K-Squared Ramblings

Eat here—we have no taste!

I’m not sure what annoys me more about this ad: the fact that the joke is tasteless (which is an oddly appropriate phrase, considering it’s about food), or the fact that it’s equating something they serve (the mustard) with urine.

“Come here, our mustard tastes like piss!” Yeah, that’s encouraging.

Spotted on September 10.

Centenarian Sweeps

I’ve been frequenting a couple of nearby smoothie shops this summer, including Jamba Juice. Lately they’ve got an interesting contest:

OK, it’s a sweepstakes promoting a book on “Hundreds of ways to live to be 100,” but the way the promo is phrased makes me think of a different kind of contest entirely. I mean, it seems pretty clear who wins: anyone who enters, then lives to be 100, wins.

So what do you give the lucky 100-year-olds as prizes? A lifetime supply of smoothies?

Drazi Drinks

Last week, after going out to see Superman Returns, we wandered over to Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. I ordered the new honeydew ice blended drink. Katie ordered the pomegranate-blueberry drink. When we picked them up from the counter, though, the combination struck us both as funny:

Yes, they were green and purple.

Only in Vegas

You know the routine. We can’t pass up a bizarre image without taking a photo and posting some sort of comment. Not even on vacations.

The drive to Las Vegas from southern California is simple: make your way to the 15, head north, and keep going until you get blinded by the neon. The ⅔ mark is Baker, CA, a small strip of restaurants, stores and gas stations in the middle of the desert, famous for the Bun Boy and the world’s tallest thermometer. Baker has something new: Alien Fresh Jerky.

We were staying at the South Coast Hotel and Casino, the latest megasino to open, which is a bit off the strip. At first I was a bit worried about finding the right exit. As it turns out, it’s the first giant hotel you’ll see as you approach Las Vegas from the south…about two miles before you actually have a chance to get off the freeway! (They have a free shuttle to the strip, though that had its own share of problems.) They put us in a room on the 24th floor, which had a great view of suburban South Las Vegas. Read the rest of this entry »

Chocolate Mint

After our trip to the nursery this weekend, Katie started seriously looking at our existing plants. We have a mint plant that got so pot-bound it grew down, through the drainage holes at the base of the pot, and back up the outside of the pot. She decided to make cuttings out of those bits… but what to put them in?

Well, she’d just finished off a container of baking cocoa…

Cheese!

This just looks like something out of a Wallace and Gromit movie. I mean, seriously. “Cheese Information Center?” “The Ultimate Cheese Guide?”

(Found at an Albertson’s grocery store.)

You know you need coffee when…

• You pour yourself orange juice, then very carefully put the carton back…in the cupboard.
• You walk into the lunch room for coffee, but forget to bring your mug.
• You momentarily forget how to make coffee.
• You set up the coffee maker, but leave out a critical step like positioning the coffee pot.
• You get the coffee, then forget to drink it.
• You pour yourself a bowl of Wheat Thins.
• You try to slice fruit into your cereal, but you do it over the sink instead of your bowl.
• You pour yourself coffee, then immediately wash your mug and head for work.

Feel free to add to the list in the comments!

Coffee rings caused by capillary action?

I was preparing my latest favorite work-suitable drink a few minutes ago, and a drop of tea spilled over the side of the mug and ran down to the base. Naturally it immediately spread around the entire base, forming a ring on the desk. It was easily wiped up, but then I thought—why does it always spread around the entire base to form that unmistakable coffee ring?

It occurred to me that it might just be capillary action with the liquid flowing along the V-shaped channel formed by the table and the edge of the mug. Some googling did turn up the fact that ring-shaped coffee stains from single drops are caused by capillary flow: as the drop evaporates, it draws water from the inside.

But the instant ring from the mug? Either it’s something else, or it’s so obvious no one has throught it worth writing about.

Edit: *sigh* Read first, then post. I was just reminded that capillary action specifically refers to fluid moving against gravity. Any other thoughts?

Moroccan Mint Mocha

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf has a drink they call a Moroccan Mint Latte. It’s a tea latte with chocolate. You can get a fairly good approximation by making hot chocolate using mint tea instead of hot water. Katie suggested Bigelow Plantation Mint (after I mentioned that I’d tried it with Stash Moroccan Mint), which seems to work well.

Update: I forgot to mention the key difference between the two varieties of tea that I tried. Black tea works better with chocoloate than green tea.

Chains of Coffee

We have four coffee-house chains in the area, in addition to local places.

My favorite is Diedrich Coffee, with a couple dozen locations in Orange County, two each in LA and San Diego… and three each in Houston and Denver. (In the last few months, Diedrich has started selling T-shirts that say, “Venti, Schmenti.”)

Then there’s Kelly’s Coffee and Fudge Factory, which had about five locations the last time I checked but now has about thirty scattered around Southern California with one more in Lake Havasu… and according to their website, they’re opening one in Riyadh. Yes, Riyadh.

And then there are the international chains. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is all over the American Southwest and Southeast Asia. Starbucks, of course, is everywhere.

At one point we had all four chains in one mall. The first phase of the Irvine Spectrum had a Diedrich Coffee attached to the Barnes & Noble, before the bookstore hooked up with Starbucks. The second phase added a Coffee Bean. The third phase added a Kelly’s, and the Barnes & Noble moved to the new section… and added a Starbucks coffee bar inside. Unfortunately the Diedrich’s was off in a corner, and without the bookstore to bring people in, it eventually closed.

Edit: I can’t believe I forgot these, but if you really look for them, you can find Peet’s and Seattle’s Best. Neither has many stores in the area, though.

Chaos in a Bag

At the market today, we discovered that you can buy a bag of Chaos. Not only that, but you can buy a bag of wheat-free Chaos.

In actuality it’s a brand of chips from the makers of Pirate’s Booty, but the name reminded us both of a time we and a bunch of friends started coming up with lists of product names based on abstract concepts. It started with a pun, “Diet Spite,” and eventually filled an entire sheet of paper. I think Jason ended up with the sheet, and may even have HTMLized it, but from there it fades into legend.

Useful warning labels

Forget “Coffee is Hot!” and its variations. What they really need is a warning on iced blended drinks that anything larger than about 12 ounces may separate and require frequent re-mixing unless drunk rapidly. And those are the ones that are mixed well. Let us not speak of the ones you get at the café downstairs from the office, or at rush hour when everyone else in town wants a Frappucino NOW and the baristas are just trying to get through with the blenders as fast as they can. You know, the ones that end up like a coffee-flavored snow cone with a straw.

For some reason, coffee just doesn’t seem to blend with ice as well as fruit does.

Last of the Lazy Lizard

While cleaning the apartment this weekend, we found a long-forgotten bag of “Lazy Lizard” Mozilla Coffee. RJ Tarpley’s, the company which sold it (and donated a percentage of profits to the Mozilla Foundation) disappeared last summer. By September, I couldn’t even find a whois record. The domain name has since been picked up by a link farm.

It was decent coffee, and it helped support some good software. And I got a nifty mug while they were still in business. There was maybe half a pound left, but 12-month-old decaf coffee just isn’t fit to drink anymore, so instead of brewing one last pot in salute, we tossed what was left.

Zucchini Spam!

A recipe for zucchini loaf showed up in one of the spamtraps over the weekend. It was one of the few that used to be real accounts, so I first thought it was someone’s long-lost friend who had a 4-year-old email address, but I scrolled down to the bottom and there was an unsubscribe link. Possibly some recipe mailing list… but one that hasn’t sent any mail for several years? Add in the fact that the message triggered Razor and the unsubscribe link hit the Outblaze SURBL list, and it’s beginning to look more like spam…but why would a spammer just send out a recipe?

Anyway, there’s just something about the phrase, “The Zucchini Loaf recipe is not for me” that I find amusing.

Random Links

AKA stuff I wanted to write about earlier this week but need to just slam out while they’re still topical.

• Judge slams SCO’s lack of evidence against IBM. Also Groklaw’s take. After all the wild claims they’ve made without providing evidence, it’s nice to see even the judge is getting sick of it.
• Coke may try out coffee cola - Yeah, it’s a month old, but it’s news to me. (Incidentally, I hate CNN’s practice of deleting stories from their website. That’s where I read about this earlier this week, and I had to go hunting for an article that was still up.) [Note: I've had to track down a third copy of the article.]
• MP3tunes.com shuns DRM - former MP3.com founder starts a new legal download service, and sticks with unencumbered MP3s instead of messing around with ultimately-flawed digital rights management. I’m reminded of Cory Doctorow’s famous talk on why DRM is bad for everyone.
• Beware the unexpected attack vector - Your enemy may not come at you from the direction you expect. Set up sentries around the beach, they’ll get you through the ocean. Set up a firewall, they’ll get you through web browsers. It’s mainly about computer/network security, but it has an interesting story explaining why there’s only one major newspaper in Los Angeles.
• CSS Zen Garden parody: Geocities 1996 - I’ve been meaning to post a link to this for over a month. It’s fully valid code, and manages to bring back the worst of 1990s web design.