It was a quiet week on Water Street, our humble home turf. But while sitting outside with the morning cuppa Joe and pondering what this week's column might contain, I was assaulted.
 It hit me squarely on the nose and then mysteriously disappeared. Startled and with all senses instantly at their dazzlingly heightened peak, I looked around for the perpetrator and/or the weapon being used against my person and realized suddenly that I was surrounded.
 Floating silently up the little street they proceeded - a militia of meandering if minuscule magnificence, some as large as soft balls, others the size of a dime, but all intent on putting on a show of delicate chaos.
 Bubbles. Zillions of 'em. They raced madly out of Kathmandu's bubble machine a half block away and took to the air currents filling the street with silent shiny soapy spheres. It was simply too cool. But this is Water Street. Cool is the norm,  even when it's quiet...
 Determined to protect us and our caffeinated customers, our Chocolate Labs Kenya and Djimah began their counter-attack on the silvery soldiers, gleefully charging up into the air to chomp on the bubbles passing by. That the bubbles utilized very little by way of defensive tactics bothered our pups not a whit...
 That they kept coming in seemingly unending procession merely added to the joy of their determined offense. As our two best friends did puppy versions of gymnastics all around the shoppe's sidewalk, they were joined by some furry, albeit tiny, reinforcements.
 Enter Molly - and Hermione - and Sara (possibly Sam...)
 Face it, there are very few things in this world more alluring than puppies, and we seem to attract most of the cutest.
 Some of our wonderful readers (Mom, our employees, and a few close friends that we bribe) may recall a column last winter dedicated to Schooner, a black Lab that was bestest bud with our pups and who was recalled to a heaven that apparently had a shortage of happy pups.
 Well, Schooner's latest incarnated self strolls into the shoppe in the form of a brand new Golden Retriever named "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" or just "Molly" for short (thank goodness!) She is the approximate size and shape of a soccer ball covered with spun gold cotton and with a tiny cold coal-black nose.
 Then enters another caffeinated regular with one small smiling (Lab's smile, honest!) black Lab pup named Hermione (pronounced "HER-mee-own" despite what you may think...) named for a Harry Potter character.
 Glancing over at yet another of our regulars seated at a table in front of the shoppe, what to our wondering eyes should appear? Sara! Barely old enough to be away from her mom, Sara's eyes and face are a premonition of sheer beauty when she matures.
 But, maturity may also bring a slight problem. A few days ago Sara's name was "Sam" and the week before that it was "Sara". There is a certain gender-identity difficulty that neither owner nor coffee personnel have been able to guarantee beyond a reasonable doubt.
 Sara...Sam... Still engagingly adorable and one of the various centers of our universe. We shall happily wait and see which gender wins.
 You see, happy puppies always assume that the world (at least) or the universe (more likely) revolves around them. And they are, of course, correct. That there were five simultaneous universal centers extant in our little shoppe is neither a problem for physics or philosophy. Kenya, Djimah, Molly, Hermione and Sara all know with a certainty their importance in the cosmos.
  In a contest for cuteness, we would be hard put to award anything but gold medals all around.
 Hanging in one of the shoppe's windows is a crystalline sun-catcher that tends to toss glimmering rainbows all over the downstairs. A slight breeze can often get those glimmers careening along the floor a little like a disco ball...
 You haven't lived until you watch puppies chasing lights! Over the floor, up the wall, along the ceiling, on to the counter. Then coming to a grinding halt while inhaling bagel crumbs and off again chasing rainbows.
 It really was a quiet week on Water Street. His honor the mayor swung by to see how things were on this end of his city and to fire some excellent ideas at us about the future use of some currently poorly allocated city property (no hints... we'll let you guess!). If good ideas lead to fruition, then there will still be  quiet weeks, but eventually prettier ones as well in our future.
 Our editor (yay, Tim!) got booted upstairs according to highly placed sources in the Pall-Times (Tim...). Our loss is your gain, oh faithful reader(s) because he has graduated from riding herd on your humble baristas to becoming 'City Editor'. Doubtless both he and our beloved publisher (bless him!) are thrilled, but we (y.h.b.'s) are of two minds on the promotion.
 Naturally there is little doubt in anyone's mind that it's deserved, and we wish him a lifetime of scoops and inside information, but it means we have to break in a whole new editor...  someone who won't use a spell checker and someone who ignores dangling participles. And someone who understands what a quiet week is...
 Rumor has it that Colleen is taking the place of  'yay Tim!' and if our sources are accurate, we (and you) have lucked out. Colleen knows how to spell as well as having a great handle on grammar, but she isn't pushy about it (thank the goddess...)
 And she understands what a quiet week is... It's one of those rare times when the world is just what it should be - nothing more and nothing less...
 When puppies play with bubbles or chase tails or rainbows or each other. When high ranking government officials (well, the mayor, at least) can drive by and shoot the breeze with a local barista, when good friends get good promotions and other friends enter new relationships with you (Colleen... gotta love her). It was a quiet week on Water Street.
 But it was a good one.
 

     Scenes of early childhood race through my panicky mind...
       My brother holding me by my heels over the Canal lock so I could watch the boats... my shoe caught in the mud that I was positive was quicksand... my brother showing me his 'egg trick' over my parent's newly installed wall-to-wall carpet... my English teacher inadvertently spitting out her dentures at me...  My brother breaking a feather pillow over my head in the middle of the night...
   Immediately on their heels flashes later life scenery: a disastrous prom night, three colleges in four years, forty-eleven careers, one son, three grandkids, and falling out of a canoe at Taylor Pond.
        Fond memories? No, not exactly. They say that your whole life flashes in front of your eyes when you are about to die. Am I about to die?
       Well, no, not exactly. But it felt like it. It was just another mind numbingly oblivious driver on a cell phone making whimsical lane changes without realizing it. And without caring, which is more to the point.
     Like the Red Queen in "Alice in Wonderland" there are a whole lot of people who try to do six impossible things before breakfast, all in their cars, mini-vans or SUV's. On the way into the shoppe a few days ago I counted:
   7 cell phone users; 5 persons in animated conversation (requiring, apparently the use of both hands as well as direct eye contact with their audience), 3 soccer moms vainly attempting to control what must have been their micro-soccer players in rear seats; 2 people reading the morning paper; 2 combing their hair; one shaving with a cordless razor, one reading his mail; one putting on make-up...
   And a frikkin' partridge in a pear tree... (in fact, it was three wild turkeys racing across our dirt road which was actually kinda neat...)
    All this while I placidly sipped coffee from my travel mug, mind you.
   Neither of your humble baristas are prone to road rage, which when you think about it is a good thing, because the potential is there at every corner, 4-way stop, "yield" sign (to which many people simply reply "Never!"), and flashing caution light.
       Years ago Steav lived in NYC, Bill in LA. Isn't it amazing how humongous megalopolises (?) megalopoli (?), well, cities can simply be referred to with initials.. Drivers in LA believe people in NYC developed road rage. NYC'ers are just as certain that it is a west coast phenomenon.
      But neither of us really recall anything so obvious as what we now refer to as 'road rage'. Blowing horns, sure. A little directed shouting out the window, of course. Selective single fingered salutes to deserving individuals, naturally! But that was just normal driving. It failed to fall into the 'urge to kill' category.
     We have a theory... naturally... most of our columns are based on our theories, however  potentially bogus. Road rage probably developed from people who were frustrated by other drivers who were doing everything in their cars BUT driving. Simple.
  My journey to the shoppe is all of 5 miles from home to business. It takes about twelve minutes of legal speed driving. To discern 22 people in that short space doing non-driving activities in multi ton metal vehicles careening mere feet from me is sobering. That's almost 2 idiots a minute!
     As I sipped my coffee from my travel mug I reflected on how the driving world got to this state of oblivion, and as I took a left turn and made a mad grab for my travel mug (which was headed west along my dash board) it came to me.
       Coffee. Specifically travel mugs. Dear Goddess! What have we done? Was it truly the advent of the travel mug that destined so many of us to begin blithely cruising down city streets without seeing hysterical pedestrians we just missed, narrowly avoiding misguided squirrels in our paths, blandly and blindly ignoring stop signs because we are relatively certain there was no one else at the corner???
       Egad! This needs examination.
   My car, a Buick Le Sabre SUS (sport utility sedan) with it's vanity plate of "Barista 2" once boasted a pair of little holes surrounded by plastic into which you placed your travel mug so that you could imbibe with a modicum of safety.
     Kenya, our two year old Chocolate Labrador ate both the holes and the plastic when she was teething somewhere around the 6 month mark. In fact, that is also where the plastic end of my turn signal, 40% of my cruise control controls and both of my horn buttons went.
       That the dealership offered to replace the $2's worth of plastic for a mere $45 is why my travel mug skitters across my dash (NOW I know why they call it a 'dash'! Cool!)
      $45? I don't think so.
  Newer vehicles actually cater to our need for distractions while driving. Cell phone sleeves, lap-top plug ins, combination radio/tape/CD players with adequate buttons to boggle an astronaut, and interactive gizmos to tell you where you are, where you've been, and where you're going.
    The entire driving world now requires "OnStar" navigation/communication so that AAA can find which culvert you've driving into and effect a rescue!
     We are absolutely certain that coffee does NOT distract you when driving. Nonetheless, when we opened the shoppe a little over three years ago (14 days over, to be precise) some lady squeezed $2 million out of Mickey D's cuz she spilled her hot coffee on herself in a moving car...
       So, no matter how absolutely certain we are, we are also probably absolutely wrong.
     Coffee, cell phones, cosmetics, counselling children, conversation, CD's and current events all have their place in this world... but not, we think, in the car. Let's put it this way:
 If the average drive by customer gets a large coffee to go every morning of the work week, they are spending around $350 a year at our little business.
 Careful out there, folks. We can't AFFORD to let anything happen to you!
 

  "You Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Gone"

  "Don't it always seems to go that you don't know what you've got til it's gone... You pave paradise and put up a parking lot."
  It's Labor day weekend (well, it is, as this is being written at least...) and our research assistants have demanded a 3 day break, so we can't tell you who sang those immortal words... Carole King, maybe; not Judy Collins, we're pretty sure; Joni Mitchell is the most likely one. But the sentiments expressed in the song still ring true, whoever sang it.
     Without research assistants we are lost. To make it worse, there are several things missing this weekend!
       Coffee. Can you believe it? Your humble baristas woke up on Sunday morning to a complete lack of coffee (well, ok, there was some decaf, but let's get real - the placebo effect only goes just so far...)
      Gotta get to church anyway, so the panic can be controlled until then, perhaps. But how many people do you know who go to church 2 1/2 hours early so's to get coffee? Our point, exactly.
      But the crisis continues: at church there is no more coffee! Someone found the secret stash during the week and brewed it all up! Hey, if you can't trust the folks at church, who can you trust? Maybe good coffee is just one of those temptations that cannot be resisted. Heh! Ego te absolvum, I guess.
    So a quick run from the church to the drive thru coffee joint. Surely an act of desperation, but appropriate when you are desperate. "Light cream, please... no sugar".
 What I get is a cup of cream over which has reportedly passed a carafe of coffee with minimal spillage into the cup! "No, sorry - my fault... I meant go light on the cream, please! Could I have another?"
     It arrives with no cream (which is OK, I guess...) and heavily sugared... Sigh. I have no theological objection to sugar in coffee, but not MY coffee... sigh. I say thank you, pay for the service and pour the tainted liquid of my dreams out at the corner of the parking lot.
      Naturally, by this time, the lack of coffee is becoming a crisis. From bed to mug is rarely a hiatus longer than 7 minutes, or the length of time it takes to boil water and make a French Press. This is coming up on 90 minutes and the situation is leading to panic. Coffee. Now. Please. Anyone.
   Laurie! Port City Cafe! Salvation! I've seen the light! Thank the gods! The possibility that the speed limit was exceeded en route exists, but the airpot at the end of the tunnel was irresistible. That Laurie makes a fine cuppa Joe is well known. That she is open on Sunday morning is nothing short of miraculous. Her sainthood is in the mail, we are certain.
 Walking out of Port City Cafe was a joy. Wonderful coffee, wonderfully brewed, and a mega-muffin for added enjoyment! Life is good. You DON'T know what you've got til it's gone.
       The lack of coffee is one thing. Major at the time it happens, but in the grand picture of life,  pretty petty. Yet it gives your humble baristas certain pause to examine the things that we, maybe, take for granted. Things that are important to us that seem dependable as sunrise but may disappear unexpectedly before you realize it.
   Things that, on this Labor Day weekend might actually require OUR labors.
       SIGHT AND SOUND. Bill has lived in Oswego for almost 10 years now. Steav has been attached to some lakefront property east of the city since birth (no, we ain't telling!) Both of your humble baristas have noticed in both the short and the long run how bright the night sky has become.
       Eyes that used to watch the Milky Way and enjoy the progress of comets and lounge on the shoreline to experience meteor showers now have to squint and puzzle to pick out planets that used to be glaringly obvious.
       It isn't our eyes. It's Oswego... and Alcan... and NiMo... and Fitzpatrick... and Sythe... and our neighbors with street and yard lights blazing when they aren't even home. The night sky has given way to a perceived need to import daylight on a population after dusk. Without a dark sky policy in place by our city and county and state governments, we eventually prostitute ourselves to short sighted economic policies that displace us in our place in the universe.
       A universe that we can no longer even see.
      And how loud the non-natural noises are in our supposedly quiet environment. It was brought out clearly when we spent two (2!) amazingly peaceful evenings recently simply because the overwhelming noise of the nearby natural gas powered electrical plant was missing. We don't know why. We actually don't care!
    We heard birds and crickets and forest sounds that had been missing for several years. Not missing, really, just completely overshadowed by a local economy's desperate answer to trying to solve economic needs. Desperation often leads to abuse, intentional or not, and abuse in any form is evil.
  THE ADIRONDACKS. This is your humble baristas' personal playground, and we are most careful to keep it picked up and treat the play equipment gently so that it will last. But more and more we discover that our favorite canoeing lakes have fewer (if any) fish left in them - Acid rain has left them crystal clear and near death.
       We pity the population of the Pall-Times who haven't experienced the awesome beauty just a short drive away - we are amazed that one of the country's, no... make that the world's most beautiful areas is one of Oswego County's biggest secrets to it's own residents. How sad.
       It's a secret that needs to be told so that more people can come to its rescue as well as discover the incredible beauty and peace that makes this slice of paradise worth rescuing.
       DOWNTOWN OSWEGO. Sure, we have a vested interest in it's success, but we strongly believed in it's potential when we opened our little coffee shoppe three years ago. Some short-sighted local government officials give tremendous lip service to the development of downtown but still act with a 19th century myopic mentality of wondering how they can personally benefit from their actions instead of seeing the realities and results of their unenlightened self interest.
       We have a sign in our work area in the coffee shoppe:
   THINK GLOBALLY
  SHOP LOCALLY
    ACT ANALLY
      When we take real ownership of our world and our community we reduce the likelihood that 'they' are going to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. There is no 'they'.

 The Be An My Thology - Removing the Bull from The Bean

  One of the stranger philosophical goals of the 1960's and 70's was the 'de-mythologizing' of stuff. Good stuff, too. De-mythology is the removal of fables from legends to arrive at some sort of truth.
        That the remaining truth may itself be a trifle suspect is probably not that obvious to the de-mythologizers, but that's what makes philosophy what it is... OK, you're right. we don't know what it is... but that has never stopped us from waxing eloquent on any other subject before... heh!
       The great story about Adam and Eve, once de-myth'ed leaves us with 'Adam' simply meaning 'the first person' and 'Eve' meaning the one who comes later. Turns a great story into a boring set of debatable facts, eh?
    We won't even begin to tell you what this fad did to Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Those who had this lofty goal of putting bare naked facts in our collective consciences by de-bunking cool stories will tell you publicly that they do it as a pursuit of truth.
   Bull.
   Allow us (your humble baristas) to de-mythologize THAT. What these so-called truth seekers won't admit to is this: de-bunking stuff is fun! But philosophers and fun are rarely thought of in the same breath, so...
    We're on a little adventure de-bunking mythology on The Bean this week. Just for fun, mind you - we care nothing about truth...
 COFFEE STUNTS YOUR GROWTH. Bunk... this particular myth began at the close of WWII when the Coca Cola Company began its conquest of the world. In fact (truth!) it was the executives at Coke (the 'real' thing) that began the rumor.
  Coke folk targeted the younger generation for their marketing and since caffeine was at the heart of both drinks, they decided that it would be a great joke to let people think that somehow their caffeine was different from coffee's.
       Yeah, they sure wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony... while burping. Take it from a singer (Steav) that singing does NOT go better with Coke (having once belched my way thru' a performance of a major opera... sigh)
        STORE COFFEE IN YOUR FRIDGE. This is only a good idea if you like your coffee to taste like leftover pizza or whatever else you have mouldering in your fridge. Coffee acts like baking soda and takes on the flavor of whatever comes in contact with it!
      Flavored coffee is fine, but do you really want to consume garlic-dill Balsamic vinegar brewed first thing in the morning? We thought not... Need a great air freshener? Get a pound of really cheap coffee and leave it open!
  STORE COFFEE IN YOUR FREEZER. Even the poor misguided coffee industry used to suggest this (they no longer do...), but it is plainly a very bad idea. See, those 'coffee oils' that give such wonderful aroma and flavor to our daily drug of choice aren't really oil at all. They're water.
   When you roast The Bean you force the moisture out of The Bean and it is this divine essence that we crave in our Java juice. Everyone knows that water gives rise to freezer burn, so that $55 a pound Jamaican Blue Mountain won't taste any better than $4 Maxwell House after a few weeks in the deep freeze.
       and speaking of which: JAMAICAN BLUE MOUNTAIN AND/OR HAWAIIAN KONA HAVE MORE CAFFEINE THAN ANY OTHER COFFEE. Nope. Just the same. And we, y.h.b.'s, don't even think they're the best tasting brews, either. Save yourself $45 and buy some Guatemalan.
 Beans is beans, see. There are 2 (only 2) kinds of beans. Robusta (grows easily, yields 5-6 crops a year per tree, strong & often bitter) and Arabica (delicate crop requiring hand tending, yields once a year, smoother and far more interesting taste).
      The run of the mill commercial stuff is robusta. The pricey stuff is Arabica. But all of the so-called 'gourmet coffees' are Arabicas. Same caffeine, folks! They just grow in different places.
        KONA AND JAMAICAN ARE LOADS CHEAPER AT "WHOLESALE CLUBS". Sigh... Marketing is the science of creating money out of deception. Yes, indeed, you can buy Kona Blend and Blue Mountain Blend for $5-$6 a pound at these discount clubs.
       The key here is the elusive word 'blend'. Coffee is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, so they don't have to tell you that the blend may be 5% Kona or Blue Mt., and 95% any other coffee they want to add. A single Kona Bean in a bag of Colombian qualifies it as a 'blend'!!!
       ESPRESSO HAS MORE CAFFEINE THAN COFFEE. Well, sorta, but only because you simply brew it stronger. Tho' we here in the USofA think of espresso as a major way of ingesting caffeine, the good folk of Italy just drink it as their daily coffee (and wonder at our HUGE mugs of thin brown liquid!)
     Strength of coffee is just a matter of how much you use when you make it. That's all. Espresso is a tiny little cup (1-2 oz) of Java with the same kick as our 10 oz mug of Joe. Thus, espresso is 10 times as strong as American coffee but you only drink a tenth as much! Kinda evens things out, eh?
        CHOCK FULL OF NUTS IS JUST THAT. No nuts, not even Chicory. Sorry. Nary a peanut or a Brazil nut. Chock Full of Nuts began as a little group of vending carts in New York City that sold roasted nuts! They graduated to selling coffee with their cashews and eventually dumped the nuts for the beans.
        The push carts gave way to corner coffee shops and their original slogan was "Better coffee a Rockerfeller's money can't buy." But the esteemed family wasn't impressed and following some legal maneuvering the company changed 'Rockerfeller's' to 'millionaire's' in their jingle.
       Which is all a moot point now because Starbucks has bought all the C.F. of N.  shops.
       THE BARISTAS HAVEN'T A CLUE WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT. Arguuuuh! Merely a rumor started by Dunkin' Donuts...
  Honest!
 
 

I DON'T BELONG TO ANY ORGANIZED POLITICAL PARTY... I'M A DEMOCRAT

 Your humble baristas are on vacation. We thought of letting the puppies write the column this week, but they wanted to come with us, so that was out.
 Then we thought of letting our Poets-In-Residence, Jen and Eriq do something about poetry, but it came back to us (all too clearly) that we did a poetry column last week which backfired on us (Gayle Danley, our slam poet, had to cancel... sigh - but she will be back!)
 So that was a no no, too. We could have had our intrepid editor (yay Tim!) run a 'Best Of Buzz Words'  but there was a lot of question from the editorial board (yay Tim!) if there actually WAS a 'Best of Buzz Words'... Sigh.
 With loyalty to our wonderful readers we determined that - vacation or not - we would write our column, thus eliminating the chance of letting down our loyal readers (Mom and our employees... sigh). That we will have to attach the handwritten column to a carrier pigeon and hope for the best simply makes life more exciting (and our deadline more vague...)
 Here we sit, off in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, somewhere northeast of Upper Jay (proving that we are now as off the beaten path as our column is. heh!). In a cabin in the woods with no phone, no electricity and water that runs as a result of gravity only. This week's Buzz Words are written by the light of an oil lamp.
 Which reminds us of another great man who came up in the news regularly over the past few weeks. Abe Lincoln. Honest Abe. (Was he a Democrat or a Republican? They both seem to claim him!)
 Writing in the physical environment of the Great Mr. Lincoln gives one pause to look at the recent political conventions. Sadly, they were more conventional than political. All the fun seems to have been syphoned off. Republicans attempted for all the world to look like Democrats with an orchestrated parade of gay, female, black and other minority speakers. We aren't sure who was fooled.
 Democrats, not to be outdone, spent most of their time introducing us to a man who needs no introduction, our Vice-President of eight years... Excuse me? Don't we know him yet?
 In a rare display of REAL political conventioneering, the Reform Party absolutely outdid itself. One faction threw the other faction out of the convention center, resulting in two (2!) simultaneous micro-conventions! No one is sure which was the real one, few care. Someone gets $12 million to play with but the courts will sort that out. Now that was FUN!
 Not to be upstaged by the carefully staged conventions, we would like to submit another name for your consideration for the presidency.
 A man who, like Al Gore, needs no introduction... A man who, like Dubyuh, er.. um... that is, well... OK, never mind. He isn't anything like Dubyuh.
 In this era of strong economic growth, we believe our next president should embody the economic understandings of "The Merchant of Venice".
 In a world where class, religious, and economic warfare divides families and communities, our next president should have the insights found in 'Romeo and Juliet".
 The new millennium requires a true Renaissance man. The candidate who knows the passionate depths of a "Macbeth" or a "Henry V" will bring real compassionate conservatism to America.
 Finally, who better to lead this country than a man who has worked all of his productive life under one of the great female leaders of the known world, Elizabeth I Regina!
 And who better than the fellow who actually wrote all these classics? We place into nomination for the Presidency of these United States, the name of that great American hero: William Shakespeare.
 Huh? Oh, yeah... he's dead. But have no fear, for your humble and resourceful baristas have a solution that is not only very much alive, but American born to boot: William Shakespeare (aka Duncan Inches).
 First of all, name recognition is surely no problem. Duncan as Shakespeare has been living the life of The Bard for years and is known from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters as the living embodiment of the creator of "Julius Caesar".
 Pray, who would guide us best in these times as the REAL education president? Surely the most famous writer of the Western World would have the skills to put and keep our public educational system on track.
 What do you mean, impostor? The real W.S. isn't currently available, sad to say, but why NOT hire an actor? This great country of ours was led by a grade B actor from Hollywood for 8 years with a modicum of success. How much better would a first rate actor who actually lives his role as a progenitor do for us and our posterity!
 We, your humble baristas, like the idea so much that we have invited The Bard of Avon to a public forum on Wednesday, August 30th at 8 pm in the lounge of our shoppe. At that time, Mr. W. Shakespeare will hold a press conference, announce (formally) his candidacy, describe his platform (more like a stage, actually), and accept this populist movement nomination. And YOU will be there (if you like... heh...)
 If nominated, he WILL run... If elected, he will serve.
 Professional politicians haven't given us all that much from which to choose of late. Relatives of past presidents are rarely very hot in the Oval Office (John Quincy Adams comes to mind...)
 We hold this truth to be self evident: a literary president is the one to lead the fight against illiteracy.
 And, last but not least, who is going to vote against someone with the wisdom to utter the famous line:
 "First, kill all the lawyers."
 Be there. Aloha.

SLAM! BAMM! Thank you, Ma'am!

   The summer dance was less this year
     The evenings were like thousands in the universe
        You and I are not strange or green
      Yet a story forever whispers
    And will ask, "Why?"
    Like him, the morning blooms
    as mud - all soft within the rain
       of sky shadows
  Let me relent over sleep
        And feel what deep red earth
    can be like- Leave life
 with a weak celebration
       Huh? Oh, sorry. It's poetry. Magnetic poetry, to be precise. Who would ever have thought that poetry would become one of America's most popular pastimes! Look around you, because poetry is everywhere... and much of it is stuck on America's refrigerators!
       Magnetic. Computer generated. Spontaneous. Random. Sidewalk. Slam. Poetry has captured America and is setting its muse free in new, fanciful and fascinating ways.We have a set of magnetic poetry on the espresso machine at the shoppe and are amazed at the draw it has on customer creativity... almost like a magnet...
    Magnetic poetry is currently one of the most popular holiday and birthday gifts and is available in multiple styles, from large print to science-oriented or philosophical sets to multi-colored sets that allow you to express your words in hued magnificence!
        I put a peanut
  into a parking meter
    it spit out
     30 minutes and
  two monkeys in change
   What do you mean it doesn't make any sense? Everything makes some sense if only because we are creatures of language and insist on some modicum of understanding in whatever we read - We ascribe the 'sense' to it even if it had none in its initial composition!
     Think for a moment of one of childhoods most famous poems:
            'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
                    Did gyre and gimble in the wade;
               All mimsy were the borogoves,
          And the mome raths outgrabe.
          "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
        The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
             Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
               The frumious Bandersnatch!"
     Lewis Carroll's famous words are embedded in our collective consciousness from some of our earliest recollections, yet this musing found in  "Alice In Wonderland" doesn't make much more sense than our monkeys and their parking meter.
       It was announced this week that a computer programmer cum poet has developed a program where his Powerbook spits out random sentences, grammatically and syntactically correct and with or without meter and/or rhyme as he requests.
   He says that, while random, it assists him in finding ideas and thoughts and concepts that he can then use in compiling (his word) his poetry.
  Slam! Poetry with impact! Feeling! Intensity! Drama! Several years ago I had the grand opportunity to work with a slam poet, locally of Syracuse, Lynne Pannell. Lynne wrote her lines and I improvised music that helped interpret her words. Slam!
       We played bars, believe it or not. Can you imagine poetry sessions at your local watering hole? The amazing thing was: we packed 'em in. We got bookings and rebookings and the audience response was electric and vital. People would begin dancing to our work, or cheering, or shouting, or throwing lines back at us.
       Lynne could whip a crowd into a frenzy with her words and the concept of "freestyling music" to enhance her style was my first foray into jazz. In the space of a few moments her audiences could go from weeping to laughing and all the myriad of emotions between, all guided by her craftily crafted words.
 Slam! Poetry is in the streets. Scrawled in chalk on sidewalks or stapled to power poles. Poetry is in our schools, not confined to memorizing "Flanders Fields" but with coaching for students to learn to find and express their muses. A recent poll found that more 5th graders than adults over 40 knew what 'Haiku' was!
  Slam poet Gayle Danley, winner of the national slam competition a few years back, has entered our local schools and inspired students and teachers alike. She energized audiences at River's End Bookstore last year and mesmerized everyone at our coffee house with her special style of 'in-your-face' poetry.
       And she's coming back! Encore! Encore!! Today (Thursday)! Tonight (also Thursday!)! At 8pm! At our little shoppe! Our special niche in the community seems to evolve and revolve around poetry. When our own original poet-in-residence Matt Rogers (aka Dimitri Nam Cresten, aka Webster McCalligan) humbly began Live Poet's Society as an open mic twice monthly event, the last thing we anticipated was poetry to packed houses. But there you are.
       And there you should be, too. Missing the chance to hear, see, feel and experience Gayle Danley (tonight...) is missing the chance to hear, see, feel and experience a real muse in action!. Poetry is part of our lives and she brings it to life like no other.
       "In a small cafe two lovers linger over tea
     Sharing secrets and scones"

WARNING!!! {insert dope-slap here}

 OK, it seems that one of us (no fair guessing who) doesn't know what a dope-slap is... So (obviously) there may be readers out there who are unenlightened. Allow me:
 Take your right palm and bring it up at an angle to your forehead in a slapping motion and utter the word, "Duh!" Got it? Here we go...
 The first week that we opened our little shoppe, nearly three years ago, a tragedy occurred in the American way of life. Not to us, thank the goddess Caffeina, but a tragedy none the less.
 A woman was awarded 2 million (that's a 2 X 10 to the power of 6, fer cryin' out loud!) dollars for a lawsuit in which she claimed that the hot coffee she spilled on her robust and august person wasn't properly labeled...
 It was hot coffee. (insert dope-slap here}.
 We immediately checked with our supplier and noted that, indeed, the wonderful 'to go' stuff that Shapiro Paper provides us DOES (indeed) say: Warning! Hot Liquid!
 (We are confused, however, since we use the same cups for iced drinks with the same 'Warning: Hot Liquid!' scrawled on it... is this litigible???)
 But we upped our insurance coverage anyway.
 When it was in its younger days, the tobacco industry during the mid 60's was forced to put the following on its cartons and packs:
 "Warning: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous To Your Health."
 {insert dope-slap here) Well, duh! They called 'em 'coffin nails' and 'cancer sticks' during the Great War... It isn't like we didn't know, even in the 60's.
 Then there was the famous warning on McDonald's fast food pies: Warning: Filling May Be Hot!
 This was supremely bogus since it said "May Be Hot". It never was, by the way, and it occurs to us that a better warning would have been: Caution: Crust May Be Soggy. But we guess that isn't dangerous enough.
 The sword swallower at the local Renaissance Faire is required to caution us NOT to try swallowing swords at home. (or eat fire or pound spikes into our heads...duh!)
 We are, as a people, forever litigiously oriented, requiring warnings on everything from wing nuts to tooth picks. We once got a marine battery for the boat that said (in large friendly letters): Do not drop on foot... (Insert dope-slap here)
 Now, understand our premise on this column, wonderful readers. Fair game for discussion at coffee houses (coffee homes?) throughout history have been the Great Three Topics: Sex, Religion, Politics.
 We talk about sex often and religion all the time, but we rarely veer off into the political gambit. Rarely... Not never, tho. Thus warned (Caution: Political Veering In Progress) read on, Mac Duff...
 You may have read about a quandary at the Humble Baristas'  little shoppe during the just successfully concluded city-wide gala we know as Harborfest. Understand one thing (maybe more, but one at a time, at least...) Your humble baristas have always loved and still do love Harborfest.
 It is the greatest part of the local year. Food, friends, families, feasting, fireworks, fabulous entertainment. Oswego does itself proud with its celebration. We have toured most of the feasts throughout the Great Lakes at one time or another and Harborfest is the Supreme, Sole, Unchallenged, Imperial Ruler of Festivals. Period.
 Well, not period... comma maybe. Each year we who ply our meager wares on tiny Water Street are amazed that, as much as Oswegonians have 'stated' that they want to change Water Street's image (all beer 'n' bars), there is (apparently) no one with the gonads and/or ovaries to actually DO it.
 Let's face it, we have an open container law which is touted before and during Harborfest, but to apparently skirt that law and allow alcohol sales to trump every other Water Street business (us, Strands & Essence, Kathmandu, Goldbergs, et al) they put up a fence and apparently (love the word) allow a single business venture to succeed while giving (apparently) city sanctions that alcohol and Water Street truly do go hand in hand and that family oriented, kid (under 21) safe, non-alcoholic entertainment is banned.
 Nice try. (insert dope-slap here).
 What we really needed this year were several very real warnings: Caution: Hurling in Progress... Warning: Flying Vomit... Danger: You May Be Urinated On... Careful: Falling Fence.
 Now (and this is very important...) please remember: Caution! What you see on Water Street is NOT Harborfest's doing. We send our apologies to the reader from Rochester (q.v. Pall-Times: August 4, 2000) and to the 47 emailers we heard from (from whom we heard... sheesh!) railing against the railings that are put up to ostensibly keep the alcohol on one side and the coffee on the other.
 The fence isn't our idea. The fence isn't a good idea. The fence isn't a workable idea. Our wonderful customers are expected to remain within the confines of our building's area all the time, so why not expect the same from any other legitimate business??? (I.D-S.H.)
 Three calls to the mayor's office with (apparently) no response... No great surprise there, since it was (apparently) the mayor who authorized the fence to go up at 6 pm in the first place. See, it used to go up at 8 pm... Bad enough for business since coffee houses (homes) tend to be evening affairs... But in somebody's wisdom the idea that 'party' is a verb requiring a fence made the 6 o'clock hour more lucrative! Well, for some, perhaps. We enlisted the able assistance of our publisher (bless him!) and our editor (yay Tim!) with no success on their parts either.
 People of Oswego, unite! Well, maybe coffee drinkers of Oswego, unite... Ok, the heck with it... Look, folks. It's your city. You call the shots, hot-shots don't. Are you happy with the idea of family oriented, kid safe, coffee swilling poets and (god forbid) artists getting together, or ought we (and (apparently) other well meaning businesses) be corralled like cattle into our little corner while the real money grubbing (and other grubby acts) go on just a beer can's throw away? With city sanctions?? At city expense???
 Insert dope-slap here.

 Happy birthday wishes and all the attendant hoopla to the coffee shoppe. OK, not OUR coffee shoppe, but THE coffee shoppe - Exactly 350 years ago today the first coffee house opened in England.
 Well, maybe not today, but SOME time in this month (or at least this year...) is the tricentenial-quintodecadinal anniversary of the coffee house as we currently think of it.
 When you think about it, it's strange to realize how amazingly new coffee is on the old historical time line. Tea goes back tens of thousands of years, beer is nearly as old as tea, and water dates from the third day of creation...
 It makes you wonder how different that first English coffee house was from those currently in existence.
 Firstly and most importantly, we remove good old *$'s from the equation. Plastic and chrome replicas do not a coffee house make. You can Xerox a dollar bill but it doesn't make it worth a buck. (actually, you can't... it's illegal, but you get the point)
 The omnipresent purveyor of partially palatable pots of Java juice has lost sight of it's outstanding beginnings. Where once in the great city of Seattle a Starbucks stood primed to prepare pleasing pots, there now are 144 outlets (honest!) in Seattle alone hawking the McDonalds' of 'gourmet' coffee.
 With *$'s now marketing everything from stale over-roasted beans to over-priced ice cream, it becomes difficult to have that warm fuzzy feeling about this particular gas giant.
 But we digress (so what's new?).
 The early coffee house in 1650's London sold coffee at 1¢ a cup with refills at a hae-penny (half a cent). We know that seems cheap, but in reality a 1000% inflation of the price over three and a hae centuries isn't bad. And refills at most current shops run about half price of the initial mug.
 The original advertising and marketing strategy was to offer a non-alcoholic venue where men of leisure and those of more modest incomes and station might avail themselves of the opportunity to discuss topics of current interest in a gentlemanly manner.
 It seems the wives were annoyed with the hubbies coming home in intoxicated bliss too often.
 Nowadays we have pretty much the same atmosphere (we moderns call it 'atmosphere' ) in most independent coffee shoppes. Political correctness aside, women figure in our clientele as completely as men 350 years later, but the current topics are still about the same: sex, religion, politics.
 It seems that wives were annoyed with the hubbies coming home wired as well, so the coffee houses of Britania went co-ed in short order.
 Back then The Bean was roasted in the kitchen oven and passed through a jeri-rigged meat grinder. The smell was phenomenal and pherimonal. Today the most often heard phrase in our little establishment is "it smells great in here" (next to "large black to go, please").
 We would roast our own and, someday, we may! But the one thing that has markedly changed in these many years is people's taste sensitivity for The Bean.
 Roasting is now an art form and done with beautiful (expensive) equipment and our caffeinated public is far more knowledgeable about what to expect from their baristas. (probably because they didn't have our column to refer to in Merry Old England)
 The obvious competition with the alcoholically oriented establishments was a major economic powder keg three hundred fifty years ago. Being surrounded by bars on Water Street, we can assure you some things haven't changed at all.
 We have far, far less vomiting and many fewer brawls in our humble establishment, but the bars have a lot less Shakespeare and Hemingway, so we suppose it evens out... heh heh...
 So, by and large, the state of the Javanated industry is actually little changed from its beginnings a century-plus before the American revolution. In one of London's papers some 25 years after the first coffee shoppe opened, a politician was quoted as observing: "If one wishes to be elected, one frequents the coffee house. If one wishes to be reelected, one visits the pubs."
 We don't know what it means, either.

A Barista in the Family

  What greater joy is there than that of a parent whose tykelette arrives at dinner (circa age 4) with, "I wanna be a doctor when I grow up."
     It is easy to imagine the prodigious parental pride when that pronouncement is altered to "Fireman", "Policeman", "Teacher".
    The panicky shudder that runs through Mom and Dad when, at a later age, the precious kidlette announces that he/she/it has decided to become a "lawyer" can only be matched by the selection of "Art History Major" as the bonny offspring's career swing.
      Imagine, if you will, the supreme relief when, against all odds, the fruit of your body finally decides to become none of the above, but instead has settled on a lifelong passion for The Bean and is determined to become a Barista!
  The joy! The rapture! The free cappuccinos!
     OK... maybe you don't see it that way, but perhaps you should (at least we, your humble baristas, think you ought). Let us, with all bias aside, examine the realities of the various and sundry aforementioned careers:
        Doctor. First, let's be honest: it is a well known but little discussed fact that 50% of all doctors graduated in the bottom half of their class. Unless you absolutely know that you have a Doogie Howzer, Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, or Peter Green in your household, it's a flip of the coin whether your aspiring anesthesiologist is going to be in the upper or lower half.
 The money, you say? Hmmm... Alright, let's look at an average phamily physician in the U.S. today... Burdened by nearly a decade (or more) of school debt, the new MD will garner about $100,000 which is, according to the AMA, about the average annual figure on which to count. Not bad for a beginner, eh?
 Office space at $1500/ month (includes utilities); a full-time secretary to keep the reports filed, invoices flowing, and insurance billings billed: $ 10/ hr. (includes whatever measly benefits that can be attached); a nurse (gotta have 'em) for about the same as the secretary gets ($10/hr... cheap, but you aren't likely to land Nurse Hathaway at the start, are you?); medical malpractice insurance... hmmm... let's just guess at $1000/ month (we're baristas... what do we know? maybe more, maybe less).
       And that office space doesn't come with all the trimmings... Even if you lease or do a loan (another loan) to buy the gizzmos and neat needed diagnostic stuff, its a safe bet that you shall fork over $2500 a month in supplies, equipment (that tres cool digital sphygmomanometer is a keeper!) in one form or another...
   So, miscellaneous expenses aside, let's do the math. income = $100,000; outgo = $90,000. Our new doc lives on $10,000 out of which still has to come all those school loans. Not good.
  Howsabout the law? The American Bar Association tags the new counselor at an average $85,000 per annum. Not as hot as our doctor friend, but without the personnel and equipment layout either. A single secretary can do until a full-fledged paralegal can be brought on board, and if you have seen some new lawyers' digs, you now that they aren't putting out very much in rent.
  But that collection of leather bound books (minimum of four shelves worth) has to nail you a pretty penny and the monthly payment on the obligatory SUV isn't gonna get paid doing very much in the pro bono line of legal defense. Ought we mention here that 50% of lawyers graduate at the same level as 50% of all doctors (bottom half of the class if you forgot...)?
     And besides all that, who wants to deal with all those awful jokes for the rest of their lives? Nah...
  Policeperson? Fire fighter? Surely noble occupations but hey! They are bloody DANGEROUS! What? Are you nutz?
    And, come to think of it, teaching (without argument the noblest of professions) is pretty dangerous lately, too. So that's out.
        But a barista in the family! Ah! The unparalleled delight of knowing that your progeny will be able to make you a decent latte, pull a perfect espresso for your morning pick-me-up, or produce a primo press of Peruvian pleasure for your palette
       They will meet, greet, and treat the world's most diverse clientele with the world's favorite beverage. Imagine your delight as they cater to both great and small, rich and poor, in a classless, tasteful environment that is among the best of working conditions imaginable, catering to mayors and mavericks, professors and poets, actors and architects, and knowing (as they do) that they are arguably the most important person in the lives of this panoply of peoples (next only to their hair stylist, perhaps, but needed more often).
    Add to your boundless joy the fact that they can keep you supplied with the Tanzanian Peaberry that you have always craved, ready a last-minute gift basket when you realize you forgot Aunt Maude's birthday, and have the expertise to elegantly and extravagantly engineer an edible extravaganza at the end of any dinner party.
    And, at $6/ hr. (plus 20% off on merchandise) (plus all the coffee they can drink) (and all the baked goodies they can eat) our noveau barista winds up making more than that poor doctor 9 paragraphs ago!
     P.S. - Barista school is on the pass-fail system... they all graduate at the top!

Realitycheck.com.gov.org.edu.net

 There are those 'precious moments' (what a horrid phrase) in your life that you will always remember:
 Your first report card... getting your own library card... seeing your name in the newspaper the first time... your learner's permit... your first traffic ticket... your first passport...
 And if you are a barista, there are other Kodakianna moments: your first day open (Sept.2, 1997~7am), your first dollar made (actually ours was a $2 bill, but we have a unique clientele), your first published ad (the Oswegonian), your first Christmas order (in August? gimme a break!), your first Harborfest (way more fun than ought to be legal), your first column for the paper ("In The Beginning"), seeing your logo somewhere you least expected it (Animal Planet), and having someone recognize you from your 'head shot' from "Buzz Words" (Price Chopper, July 1999).
 But nothing, nothing in the world equates to going on-line, booting up the world wide web, and typing in your own domain name: www.coffeeconnection.net
 This kind of reality puts you up there with the Bill Gates's and Amazon.com's of the world - not only are you out there for the world to see (we have had a web page for two years at a simply dreadful address that no one could remember) but you are out there for the world to actually find!
 www.dreamscape.com/wabates/cc.htm
 Who is going to remember that? But that is where we were for two years. Bill faithfully managed a web site that nearly no one visited in hopes that someday something better might come along.
 And then it happened. For two years we checked CoffeeConnection.com regularly, but it was in use and didn't seem likely to ever come available. Same was true of CoffeeConnection.Org. But the virtue of virtual patience won out and the day that CoffeeConnection.NET showed up as 'available' we grabbed it!
 This may well seem all too self serving, but it's our column, so we shall serve ourselves! Life at the turn of the new millennium seems to also turn on the web and having our own real web presence is just too cool to describe.
 We don't sell coffee on it, by the way. Nah... Selling coffee on the web is like a mail-order bride. Silly at best, dangerous at worst. Who wants to buy The Bean when you can't see it... or smell it... or taste it... or discuss it...
 But our virtual reality check comes in the form of letting people know what coffee is about. BUZZ WORDS, par examplum, can be viewed at 'Weekend-On-Line' at www.pall-times.com. Our editor (yay Tim!) posts it there each week for your viewing entertainment, and it always amazes us that people actually GO there to read it! Tres cool...
 But Bill, in his copious free time, has now designed www.coffeeconnection.net with ALL (every last drop) of the Buzz Words, carefully laid out in chronological order, with 'frames' to help you navigate through the barrage of verbiage that we have put out in the past year.
 More than that, you will come across a wondrous collection of links to famous, infamous, and unknown coffee and tea sites on the net that will have you reading and/or chuckling to yourself during those evenings when you have nothing better to do than surf the web...
 Surf indeed. Now it is actually possible to drown in the web. Millions of places to go, millions of things to see, millions of people to meet.
 Recently I went to a search engine (web-slang for a 'table of contents') and looked up "coffee"... That's it, just "coffee".
 My search resulted in 9,826,368 references. And we are told that search engines only actually browse through about 15-20% of the entire web... sometimes less... That means there are upwards of 45 MILLION places about coffee.
 Yoikes!
 Too much information. My circuits are overloading. My powerbook is beginning to smoke.
 So, now I try a search on "coffee connection' and, whoops! There we are, in the virtual flesh, on the FIRST page of references! This is a memory that will stand out in our minds forever.
 Dot com companies are sinking in the unregulated abyss with great regularity. Venture capitol has turned to misadventure capital in loads of cases. Start-ups have converted themselves to mop-ups, and amazon.com's hopes aside, people are learning that the web is a better reference tool than a shopping cart.
 Not that shopping on the web is a bad thing... it's just not as much fun as doing it IRL (web-slang for 'in real life'). IRL shopping is: Taste it - touch it - poke it - smell it - weigh it - hug it - turn it over - kick its wheels... now THAT'S shopping.
 The flip side is: read it, cogitate on it, cross reference it, think about it, find others who are doing the same thing, test it, debate it, discuss it, update it, learn about it. That's what the web does best.
 And now, thanks to your humble baristas, some 45 million plus coffee references can be easily sorted out for you. You would think that that is why we did the web-site, wouldn't you - but it's not...
 We just wanted to see OUR shoppe on www.coffeeconnection.net. Heh!

 In his famous set of books "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (available at your local bookstore...), Douglas Adams tells of the creation of the universe's largest computer, aptly named 'Deep Thought'.
 'Deep Thought' had but one reason for existence: to discover the answer to life, the universe and everything. It churned its jillions of microchips for decades and finally provided its creators with THE answer to life, the universe and everything: 42.
 Ok, we all know you have to be careful what you wish for because you may get your wish. If '42' is the answer, then what is the question? Naturally yet another colossal computer had to be created to find out what the question was...
 Exactly one year ago our publisher (bless him!) asked us if we could do a weekly 'thing' about coffee for his paper. Did we have enough information on The Bean to keep going for a year or so? Did we know enough about coffee to deliver a weekly bit of info? Was he being careful of what he was wishing for? Nope.
 And (of course) we said, " You betcha."
 So he handed us over to the Food Editor (yay!) and only then did we find out that what WE thought was gonna be a little blurb about our fav bev was actually supposed to be a COLUMN... two pages, 1 1/2 spaces typed. Yoikes!
 Thus was "Buzz Words" born and in a very (very!) short time we knew we had the answer (42) but didn't know the question.
 In the past year we have chatted about coffee's history, its heroes and heroines, ecclesiastical brewing problems (the 'bad coffee in church' column is still getting us in trouble!), the heresies of the past ( 'instant coffee' of which there is no such thing, trust us...) and heresies of the future (coffee stunts your growth, kid... but Coke doesn't???)
 A new 'computer' had to be built to handle "the question" to life, the universe, and everything. Fate stepped into the 'computer design' in the form of our current editor (yay Tim!).
 We got moved out of 'Food' and over to 'Weekend' on December 16th, which was a good thing cuz we were rapidly running out of ideas for the food section! (Sorry, Kathy, but you've forgotten more about food than we will ever ever know.. We can make a great cuppa 'Joe' but there is a reason that we run a coffee shoppe and not a restaurant!)
 In our new newspaper digs, our new editor (yay Tim!) let us have our heads and write about pretty much anything we wanted as long as it had some tenuous, fleeting, minuscule connection to coffee.
 And we obliged. We have talked about poetry, puppies, Papa, and percolators. The weird thing is that people have read it, apparently regularly. Tim (of 'yay Tim!') posts Buzz Words on www.pall-times.com every week and we get fan mail!
 Fan mail! Can you believe it? Folks, its just COFFEE, fer cryin' out loud! Some weeks have been in the 200 email range! Get a life!!! heh...
 Every week, people stop us and comment on our commentary, for good or ill, but mostly for good (isn't *that* nice...). When we began, a writer told us that we had to gear our writing to a 5th grade level in order to be widely read.
 We didn't do that. Aside from the obvious grammatical problems that we are accused of (of which we are accused... sheesh) we have shared the tales of 'The Bean' and the fables and foibles of 'The Friends Of The Bean' as intelligent people talking (ok, writing) to intelligent people.
 Face it. Without a strong intelligence, no one could ever piece our fractured sentence structure together to adequately figure out what we are talking (ok, writing) about (about which we are talking (ok, writing... lemme be))...
 Surely without the three little dots, our stream of consciousness style of writing would be lost. We have made a working campaign to include the three dots into the punctuational lexicon.
 One of our fans (yes, fans!) once remarked that Buzz Words is a little like "Seinfeld" in that it isn't really about anything at all... Excuse us? It's about coffee! Isn't it?
 We do this for fun. So far our publisher (bless him!) and our erstwhile editor (yay Tim!) haven't figured out how to turn this into a profitable venture (we remain hopeful... heh) but that doesn't mean that we don't get paid for our efforts. In fact, the pay we do get is better than anything the good folks at the paper could devise.
 Friends. Many of them we have yet to meet, but they write us or email us or call us at the shoppe. We get stopped in the grocery store or the bookstore and people tell us how much they like Buzz Words. Friends.
 The question we've been asked most in the past year is, "Are the stories true? Did that really happen?"
 And the answer is, "Yep!" True stories, aside from being stranger than fiction, are easier to recount (and we do seems to excel at story-telling, don't we...).
 So here we are, celebrating Buzz Word's first year. We would sing "Happy Birthday" but ASCAP owns the rights to that famous tune and would surely pop us into jail if they got wind of our abuse of it. (The American Society of Composers, Artists, and Performers equates the words 'use' and 'abuse')
 But rather than wallow in such self-serving mush, and having (probably) wasted another 2 pages of 1 1/2 spaced typewritten prose, and undoubtedly driving our eternally patient editor nuts yet again (yay Tim!), we choose to close by sharing with you a 'thank you note' that we got this past week.
 It's true, unedited, and unsigned (although' it is initialed) and is the best birthday present Buzz Words could have ever received. As follows:
 "Dear Baristas: I am an 80 year old terminally ill cancer patient
 doing my best to stay alive one more day and I must tell you
 I look forward to your column every weekend in the Pall-Times.
 It really keeps me going and I thought you should know."

 42, indeed...