How big is big in the World of Coffee? · Saturday April 19, 2008 by colin newell
So I pop over to Google for a couple of seconds…
and type in the word coffee.
It seems that I am number 4 in a list of 250 million references.
Starbucks is 3rd.
I guess the point is – diligence and tenacity pays off. In some small way.
Funny thing is – Although I have been writing about coffee, online, since the mid-nineties and experimenting with it since the seventies, I still feel that I have just shaved off the tip of the iceberg… with a 99 cent box cutter.
I am sure of it in fact.
And as I cruise through my late-forties (how did I ever get here!?), I think… I am definitely going to need another 40 years to master this bean thing.
Speaking of Starbucks – starbucks has now surpassed McDonalds as the most parent-requested outing from children.
No kidding.
Children, aged 4 and up, are now more likely to ask mommy for a hot chocolate at Starbucks than a happy meal.
Damn.
Canadian Mental Health Report #1 · Thursday April 17, 2008 by colin newell
The CBC and Angus Reid reports that Canadians are more angry than they were a year ago.
No $&#@‘ing kidding?
According to the pollster, almost 50% of Canadians feel their fellow Canucks are angrier than they were last year, and 25% admit to losing their own temper more often now than in the past.
Apparently women and young adults seem especially irritable: 30 per cent of women and 32 per cent of those age 18 to 34 say their fuses are way shorter than they used to be.
Why is that? Kathryn Jennings, a counsellor at Anger Management Counselling Practice in Toronto, suspects the increasing use of computers and technology is shortening our patience.
“With technology, our lives are faster, access is faster, and a lot of our needs are met immediately,” she says. “It has made our expectations higher. We expect that things should work and should work quickly.”
Personally, I feel a corporate culture and mind-set has invaded many employers previously more evenly paced… leading to frazzled worker bees.
Take my employer for instance – I will let you, the readers, figure out who that is.
Not that it really matters.
My work environment has quadrupled in size in 15 years with a net increase in individual responsibilities (within our technical group) by a factor of about 3 to 5. And if that is not entirely clear – My workload has probably tripled and the number of bodies available to deal with this massive increase in responsibility has dropped.
Where we once had 4 or 5 guys handling a large chunk of technical territory, we now have about 1.
Recently my employer approached me about taking on about 50% more work on top of this – with no increase in pay of course.
Another example: A colleague of mine crossed my path on the job site recently reporting how intense things have become. I replied… “We have become members in a culture of intensity…” “running from fire to fire is our way of life every day on the job…” “We start a job and that job is interrupted and that interruption is clobbered by yet another interruption… or a more serious crisis…”
It is bullshit. It gets a little worse each week. And we are willing participants in this ballet of madness. As my colleague and I parted ways, I coined another phrase…
“This trend is like an asteroid within… slowly making its way toward crushing our sanity…” An asteroid within… Damn. That’s witty.
So what else is making Canadians angry? Apparently queue jumpers are at the top of the list. I encountered one at a bank machine once… if you can believe that someone would be silly enough to cut in front of a line-up of busy and aggravated people (myself included…) in a bank machine line-up. I assure you… he will never do that again.
Other irritants include loud cell phone talkers, aggressive drivers and, oddly, people who ignore greetings in the office or have generally bad manners.
My personal favorites include motorists who eat breakfast cereal while at the wheel, cyclists who do their make-up – or hockey fans who talk about their financial portfolios for 3 periods of play.
British Columbians as sheep rant #1 · Wednesday April 16, 2008 by colin newell
When it comes to taking a fleecing, it seems that no one bends over more quickly (for the man with the scissors) than the average British Columbian.
I mean – we love being taken to the cleaners… and I am not entirely sure why? Living on the West Coast in a haze of pot smoke could not possibly account for all of the passive behavior… or could it?
Take the price of gas. It can go up 3 to 5 cents in a day and there is nary a whimper from the general public… alright, maybe there are faint little bleats from the average British Columbian… but nothing sustained.
It is simple. We are all gutless, two stomached, masticating wimps in furry lavender soaked coats.
Now take todays news for a moment. The B.C. Ferries Board (whatever the heck that is…) have just voted themselves a 60% raise… pretty much out of your ruminant pockets. And before ewe get your trotters all a-twitter (as if!) how about a few more details? The board chair, Elizabeth J. Harrison, received a pay raise on April 1, when the pay hike went into effect, from $105,000 to $140,000 a year. Five new members were appointed to the 13-member board on April 11.
On April 1, BC Ferries hiked fares by an average of 7.3 per cent on the three major routes connecting Vancouver Island to the Lower Mainland and an average of four per cent on the remaining routes.
The company said the “fare increases are necessary due to the rising cost of fuel as well as operating and capital expenditures.”
I wonder what this Province of lamb-chops will do about it…
apart from uttering…
Baa
Humbug.
B.C. transit use of taser shocking · Tuesday April 15, 2008 by colin newell
I ride the B.C. transit system in Vancouver any time that I am in the city –
Bus, Train or Seabus – It’s the only way to go in a city choked by single vehicle traffic.
But what is this that I hear via the CBC? B.C. Transit Cops are using taser weapons on fare scofflaws?
The CBC website reports – Transit police have fired Tasers 10 times since January last year, and three cases involved non-violent suspects, according to internal police reports obtained by CBC News using access to information laws.
In one case, a person ran from transit cops during a check for free-riders and “the Taser was deployed as the subject fled,” the documents say. Another person who didn’t pay the fare was arrested but “grabbed onto the platform railing and refused to let go … the Taser was deployed.”
I ride the “trolley” or diesel buses regularly and drivers are explicitly instructed not to be fare regulators or police – as a result, there is lots of abuse. On the Trains it is another matter. Transit cops are there for some good reasons. The additional visibility of a peace officer on a system only mildly beset with violent incidents is a plus. But why the additional firepower in an already peaceful environment?
Have we learned nothing from the Vancouver International Airport incident when a confused and dehydrated Robert Dziekanski was tasered and died?
The officers on B.C. transit should not have these weapons.
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