Coffee and Provocation

This is my Starbucks card.  It's just like cash, but less useful.

Drinking With Teddy Roosevelt:
Teddy Roosevelt consumed about a gallon of coffee a day.

Tampons in Your Survival Kit?
Your survival during the coming Zombie Apocalypse may depend on whether you have an adequate supply of tampons on hand.  It turns out tampons make great fire starters, water filtration devices, wound dressing bandages, and can supply emergency string for dead-fall traps, wicks for candles, and cotton for blow-gun darts.  In addition, tampons and packaging can be used as fishing bobbers and dry safes for matches.

Gaddafi's Fall Leads to Locust Outbreak:
The fall of Muammar Gaddafi has led to the rise of desert locusts.  As the country slipped into  turmoil, pest control was and so now croplands in Libya (such as they are) and in other nearby African countries are (supposedly) at risk of destruction by locust swarms says the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

How to Car Camp in a Toyota Prius:
This actually pretty close to genius.  Real genius.  Also fits the Honda Insight.  No poles, cheap, fits in the glove compartment or wheel storage area.  Now we need a version to rock a Ford Explorer. 

What Was HBO Thinking??
From Ken Levine: "'Hemingway & Gelhorn' is so bad that if Hemingway were still alive this would have killed him. It’s hard to believe HBO could miss so badly but this is the HEAVEN’S GATE of cable.... Clive Owens plays Kevin Kline playing Cole Porter playing Ernest Hemingway. And he is Oscar worthy compared to Nicole Kidman’s performance, which wouldn’t get her cast as a walk-on in a high school play. Her take on a hard-bitten, hard drinking, bad-ass journalist Martha Gellhorn was absolutely laughable. Carol Kane would be more believable." Read the rest from a very, very good television sit-com writer (Cheers, Mash, etc.)

Good Books for Free That You Already Paid For:
It used to be called a "library" and we went there for books.  Honest, these things existed once.  Now they may come back since decent public libraries with connections to the software service Overdrive now allow surprisingly easy checkout of "library books" (including eBooks and audiobooks) via your Kindle. Just put in your zip code to see if your local library participates.

Irony Alert!
Raymond Dolin, 39, from West Virginia, who is hitchhiking across the country and writing a memoir called "The Kindness of America," was shot in Montana by a stranger in a drive-by shooting.  In Montana?

Singing with Bach:
Johan Sebastian Bach wrote an opera about a woman who was addicted to coffee.  The Coffee Cantana, aka Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, can be seen and heard here.

Perverted Penguins:
On a 1910–1913 Antarctic expedition, zoologist George Levick bore witness to some of the sexual behaviors of Adélie penguins which included forced sex and necrophilia. The paper he wrote has been hidden away for 100 years and only recently has been been rediscovered.

Gun Rights for 9-11 Hijackers?
The Department of Justice has just given nonimmigrant aliens (tourists, foreign students, guest workers) gun rights they did not have previously.  I imagine that on the far right a lot of heads will explode.  Is this a victory for the Second Amendment, or a notice to Al Queda to put away the box cutters because now they can use MP-25 Ravens?

Drinking With Voltaire:
The French philosopher Voltaire is said to have downed over 50 cups of coffee a day.

Thanks for Calling Local Canine Rescue:
Please press ONE.

We Either Need More Pandemics or More Birth Control:
You probably want to avoid a pandemic, eh?  You would!