Archive for February 2013
“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all”*…
Hot or iced, drip, French press, espresso, Chemex or Keurig, each of us downs about 23 gallons of joe a year on average. It’s in our blood. It’s also on our streets, where Starbucks outposts outnumber hospitals and colleges. And even on our resumes: 161,000 people list “coffee” as a skill on LinkedIn.
But the truth is, our cup is half empty. We could be drinking a lot more coffee and, in fact, we used to. In 1946, when America’s thirst for coffee peaked, each of us swallowed about 48 gallons a year on average, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — more than twice current consumption. “We’d drink coffee with breakfast, coffee with lunch, and coffee with dinner,” says John Sicher, publisher of Beverage Digest. “And mostly, we’d drink it at home.”
The whole dark-roasted story at “America’s coffee cup is half full.”
* David Lynch
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As we reach for another soft drink, we might recall that it was on this date in 1905 that Paul P. Harris, a Chicago attorney, met with three friends– Gustave E. Loehr (a mining engineer), Silvester Schiele (a coal merchant), and Hiram E. Shorey (a tailor)– to found The Rotary Club, the world’s first service club. It was so named, as the friends intended to rotate the site of their meetings among members’ offices. Now known as Rotary International, the organization has 34,282 local clubs and over 1.2 million members worldwide.
[coffee photo sourced here; Rotary founders, here]
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend*…
Miss Ethel Philip Reading — James McNeill Whistler
Central Connecticut State University’s “America’s Most Literate Cities” study takes stock of the largest cities in the United States.
This study attempts to capture one critical index of our nation’s social health—the literacy of its major cities (population of 250,000 and above). This study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: number of bookstores, educational attainment, Internet resources, library resources, periodical publishing resources,and newspaper circulation.
This set of factors measures people’s use of their literacy and thus presents a large-scale portrait of our nation’s cultural vitality. From this data we can better perceive the extent and quality of the long-term literacy essential to individual economic success, civic participation, and the quality of life in a community and a nation.
The winner? Washington, D.C., closely followed by Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The loser? Well, readers in Stockton, Corpus Christi, and Bakersfield can check the full ranking of the 76 qualifying metros here… or not.
Woman Reading — Georges Braque
* “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx
[Paintings via Biblioklept]
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As we polish our glasses, we might send prehistoric birthday greetings to the red-headed pride and joy of Fred and Wilma Flintstone; according to the February 22, 1963 edition of TV Guide, their daughter Pebbles was born at the Bedrock Rockapedic Hospital on this date in 10,000 B.C.
Pebbles (left) with her buddy, Bamm-Bamm Rubble
It’s always Chile in Norway?…
When it comes to a country’s prospects, is morphology destiny? Or is it simply the phrenology of geography? Strange Maps explores…
Do Norwegians feel curiously at home in Chile, and vice versa? Do South Africans have a strange affinity with Italians? And Filipinos with Maldivians? They should, at least if they’re map nerds: each lives in a country with a territorial morphology that closely resembles the other’s.
Although they’re on opposite sides of the globe, Chile and Norway are each other’s type, morphologically speaking: elongated to the extreme…
The Five Types of Territorial Morphology [c.f., here] sounds like a fun parlour game, at least in cartophile circles (is Portugal compact or elongated? Is or isn’t Somalia prorupt? Does New Zealand qualify as fragmented?) But there is a serious, geopolitical concern behind this attempt at classification. For a country’s shape has a profound impact on its economic success, and even its political viability.
Case in point: Lesotho. Being completely surrounded by another country does your economy no good. Four out of 10 Lesothans live on less than $1 a day, and the country ranks 160th (out of 187) on the UNDP’s Human Development Index. Even compared with the wildly unequal society that is South Africa, Lesotho stands out as a pocket of deprivation…
Another morphology, another set of problems. Fragmented states often experience great centrifugal pressures, with separatism affecting their outlying fragments. This is true of the Philippines, the central government of which only last October concluded a peace deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which had waged a separatist guerilla on the southern island of Mindanao. Something similar has been endemic in Aceh, at the western tip of Sumatra, where both the Dutch colonisers and the Indonesian central government have battled insurrections and rebellions.
Indonesia has had to contend with a few other centrifugal forces, one of which actually succeeded (and seceded): East Timor, which in 2002 became the 21st century’s first independent state. In the process, East Timor changed from being a fragment of a fragmented state to being the solid core of a compact state.
The implicit message of the Five Types is that compact is best, avoiding the logistical problems posed by the elongated, fragmented, perforated and protruded types. But is that really so? Cambodia, vaguely resembling a sea shell, is a fairly compact nation. That didn’t stop it descending into murderous anarchy when the Khmer Rouge took power in the mid-1970s, installing a regime that took its cue from the crazier aspects of Maoist Communism. China itself, morphologically compact, is torn between its high-performing coastal zone, an underdeveloped hinterland, and a far west forever rumbling with the distant thunder of separatism.
Perhaps these morphologies are the star signs of geopolitics: a fairly random way to categorise states and territories, which may or may not behave like the categories they’re placed in predict they will. Maybe the Five Types are a parlour game after all…
Read the whole story at Strange Maps.
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As we agree with Virgil that we should “trust not too much in appearances,” we might send clearly-magnified birthday greetings to Alexis-Marie de Rochon; he was born on this date in 1741. An astronomer, physicist, and inveterate traveller, de Rochon worked extensively in optics and lens design– and is probably best remembered as the inventor of the retractable telescope, the spyglass.
R.I.P…
Alongside its Waterbury, Vermont factory, surrounded by a white picket fence, stands Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard, arrayed with the headstones of especially beloved– or particularly despised– flavors…
See more monuments to melted dreams at Messy Nessy Chic.
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As we lower our spoons to half mast, we might spare a thought for Clarence Nash; he died on this date in 1985. While never as well known as Mel Blanc, Nash was the voice actor who created one of the most recognizable characters in American film history: he voiced Donald Duck.
Only Connect!…
rubber mat + bottle cap
As Digg suggests, “Seeing totally unrelated objects perfectly nestle inside of each other provides a certain kind of peace in an otherwise chaotic world.”
his shoes + her shoes
See more Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things.
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As we take Forster’s advice, we might send elegant (albeit dark) birthday greetings to Lula Carson Smith; she was born on this date in 1917. Better known by her married/pen name– Carson McCullers– she was an author who (with Faulkner, Wolfe, Welty, and Williams) embodied “Southern Gothic.” She had many admirers among fellow American artists: Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, among many others. From across the pond Graham Greene observed, “Mrs. McCullers and perhaps Mr. Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Mrs. McCullers to Mr. Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D. H. Lawrence because she has no message.”
Carl Van Vechten’s 1959 portrait
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