San Francisco Espresso
A while ago, I did the New York espresso
tour.
I was in SF a few weeks back and did a San Francisco edition
with jdeboer and pphaneuf. Admittedly I've
been a little slow writing it up...
Ritual Coffee Roasters. Order: 1 skinny cap, 1 clover drip.
Foam: decent. Latte art: moderate; heart instead of rosetta.
Espresso: disappointing; slight bitter aftertaste.
Drip: disappointing; bitter taste overpowered everything else.
Philz Coffee. Order: 1 "cappuccino-like thing", since they don't have
cappuccino proper.
Foam: not foam in the usual sense, but was ok. Latte art: n/a.
Espresso: n/a.
Drip: pretty good; melo aftertaste, not too bitter.
Blue Bottle. Order: 1 skinny cap.
Foam: good. Latte art: good; nicely-poured rosetta.
Espresso: nice; mild aftertaste.
The winner for me was Blue Bottle. Next time I'm in the area I'm told
I have to make the trip to Barefoot in Sunnyvale.
Clover Coffee
Speaking of all this coffee, I recently discovered the Clover drip
coffee machines. They have one at Ritual, and as I mentioned above the
Clover I tried there was disappointing. You see, I had read several
articles about the Clover that hyped it up as a life-changing coffee
experience. My first Clover cup at Ritual was far from that; way too
bitter to enjoy.
However I discovered that they also have a Clover machine on the
Google campus in Mountain View (for the Googlers reading this, it's
in American Table café). I tried it out my last day in MV
and the coffee it produced was indeed delicious. Not life-changing,
but very enjoyable.
There's also a café near Google in NY, Café Grumpy,
that has two Clovers, and I've been sampling their Clover selection
since returning from MV.
However, there's a sad ending to this story. Starbucks recently bought
Clover, the company that makes the machines. Starbucks intends to
put Clovers into their stores, as a way to revitalise their business,
which hasn't been doing well of late. You see, the Clover coffee is
fancier, so Starbucks intends to charge a premium for it over their
normal drip stuff.
Which is all well and good, except that to make a delicious cup
of coffee you need more than a good machine. You need a good bean,
and that is where Starbucks falls short. Not only is their selection
pretty run-of-the-mill and uninspired, but they have serious problems
getting fresh supply into their stores. No matter how fancy a machine
they have, if their coffee is stale it will taste it. So personally,
I don't hold out much hope for the Starbucks Clover coffee, though
I would love to be proven wrong.
The really sad aspect to this story, though, is that since Starbucks
bought Clover, they are no longer selling the machines to anyone else.
So Starbucks, by buying Clover and then using the machines with
their crummy stale coffee, has essentially killed a whole new style
of coffee. Way to go guys.
If you are a coffee afficionado, or even if you just occasionally
enjoy a cup, you may want to try some Clover coffee before the
existing machines break down and the only remaining Clovers are to
be found in Starbucks. There are 250 non-Starbucks Clovers worldwide,
so it's only a matter of time.
China, Olympics, and all that
As the Olympics recently kicked off in Beijing, there have been more
and more news stories about various politicians and groups criticizing
China for some of its more dubious policies.
While I also find a lot of China's policies troubling, I want to
encourage people (especially Americans) to look at things with a bit
of perspective. Let's look at a few of the issues where America
has criticized China recently:
Sudan, Darfur, etc. I would remind readers that America has propped
up many a dubious regime for economic or other less-than-wholesome
reasons. Pinochet, anyone?
Human rights abuses. Yes, China's record here is bad. So is America's,
especially recently. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the whole kerfuffle
over dubious definitions of torture.
Democracy. I'm going to get in trouble for this one, but is
America's two-party system all that different from China's communist
government? After 4-year campaigns where the candidates pander
to every special-interest group under the sun they start to look
remarkably similar, with only subtle differences. Sounds a lot like
"you can have any colour you like, as long as it's beige" to me.
Free speech. This is one area where China's record is much worse
than America's without a doubt. Internet censorship and throwing
reporters in jail are (thankfully) things that do not (yet?) occur
(often?) in America.
Am I saying China should be excused of all its dubious policies
and actions? Absolutely not. I am just saying that I find American
foreign policy towards China, which presents a "holier than thou"
attitude of finger-wagging, very hypocritical. And I'm not the least
bit surprised that it doesn't work.
Inbox Zero
This seems to be all the rage these days. Get your inbox down to zero
and get stuff done! I haven't read the books or seen the talks, but I
actually believe that in many circumstances having an empty inbox and
getting things done are opposing forces. Spend all your time reading
email and you won't have time left to actually do real work.
Anyway, I've massively cheated the system here by auto-archiving
everything. My inbox is always empty, unless something manages to slip
past all my filters. In which case I write another filter to catch it.
I also have a list of labels in gmail, prefixed by numbers so they
lexicographically sort at the top of the list, that are high priority.
Mail sent directly me, and mail on my team mailing list is there. This
allows me to scan just those labels and nothing else when I'm in
a hurry and be reasonably confident that I've not missed anything
too crucial.
So I get inbox zero with the pragmatic approach that I don't actually
have to read every email all the time, which is good because I couldn't
read it all. As I type this, I'm on 109 mailing lists.
The Arugula Election
In summary: for fuck's sake. I never understand why Americans get so
flustered and afraid of this imaginary "liberal elite". I mean why
do Bush and McCain get off being ridiculously rich but still able to
play the "normal guy" card?
Hypothesis: it's not actually a question of wealth or means
or lifestyle, as the "arugula" term suggest, but a question of
education. Bush, being the complete and utter fucking dumbass that he
is, comforts Americans who, like him, cannot pronounce "subliminal"
or reliably name a foreign leader.
The thing a lot of Americans seem unwilling to grasp, I guess, is
that it's ok, even desirable, to elect someone smarter than them. I
know if you're "Joe Average" pumping gas for a living it's easy to be
threatened by an "elite" candidate who eats vegetables you haven't
heard of and uses words you can't pronounce. But at the same time,
Mr. Joe Average, do you really think it's a good thing for somebody
exactly like yourself to lead the country?
Anyway, all that comes off as extremely arrogant, and it is. And
as such that kind of argument is never going to work. So really, the
democrats just need to be much, much better at appealing to the Joe
Averages out there. Get Barack and Biden in a bar chugging beer.
Get them at a (non-soccer) football game. I'm running out of other
stereotypical American activities here, but you get the idea. I
mean how hard can it be to get photo ops of Obama in greasy spoons,
bowling alleys, pool halls, etc.?
And if anybody mentions arugula again with respect to this election
they deserve to be shot. Which reminds me of another great photo
op for the "Joe Average" folks out there: a shooting range. Show
Barack busting a few caps in some proverbial ass.
