Motivationally Challenged

So, sitting here…waiting for the flash of inspiration or a reasonable facsimile and nothing…I mean nothing…is coming to me. I’ve scanned memeorandum for suitable blog fodder and the news is all disagreeable; no surprise there. News, by its very nature, is 90% bad. Good news is all-too-rare and seems to be non-existent this morning. {sigh} But the coffee is good. Then again, it’s always good here at El Casa Móvil De Pennington. Without exception. Speaking of coffee…Lileks:

If I were a member of the Kona Coffee Growers Association, I’d consider a class-action suit against the suppliers for the in-room coffee machines, because they're not doing the Kona name any favors. Granted, the prefab packets promise a Kona blend, which could mean they mix ground tail of newt and cigar ash into the stuff. It has a peculiar and particular taste, and after a summer in various motels it’s become the taste of in-room coffee. But it's off-coffee. It's just not right. It has no floor. Then again, all the coffee around here is wrong. Wrong. The waiter explained the other day that they serve Dougbe Edberts, or Douge Housar, or Dougb Frezh, or some such Dutch brand. Which is fine; it's a nice roast. But they serve the reconstituted variety. It's replicator java. They boil down actual real coffee into a potent ichor and stored it for later use; when the time comes, hot water is added to make it whole again. Sorry. That's not coffee. That's a Civil Defense ration for bomb shelters.

Douwe Egberts, James. My coffee of choice whilst in Europe, home away from home. Bought it in a little shop around the corner from the corporate flat I occupied for a short while in London, just two blocks down the way from the London Hard Rock Café. But, I digress.

I am SO with Lileks on the subject of in-room “coffee” provided by the hospitality industry. Uniformly bad, without exception. I learned a trick from my former girlfriend when we were traveling around New Mexico: bring your own. This is somewhat surprising, in retrospect, as in “Why didn’t I think of this?” The Lady had a medium-sized basket in which she packed coffee, filters, sugar, cocoa, creamer, tea bags, and other assorted goodies for our trips; it was a trick she’d been using for years, given the fact she did/does a lot of road work. Solves the problem of bad in-room coffee quite nicely! The other solution is to go out for coffee, but that’s an awkward work-around. However, that’s exactly what I did on my last trip, to Maine. There was a Starbucks located about three minutes outside the gate of Brunswick Naval Air Station, and the gate was about a three minute drive from the BOQ. Each and every morning while in Maine I got up, threw on some clothes, drove to Starbucks, got a grandé drip and motored back to the ‘Q. I even managed to smile at the barrista, no small feat for a non-morning person such as myself. Coffee is that important! And…thank God for Starbucks. I just wish they’d see fit to open a store in P-Town. Fat chance.

I think I’ve mentioned the fact that I’m not a movie person here before; I know my profile says it. So it may come as a minor surprise that I checked out not one, but five DVDs from the Base Library yesterday: LOTR, Parts I – III; Fargo; and the complete second season of South Park. OK, the last doesn’t exactly qualify as a movie, but…Hey! South Park makes me laugh. A lot. And I need more laughs in life…

I watched Fellowship of the Ring last evening and was impressed. Today I’m off to Wally-World to buy some AV cables so I can exploit the full capabilities of my spiffy “progressive scan” DVD player and the HD-capable TV I bought not long ago. Being completely ignorant about the ins and outs of video I (un)naturally assumed all I needed was a standard RF connection between DVD player and TV. Wrong. I need specialized component video cables. OK, we’ll have these. Today. And then I’ll be able to experience the wonderfulness of high-resolution video. Getting back in touch with popular culture just might be fun…

Forgive me, Gentle Reader, but there will be no politics or other news today. I just can’t go there. One needs a bit of a break every so often, and today’s the day. We’ll resume normal programming later in the day (maybe), or tomorrow (much more likely). Gomen, ne?

Today’s Vanity Shot: Yrs Trly, in hippie mode. Berkeley (seriously), CA. February, 2001. A Space Oddity.