Kopi Luwak, for those of you who don’t know, is a very rare kind of coffee. The luwak, also called a palm civet, is an animal found only in certain Indonesian islands. Apparently, ripe coffee cherries are part of their usual diet, and when their digestive systems are done with the cherry, the beans are deposited within their feces. There are lively discussions about what the digestive enzymes may or may not do to the quality of the beans, but so far as I’m concerned, those discussions can’t get around the fact that some poor slobs have to collect poop to “harvest” the coffee.
So, the coffee gets separated from the fecal matter (another process I’d rather not think about), and when roasted ground, and brewed, the coffee is supposed to be the best-tasting coffee you’d ever want to taste. It’s very highly sought-after, and very expensive. If you go to the website shown in the picture, you’ll find that you can mail-order a pound for $85.99!!!! Wikipedia has a short article on it, which notes that one cafe in Australia sells one cup of this stuff for A$50.00!
That’s a heck of a lot of money for crappy coffee, if you ask me.
All that aside, the question I have to ask is this: If you sold coffee that expensive, would you be driving a Ford Escape? If you’ve got enough ego to push over-the-top gourmet coffee, with all the snobbery and cooler-than-thou thereto appertaining, wouldn’t it take at least a Hummer H3 to hold said ego?
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Another episode: I was driving on the freeway today, and got stuck behind someone in the slow lane who was taking “slow lane” entirely too literally. When I was finally able to get around them, I peeked over at the driver (because that’s what we DO in these situations, isn’t it?), and was almost overcome by a mass of stereotypes: The driver had all of the following clichés going:
1) Asian
2) Female
3) Tiny person driving a big SUV
4) Talking on a cell phone held up to her ear
5) Punctuating her conversation with her “free” hand -- i.e. the one that should have been glued onto the wheel.
Confronted with such a glut of stereotypes, I had only one choice: I had to shout “GET OFF THE ROAD” in my best over-caffeinated angry-white-boy voice. I tried to resist, but there was apparently too much of a concentration of tired cliches in that area, and holding back could have caused a rift in the time-space continuum.
Who am I to mess with that?
