Not Me

While it's true that I work at the University of Vermont, I do not "moonlight" for our friends at Clear Channel Communications. So don't be misled: this 'aint me:

Open Letter to Starbugs

(sent to Starbucks earlier today)

Hello kindly Starbucks Quality Control Masters and Mistresses.

Longtime Starbucks fan (broadway store, seattle, 1985-ish), first time complainer.

So look, here's my story: I was traveling from Vermont to Seattle (my home for 20 years, thank you very much), in September, when I had to change planes in the under-appreciated Detroit airport (which, by the way, has one of the coolest fountains anywhere). Realizing that meals are no longer served on airplanes, my wife and I rushed to the nearest Starbucks to buy a couple fine beverages and to grab some food for the trip to Seatac. After some hems and haws (and some furtive gawking at a woman with freakishly artificial looking breasts who was nearby) (sorry, but it's true), we settled (foodwise) on a couple of fancy ham and cheese sandwiches sold by your fine company, the kind that come on foccaccia bread or whatever.

To cut to the chase, we ate the first sandwich as we lifted off from Detroit, and it was tasty (albeit with kind of dry bread). A couple hours later we prepared to eat the second sandwich when lo and behold, before my wife could open the seal on the package, what should she discover but an insect running around there, INSIDE THE PACKAGING. It was not a cockroach (though it moved quickly), and not a fruit fly (though it had wings), and it seemed pretty desperate to get the heck out of there. We, on the other hand, were suddenly quite desperate not to eat our lovely sandwich. Have a look:





It should be clear that this bugger was inside the packaging (otherwise it would have flown away--into First Class or something).

I must say, bugs in my food is the last thing I expect from The Starbucks Experience, yes? (and just yesterday I heard that you have stopped selling molasses cookies??? The horror!). Are these truly such tough times for Starbucks that we must expect to see the closing of stores, the discontinuing of your finest cookie, and (gasp) the insectifying of your fine comestibles?

What say ye, oh Quality Merchants of Yesteryear? Is it time to refocus on food quality and insect eradication and maybe not so much on lifestyle branding and your own line of audio CDs? One wonders.

***

The response, from "Jessica F., Starbucks Customer Relations:

Hello Rob,

Thank you for contacting Starbucks Coffee Company. We appreciate you taking the time to share with us your concerns regarding the sandwich that you purchased.

Starbucks is committed to providing our customers with the highest quality beverages and food, so we take any concerns about product quality very seriously. I would like to share your comments with the management team responsible for the store, as well as our Quality Assurance team, in order to address the issue properly, however I was unable to locate the store that you visited.

As a customer service gesture, I would like to send you a Starbucks Card with my apologies for your experience....

All in all, this is a fairly lackluster response to the concerns I had regarding my sandwich.

From The Strange and Beautiful World Department

My apologies to those of you who have already seen this stuff (it's a couple years old), but please watch "Pinky the Cat" (first video) and then watch "Pinky the Cat Redeux". What does "Pinky Redeux" tell us about 21st century western culture? I honestly can't tell you if this is delightful or scary.

Ocho

It doesn't say enough to say that he was a good kitty. But he was.

Second Life and Polygamist Haikus

I often find poet and National Public Radio commentator Andre Codrescu to be insufferably cute, in a writerly/Latka Gravas kind of way. But today's commentary caught my ear, and held up to reading, and so here it is:

October 9, 2008.

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.

This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of 'em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I'm fixin' to make the thing run on plum brandy. I've got a plum tree.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.

Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.

So I go back to it, and I see a line of refugees coming up the road to move in with me. Oh my God, it's the '70s again. All my deadbeat friends — dead and alive — are being chased out of their homes and heaven for not owing any money. They are debt-free in a world that can't exist without interest rates. The dead are especially egregious in this regard; you can't squeeze even an extra penny out of them.

Oh, no, now that they are getting closer, I don't even think it's people from the '70s: It's people ... from the future!

It's worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity. After the bailout, they owned their own homes, they didn't pay into a corporate energy grid, and they didn't worry about food because they grew it on the roof. They didn't drive, because they didn't have any jobs to drive to, and every garage in America was the site of an invention that was so darn beneficial nobody needed anything from the store.

Without worries about money, without a job, and with extra space in the garage to grow food and invent, these people forgot about the stock market, stopped borrowing money, even forgot how to shop — in short they stopped being American. These un-Americans got their exercise raking the compost instead of circling the mall; they home-schooled their children and were never again embarrassed that their kids knew more than they did. Heck, they were in heaven, the place where the pursuit of happiness leads to when you stop pursuing it.

Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.

And now they are coming up the road to my place because I'm a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.

"What did you do wrong?" I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.

"Nothing," he said. "We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn't turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In."

"At least the Second Amendment is safe," I said. "Nobody took away your guns, and the Founding Fathers didn't say anything about TV."

And with that, my chief haiku welcomed them thus:

make yourselves at home

you won't be bailed in or out again

you're safe in Second Life

Source


Second Life

Two Songs For Strangers

How do you pick two songs to share with strangers? That's the premise of the so-called False 45^th Record Club, an informal group of music fans who meet up in Montpelier to share a few drinks and songs every now and again. The result—both socially and sonically—is eclectic, educational and, well, only slightly less geeky than a dungeons and dragons meeting. So far it's also a bit of a white male thing, but we're travelling hopefully.

Record Club #2 happened recently at Montpelier's Black Door. Leading up to it, the hardest thing, of course, was: What two songs to pick?

For some reason I knew that I wanted to contribute a garage-rock song by Bellingham (WA) band the Mono Men (though I briefly considered a grungy thing by Hammerbox). But I ran through several options for my second song--before more or less tossing a coin. It shouldn't have been a big deal; odds are the songs would not get played adjacent to each other (playback on Club night and on the discs we all come home with is completely random). But still, I certainly wouldn't pick another garage-rock or surf-rock thing if my first song was going to be the Mono Men. So what to consider?

One that almost made it was "Why Can't He be You," by Patsy Cline, which would have made for a nice counterpoint to the Mono Men, and added to the female (and country & western) balance sheet—both of which were in short supply at the first Record Club.

I tried out several Gang of Four songs, but maybe the forced-monotone of, say, "At Home He Feels Like a Tourist" might have been a little much for the ostensibly upbeat atmosphere of a record club gathering. Or, sadly, a little dated.

Taking a different tack I almost went with the post-apocalyptic cabaret stylings of the Tiger Lillies: I considered "Russians," which seemed topical, too, given that Russia had recently invaded Georgia. Then again, "Slough" at least had an accordion, and had a zippy bounce to it (Slough, a city in the UK, must be a swell place to live). In the end, I wasn't quite ready to drop Martin Jacques' counter-tenor vocals on a room full of half-drunken strangers. Still, you have to admire a band that not only has a member named Adrian Large but another one named Adrian Huge.

Conor Oberst (also known as—wince--Bright Eyes) almost made the cut with his lovely duet with Emmylou Harris, "Landlocked Blues." I'm late to the whole Bright Eyes thing, having been amazingly put off by the name. But this song captures something about the way wartime events interweave themselves into our private lives--and we are at war, right? Plus, I love the trumpet solo in the middle—playing "Taps," I think. But Conor Oberst is quite popular these days, and I didn't want to roll any eyes at the Record Club. Rightly or wrongly I take it as an unspoken rule that you're not supposed to share the obvious.

Finally I decided to counter the simple garage-ness of the Mono Men with some classic soul: "Aint No Sunshine," by Bill Withers. I've always loved this song, even though I completely forgot about it for a decade or two. It's a song that evokes a wistful time for me--and even a particular year at summer camp. Go Camp Tousey! (Go Record Club!)

Tiger Lillies: "Slough"


Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn't fit for humans now
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, death!

-John Betjemen, 1937

Vermont: It's Small

Like everywhere else, Vermont has its People of Note. Some of them are relatively Large (Michael J. Fox, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, David Mamet), some relatively small (James Kochalka, Fred Tuttle).

Frankly the relatively small are more valuable to me.

But the striking thing about Vermont is how SMALL it--the state, the culture--all is. Six degrees of separation is more like 2 degrees of separation here, especially when it comes to the Relatively Small. On recent flights to or from Burlington, I've struck up conversations with people who turned out to be friends of friends, and run into co-workers coming back from vacation, and seen minor celebrities, like Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home. The woman who ran Fergus' playgroup in Montpelier lived next door to William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman. Other friends are neighbors with Frank McCourt's daughter. Speaking of daughters, Alistair Cooke's daughter is a minister at the church down the road. My favorite breakfast place happens to be David Mamet's favorite local breakfast place (though I've never seen him there). My wife's veterinary clients include the writer Howard Norman and, um, Sandra Bullock's sister (She introduced her as "My sister Sandy" when they both came in to the clinic).

It all sounds rather silly when you write it down like this, but it really is amazing how everyone is connected up here. Here's another example:

While we were in Maine last weekend, Montpelier apparently had a kind of street party called "Army of Fun," as you can see in this little video. The video itself includes two adults that Fergus knows (the mysterious Ben T. Matchstick and cardboard-samurai Pete Talbot), a girl that Norah knows (Maggie), a guy I know (Brian Murphy) from the local Record Club, and the wife of a guy (Earl) who did some work on my house last year. You can smell the patchouli in the air, a bit, but it's all rather charming.