Starbucks

So I got a coffee in Starbucks the other day. Or ThreeBucks as they should call it, well ThreeBucksTwenty is what my coffee cost. Not the same ring to it though I suppose. It's not that I made a huge conscious decision to avoid it before but the thing is I pass it every week. Early in the morning on a Saturday. And I need a coffee but I don't go there as it's ten minutes walk to where I'm going. And I'm usually carrying a computer (why don't laptops weigh as much as lapdogs? In fact spidery little legs for self locomotion and fur would make nice additions to laptop design. They could sort of purr maybe during use. Anyway.) so I don't bother. But, there is no coffee shop between College Green, past the copshop on Pearce Street, down past Westland Row to the far end of Pearce St. Chef shops, kitchen gear, yeast retailers, fundaligionist creeepy fucked up fambly friendly young earth creationist Christian Worship Centres yes. But no coffee shops. I think to myself is this some kind of 21st century version of Joyce's game 'can you get from a to b in Dublin (in his mind, in Zurich or Trieste) without passing a pub (and no doubt a bracing restorative imaginary glass of wine)' except now it's a coffee shop. And you'd be doing it on google earth / maps.

Does absolutely everything have to have a web 2.0 interface now?

Needless to say we had the 'hilarious' I'm too stupid to talk to them thing. 'Large black coffee to take away please'. Fool! 'What kind?', 'oh you know, normal, black, americano, whatever you call it', 'normal or Americano?''Americano''With milk?' 'no black' 'large whateveryadadyadaddaa no room to go'. And there was no room in this giant litre vat they served me. So I spilt a bunch on the way to where I was going, soaking my hand in scalding coffee and soaking the cardboard sleeve that should keep your hand from getting too hot when holding it and the vat, when half full, toppled over and spread an oilslick a metre square on the carpet.
I read about WalMart's gallon jars of pickles (who wans a gallon of pickles?) now I saw it in action.

I'll make my own in future. It's at least as good, costs pence, isn't a two litre tub, and won't go all over the place.

Vive la revolution... or at least we'll have a strike

Just came back from over a week in France, in Toulouse and Carcassonne. Had a great time, bought a load of records, went to a match with my da for his seventieth birthday and it was great, came home later than expected. I love France, and in general, I love the French people. Though the civil service there seem to get their only thrill in their stunted, joyless, impotent lives by being arseholes. Off work they're probably fine.

I was sitting in Carcassone castle enjoying the sun and reading 'House of Leaves' by Mark Danielewski (extraordinary book - David Foster Wallace's 'infinite jest' is the major reference that comes to mind. But without the smug annoying self satisfied onanistic backslapping on its own cleverness and with terrifying voids of horror and emotional damage)and I met some nice Americans while I was having a glass of wine. They insisted on buying me a glass - no other nationality would have in that circumstance, Americans are actually, genuinely much nicer than Europeans. One thing that struck me as odd was that they were genuinely annoyed by French people going on strike. I was kind of 'why do you care? I mean it doesn't hurt your economy...' Which is kind of my attitude to incomprehensible things that you can't change and don't really effect you. I often find it funny when people in Europe get heated about US domestic issues. It's not like you can vote. Anyway I was saying that they had a revolution so that they could do this and if they were the same as everyone else why would people come to France? We were sitting, as I said, in a beautiful huge castellated medieval city. If it was in Ireland every tourist image of the country would have it. But the more I thought about that issue the more the revolution came into my head. Revolution often fills my head. When I was in school I remember writing a parody of Hopkins called 'that nature is a Hegelian dialectic and of the comfort of the revolution'... Anyway. I think the reporting of the current French strikes and protests against the law to 'liberalise' the youth employment market misses the point. The protestors are the children of petit bourgeois, functionnaires. The French revolution was a petit bourgeois revolution. It was unnecessary in England as merchants ran the country rather than aristocrats. The US revolution, by contrast, was a revolution of aristocrats and oligarchs avoiding paying tax to the English. As a result France is run by and for the petit bourgeois: the US is run by and for the ultra-rich who don't pay tax. Where does that leave us? I've said before that we took the Canadian option when we were run by our local version of the US revolutionaries: rich landgrabbing Anglos that didn't want to pay tax to England. And then we had a revolution. Or did we?