The Coffee Guy's blog

Another Year Older and Wiser Yet

New, knew what?

Seems I feel I am only a monocle and a Persian cat away from being a villain in a Bond movie.  The getting to number one. 

A recent study done by a notable individual summed it up.  On Google search, we are number one.  We come up on the first page of a Google search for “The Coffee Guy”.  Not bad for only having started posting this year!  Advertizing will be at our collective doorsteps pleading for the opportunity to list on our site.  Dot Com history in the making I say.

Speaking of which why do we call it a New Year?  After all it is more akin to just “another” year!  There really is nothing new about it.  Same old dates, same old months, same old weeks.  Perhaps we should call them short years 1,2, and 3, and long year. They are definitely not “new”. 

Define “new”, perhaps one of these fits:

-     1 -    of a kind not now existing or appearing for the first time; novel: a new concept of the universe.

-      2-   having but lately or but now come into knowledge.

-      3 -   unfamiliar or strange (often fol. by to): ideas new to us.

Well the annual New Year is none of the above.  So how does it come to be called that which it is not?

Were predecessors of ours unfamiliar with the word “another”?  Did they not understand repetition?  Were they enthralled with reinvention?  It seems on the edge of preposterousness that they could be so puerile.  But yet here we have it: they have brought into the world and kept it there in absentia, the concept of continuous time being new!

We don't say wait a new minute, or I will be there in a new quarter of an hour.   If the year is new, hence should not the month, week, day, hour, minute and every second be a new one?   You would think me unfledged.

The sense of time being something new only happens once a year. At the end, and only with regard to the “year” and no other time referent.  Although in my cranial reference I sense that the millennium was referred to as “new”.  As it happens, there were no men alive who in fact had observed and witnessed the last coming of a millennium and also the recent coming.  So in that sense I could accept it as a “new” one.  Hogmanay.

We take the word of a small sect of peoples in the northern reaches of a small island in a cold sea, and spread the word throughout the world.  Hmm that sounds reasonable.  But just not to me.

Here we have some heathens spriting about in skirts proclaiming that there are “New” times ahead.   Hmm, they didn’t even have a watch!  This was all started back in the beginning of the last millennium.  After all, then they thought the sun rotated around the earth!

So the top pick to have a party on that night are in general order: New Orleans, Prague, Sydney, Las Vegas, Whistler, and Rio De Janeiro.

Well those are  a few to cross of the ole bucket list.  Lets have a link or two for those unaccustomed to surfing the interweb thingy.`

http://www.pubclub.com/neworleans/bartenderkatrina.htm

All the fun in the quarter.

http://www.praguestags.com/

In Eastern Europe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSsD1riw7y8

For some fireworks off the bridge.

Las Vegas, and you need a site for this from me?

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/buckle-up.php

From the sacred slopes of BC.

https://www.clubvibes.com/listings/listingsdetail.asp?id=35982

This looks like my kinda place in Rio.

 

After all the hoopla and related stuff, what are we about?  A big bash at the end of one year, and the beginning of another?  Not a New year as it were, nothing is new again after all.  How many times can the same thing be called new?

Not even Newtonian physics is still new!  And I bet you don't think of it more than once a decade.  Let alone that it is new.  Even New York is not called New New York.  Forced approaches of untold newness will not make something new!  It is only once.  After that, it either, another, or an old one.  Ever understand why they say "there is nothing new under the sun"?  It not a cuz’in there are no new ideas.  Just that the matter is the same just arranged differently.

We strive everyday to the pinnacle of our abilities.  We work toward untold toils of the terrestrial tremors.  And lo and behold along comes December and near the end we have something new!  Whew!  How was I gonna survive without that!  Just put me in a bag and off to the curb!   New! 

I mean, Whew!  What I would do when. 

At any rate the best place in my mind to be on the Eve of another Year would be in Times Square.  With the old Guy Lombardo playing nearby in the Astoria.  We call it that with affection from frequency.  Take Park Avenue south to 43^rd and straight over to Broadway and the Times Square celebrations.

Who hasn’t, or thought of being there?  The throng thick with anticipation. Mirth in the air like speed on a freeway.  All about and not without consequences.

Pour some bubbly baby; I am coming in for a smooch.

Mark Hull

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family Christmas

Festive Family

So as the world turns we entertain again.  It’s a weekly thing at our house it seems.  From one week to the next we have some ins and some outs.  People we know and those we don't know so well.  Not an issue for my darling wife and myself as we greet and treat all as friends.

Now this week we will be exceptionally booked.  Here I am off on a New Store Opening and not in the abode as much as I would like.  So a heavier burden is placed on Suzanne.  No coffee for her.  Just tea made by my loving hands. 

So the room will seat a comfortable 25 and that's the number we are expecting.  Not too many, not too few.  It would be uncanny for me to think that we have this under control, but I hope that is how things play out.  The big fridge, (outdoors) may or not be operating.  We do have two inside.  Many hands will make light work.

The menu is festive with the “Bird”, a ham, and all the fixxin’s.  Eats before dinner will stave off the hunger of those who come to gorge on the gallons of gravy and potatoes.  We have done this many times and expect to do so again.  We have table and chairs on order, and booze in the blender, and soon it will render.

It party time!  The kids will play, and the adults will talk.  If it’s nice we can get the winter version of the Coley Car out.  New big bad rubber on the back, and the red skis out front.  Goes like a bat, and roars loud.  You can’t ride this if you wanna stay warm and dry.  Snow in the face and up your sleeves.  Chillin the very core of humanity.

No rink this year as the weather Gods have not been favourable for this activity yet.  Perhaps in January.  It was a treat to be out on New Year’s Eve last year with Cole, some skates, some dogs, mallows and Suzanne.  Fire blazing high like an inferno.  Cold on one side and frozen on the other.  We roasted the New Year in and skated a few rounds.

We’ll be getting the Chad Meister, Trevor and all the younger siblings to show up.  Amanda, Carolyn, and Douglas will all be there grinning.  Maybe Santa will show.

Get few mulled rum in you and you can do it all.  Red and green everywhere.  Two trees decked out in festive attire.  Fire for warming in the rec room and enough wood for the winter.  Let’s burn up a few logs outside in the Chiminea and roast a few mallows over a brandy or two.  Vino Tinto and Blanco, beers and cocktails.  Catch up on last year and regale old times.

Let’s try to speak new words and see different angles.  Make new associations and key up for a lesson or two.  Perhaps we may sing a jingle or two and play the bells.  I still have a trumpet or two as well.  Carolling on the avenue as darkness falls and lights brighten, and the season chills.

Merry Christmas everyone.

 

Mark Hull

 

And you thought you could?

Feline Frame of Mind

 

For forty-five festering decades the fat of the feline has been foisted upon the unsuspecting masses of humanity. What proclivity to unearthly desires makes us want this confederate?  Or why is it brought upon us to tout this consort?  Why not let them go feral and see what happens?  Why do we have such a penchant for having them co-occupy our residences?  Why do we endure their oral discharges?  Clean the litter?  Shit!  I mean it!

Man’s psycho-enamoured drivel for the feline might have been pre-ordained.  After all if you take Yahweh’s word from the Tetragrammaton, you can clearly see the ordination of the feline likeness.

Hhhhhhhhoooooooooooolllld on!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oops!  I almost slid into a rant about religion.  Man would that have been uninformed!

The possibility at hand will be the wood world.  What I would do without wood?  Couldn’t burn it!  Can’t build with it. Can’t process it into paper, cardboard, Oriented Strand Board, (OSB), Engineered Plywood and flooring, trusses and trim.  Even the MDF people use to make stuff outa, wood.  Even the fake wood under fake countertops and cupboards, dressers,  furniture, doors window-frames, all of it wood.

So last week in the deep freeze we went out and hunted down a few of these suckers for Christmas trees.  Sneaky buggers I say.  They hide on you, sneak up on you, switch places, disguise themselves as other trees, poke you, and trip you.  Yes the hunt was on for a few more sightly specimens.  So how does that come around to felines and Yahweh?  Let’s take the pulse of the coffee maker and see what we can hypostatize.

So It’s brewing, and perking, heating and streaming. The chestnut liquid filling the urn to brimming.  Now try that with tea!

For those who know me well, they will be apprised of my enjoyment of the outside world, cuz in the house there is just this stuff, but outside is the REST of the world!

So here is a somewhat stale site.  Looked active at one time, perhaps the webmaster croaked?

http://www.get-outside.com/index.html

Seemed some interesting posts at one time. 

So I am off in search of comparative analyses for  the blog. I am looking for some quality assurances as it were.  So in viewing perhaps 20 to 40 other blogs, leaning to or mentioning “Coffee”, most are just drivel.  Some like last week’s, totally incomprehensible. 

So there I am on the waves of cyberspace, and I land my magic surf-board on the curl of a newspaper site.  The Record-Courier.   I go to the "about us" wave and the flow shows me a little of the history of the paper.  Nice, but informative?  Then over  to the sandy ebb of the, “contact us” link.  This wave too is informative but not explicit.

All I am hanging my Ten out there for, is to find out from where this newspaper is published.  Read on my good friends.

“The Record-Courier was born in 1875 as the Carson Valley News, begun by Douglas County District Attorney A.C. Pratt.

Pratt operated the newspaper for five years and then sold it to Boynton Carlisle, who changed the name to the Genoa Weekly Courier.

Carlisle’s operation of the paper prompted George Smith, with support of others to found the Genoa Journal in 1880 and after a year of head to head competition, Smith purchased the Courier and closed the Journal.

The Gardnerville Record was founded in 1898 as competition for the Courier, which moved to Gardnerville the following year.

Both newspapers covered Carson Valley for six years until 1904, when the Record burned to the ground and its owners purchased the Courier and combined the two nameplates.

That was the same year that long time owner Bert Selkirk went to work for the newspaper as editor and publisher. Four years later, Selkirk purchased the publication and owned it until 1944.

The R-C’s distinctive banner was an original woodcut of the Carson Range as it appears above the Valley. It originally appeared in the banner on March 12, 1926.

The newspaper published on Friday’s for most of its lifetime. It began publishing twice a week on Thanksgiving 1989.”

Any help?  Nope!  Now the next line hints but does not state clearly.  “A third edition of the paper inside the Nevada Appeal began printing in July 2003. “

 

Well, well, well, so they are either in the county of Nevada in some state, or they could be in the State of Nevada!  Amazing.

The unfortunate part of this county is that building has ceased!  Not one single building permit was issued last month!  They do cost $5,000.00!

One of the problems of attracting new people might be the lack of available lodging in the valley.  On the link provided on the non salty surfing medium, there was not one single lodging listed.  So how do I visit this county without simply making it a day trip on the Thru-way?

Fact is, there has not even been an activity in the community since late September!  It was the “Dangberg Home Ranch Tours”.  Hmm

Good thing it’s the season to be jolly.  Have a Java and sit back and read all the news!

Mark Hull

 

 

Teaser and the Firecat

TO PROROGUE OR NOT TO PRE-ROGUE

From whence comes a rogue in sheep’s clothing?  From behind the ewer!  If you are wearing that many clothes, then you are the one who is hiding the skin.  Since when does skin hiding relate to skinning us alive?

We all know that it is impolite to talk about religion, politics and abortion at a dinner party.  So what does this leave us?  Nothing but the weather and gas prices.  Gas prices are moot cuz’in’ they are simply under the control of those of whom we have no line to direct.  Doesn’t leave much does it?  The weather.

We walk to the corner and slip on a fall.  We sue the actress who left it there.  The right turn is not available because the sign says so.   Sign, sign, everywhere a sign, do this don't do that everywhere a sign.  The signs of winter are upon us.  Cold weather should be a clue.  White stuff should be another.  If you need more, then click to another blog!

Erstwhile we traipse along on our merry way thinking about the season.  Christmas.  The season never left those whose abodes have been adorned with the lights of the season for the past eleven months.  We now have lights on LED.  That’a be the Less Electrically Dissatisfying.  They use so much less’a da ‘lectricacy sosa y can have more of them.  You see it everywhere now.  Literally thousands of the little suckers sprouting from the eaves of houses like coral from a reef.  Oops, well, coral IS the reef, I know.

Spektaqular I say.

Well not all is speculative on the markets.  Let’s say things are less spectacled.  Those with rose coloured glasses are seeing more cranberry on the markets than before.

Now chatting about the weather.  Here is the challenge.  Figure out what any of the people on the following page is saying.  Report back and you win a fabulous prize!

Here is the site.

Check out what is good about the “Good Direction Weather Vane”.

See what Lazarus, Mathew Lillian, Willy, or Olive are saying.   In know, I know, someone is about to see that there is a ”mark’s” Page link on the left, and you will claim it’s mine. It’a aint! You all know I have perfect grammar.

http://parkerexectravel.com/weather/1145.html

Seems the old Hatfield and McCoy’s are up to it again, but this time it’s the Hodge’s and Schofields.

This time there is no Tug Fork River off the Big Sandy.  This is a new entrepreneur in the pleasant town of Hinsdale NH on Echo Farms. 

Well they got their old cow, got a good puddin’

Set it all up on a good footing.

Farmin’ aint nothing but putting on a gooding,

Thank God we’re a marketing.

 

That's pretty well it in a nutshell.  Faming is nothing but marketing.  Marketing is the bane of our materiality.  We have the overindulgent Big Box canyons steeping the countryside with unwanted, direly un-needed, low quality, non-competitive, lowest common denominator services and products.  An we are wondering what kind of stimulus package the government is gonna toss our way? Key- riste!   Just stop buying this crap!   In know, in know.  Some of you might say, well what about the employees?

Well reality is, most of the downtown cores of towns and cities have been gutted by this glut of ostentatiousness.  The ground space is the same.  We used to patronize the small family store or the currier, the furrier, or the cobbler.  They had enough employees who knew enough about what they were selling to keep you coming back.  We all had enough STUFF!  The people are the people.  That s a fact! We have not been replaced by droids!

Anyone out there have any space left in a closet?  In a garage?  In a cubby storage area?  In a shed? In an attic?  Nope!  Get a drift!  Poke this stuff out on the road and have it shipped over to China where they make it all.  Let’s actually just pick an address off one of those interweb thingy pages and send all our unwanted crap back to them to dispose of!

 

Oh a shipping I will go, a shipping I will go, all my stuff off to good ole Chang Dao!

Send me to the Moon Cake baby!

Mark Hull