It's nice to hear progressives paying respect to the virtues of federalism.

And what's ube? It's just hair-colored yam, I mean, purple yam. I take it you just buy the yam extract — commission earned — and mix it into your milky — vegan milky — coffee.

"In the past I would typically ignore the flowers in the local park; now I actively seek them out. And when I’m in the kitchen I’ll inhale the aromas..."

"... that are readily available in my spice rack, and I pay greater attention to the fumes emanating from the boiling pots and pans. I now consider smell training to be an essential part of my routine. I find it to be pleasantly meditative, leaving me mentally grounded in much the same way as my daily yoga. And while I cannot say that I’ve noticed a huge leap in brainpower, I am optimistic that I am protecting my brain from future decline. This morning I made my espresso as normal and sniffed the cup hopefully. For the first time since I began my smell training, the aroma hit me hard. I couldn’t help but smile when I realised that I had, quite literally, learnt to wake up and smell the coffee, and I shall never take my nose for granted again."

I'm reading "Wake up and smell the coffee — the new way to train your brain/Loss of smell can signal a decline in mental health. David Robson discovered how to improve it" (London Times).

The author is only 39, so his ability to revive his sense of smell is very different from mine. He had luck with one of those smell kits where you sniff at various essential oils — eucalyptus, lemon, rose, clove. Keep trying. Practice smelling. I've already done that. Imagine telling blind people to look harder and deaf people to listen closely. What if that worked?

Mom & Pop Accounting.

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At the Medium Hot Mocha Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"To be creative, you want to feel like you're getting away with something."

Also: "You spend all your life trying to save time, but when you get to the end of your life, there's no time left, and you'll go to heaven, and you go 'But wait, I had velcro sneakers, no-iron shirt, clip-on tie. What about all that time? It's gone.'"

And, though Seinfeld won't show you his Star of David necklace, he says "Yes, I wear a Star of David necklace, because it makes me feel closer to the people of Israel that I feel close to and that's why I wear it."

He reveals his favorite word: "quintessence." He discusses the meaning, but I wanted the OED meaning: "The most essential part or feature of some non-material thing; the purest or most perfect form or manifestation of some quality, idea, etc."

But that's the figurative meaning.

"Make mental note to watch 'My Dinner with Andre' again soon."

That's something I blogged on July 6, 2005, in a post called "My declining NYT habit."

I was stunned to see that in the top post of a search of my archive this morning, 2 days after re-watching "My Dinner With Andre," and one day after blogging "A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important...."

What do you think? Mystical and important?!

I don't know, but what I was searching for was the topic of habit. In the movie, there's some discussion — blogged here yesterday — of the problem of doing things out of habit. There is, one person thought, "a great danger" of "fall[ing] into a trance" and no longer "seeing, feeling, remembering."

Well, I was just wishing I'd created a tag for "habit," because it would collect some good material, and it's a topic I want to think about. I like my habits. I think my habits are good.

Wake up and smell the instant coffee....

Yesterday, at 2:18 PM, 3 posts down, I was talking about "talking about instant coffee," and then, that evening, I was rewatching my old favorite movie "My Dinner with Andre" and that line jumped out: "we drank instant coffee out of the top of my shaving cream."

A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important, such as when Andre — after feeling he's heard the voice of The Little Prince — runs across a copy of an old surrealist magazine with a page of handprints from 4 eminent men whose names begin with the letter A and 3 of them are Andres and the other one is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Wikipedia has this about Saint-Exupéry:

In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry's own experience.... On 30 December 1935, at 2.45am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert....

See? A random Andre.

We were just talking about instant coffee — how you don't really need to go through a whole elaborate brew-your-own coffee ritual at home.

It's an easy choice for me because I don't have enough of a sense of smell to notice the difference, but now Meade has switched to instant. How did we all get so convinced that we needed so much equipment and fooling around to make coffee?

Back in the 1970s, there was an ad campaign aimed luring young people into the then-dying practice of drinking coffee. Coffee, we were told, was "the think drink." One thing led to another I guess, and we became way more wrapped up in coffee than the International Coffee Organization could have imagined. Do you ever stop and wonder if it's worth it, this long strange coffee trip?

Today, I run across "The Case Against 'Good' Coffee/Instant coffee tastes … just OK. And that’s fine by me" by the novelist Peter C. Baker in The New York Times.

James Taylor sings and comments on the old Chock Full o' Nuts coffee jingle.

Found this morning while searching, unsuccessfully, for an old Chock Full o' Nuts commercial (the one with the American woman going through French customs ("I have seen this coffee many times, in many suitcases")).

Alternatively, here's an operatic Chock Full o' Nuts commercial from 1991:

At Tomorrow's Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"For some strange reason, I always feel incredibly sleepy when I'm dreaming."

"Basically, I would have to struggle to keep my dream eyelids open, and would generally pass out randomly etc. The sleepiness is very extreme, far more sleepy than I've ever experienced in waking life. It's so bad that it's basically my reality check: if you're super sleepy, you're probably dreaming. This is affecting my lucid dreaming. The sleepiness generally becomes worse when I'm lucid, so I'll easily 'fall asleep' into non-dreaming sleep. Even if this doesn't happen, the sleepiness is extremely distracting.... I tried to do things like drink imaginary coffee, but it doesn't really work...."

A Reddit post from 8 years ago, read this morning because I had one of those dreams within which I'm incredibly sleepy. Within the dream I am trying to stay awake, but in reality, I'm trying to stay asleep (to continue the dream). Or is falling asleep in a dream the real-world experience of waking up?

Around town.

 At the UPS store:

In the Wisconsin State Capitol:

At the café:

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"My decades of experience in the region taught me that Palestinian and Israeli parents may say different prayers at worship but they share the same hopes for their kids—just like Americans, just like parents everywhere."

"That is why I am convinced Hamas must go.... Hamas does not speak for the Palestinian people...."

Writes Hillary Rodham Clinton, in "Hamas Must Go/The terror group has proved again and again that it will sabotage any efforts to forge a lasting peace" (The Atlantic).

Clinton begins with an account of her brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas back in 2012, a cease-fire that Hamas violated in 2014. Now, she tells us: "Cease-fires freeze conflicts rather than resolve them.... Cease-fires can make it possible to pursue negotiations aimed at achieving a lasting peace, but only when the timing and balance of forces are right."

She wants change not only in Gaza, but also in Israel: "Going forward, Israel needs a new strategy and new leadership. Instead of the current ultra-right-wing government, it will need a government of national unity that’s rooted in the center of Israeli politics and can make the hard choices ahead...."

ADDED: The first 2 sentences are too rich not to quote: "One morning in November 2012, I knocked on the door of President Barack Obama’s suite in the Raffles Hotel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, so early that he was barely out of bed. I had an urgent question that could not wait for the president to finish his morning coffee: Should we try to broker a cease-fire in Gaza?"

Can't he just sip his Raffles coffee?

AND: That last question references this: "At diner, Obama brushes off question on Hamas. Says, 'Why can’t I just eat my waffle?'"

Yes, Obama's famous "Why can’t I just eat my waffle?" was a reaction to a question about Hamas.