Balzac! It's All About the Coffee

This is a 150,000 gallon tank, water not coffee.
See how many giant coffee containers there are.

Perhaps I don't say enough how much I need coffee, how I keep my veins constantly pumping a heady mix of caffeine and wrinkle cream, how every morning I fairly squeal like a kitten in anticipation of my first cup. But I do.

So here's stuff all about the Joe for you fellow travelers.

1) Like the ADD suffering, self-medicating Demo Reel (where I first saw the quiz)
I am an Espresso:
At my best: straight shooting, ambitious, and energetic
At my worst: anxious and high strung
I drink coffee when: not sleeping

I debate the Caffeine addiction level: high (I tweak my daily dosage down low enough, even drinking- ugh- decaf, so that withdrawal headaches aren't inevitable if I don't get my am fix.)

See who you are. Make your own excuses.

2) Via BCCY, Coca Cola sales are down, and ready to drink coffees are up. Pepsi licensed the Frappacrap in bottles in the grocery so their heinies are covered, and it looks like Coke's entering the pod brewing arena with Far Coast. What about this as a campaign: Wherever you are, the coffee's coming from far away. Whatever your taste, it'll be far from good.

3) From Chin Music Press comes the highlight of the day, this beautiful and strange essay on coffee by a nineteenth century man of letters who didn't like to leave his dressing gown, and woke at midnight to write all night, sometimes for 16 hours, fueled by a special Parisian brew. Here's more about the eccentric and prolific Honore de Balzac, and here's a taste of the essay:

Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring...

I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach...

I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thought he'd been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part, a failure of observation...