I cannot believe that people drink weaselshit. I cannot believe it.

I share this story with you, my friends, so that you can make a little money. Because I care about you and your pocket change. It works like this: tell someone that there is coffee made from weaselshit and that people drink it as a delicacy. When they do not believe you, which more than likely they will not, bet them money. Then share with them the following (verifiable) information:

Kopi (the Indonesian word for coffee) Luwak comes from the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi (formerly Celebes), which are part of the Indonesian Archepelago's 13,677 islands (only 6,000 of which are inhabited). But it's not strictly the exotic location that makes these beans worth their weight in silver. It's how they're "processed."

On these Indonesian islands, there's a small marsupial called the paradoxurus, a tree-dwelling animal that is part of the sibet family. Long regarded by the natives as pests, they climb among the coffee trees eating only the ripest, reddest coffee cherries. Who knows who first thought of it, or how or why, but what these animals eat they must also digest and eventually excrete. Some brazen or desparate -- or simply lazy -- local gathered the beans, which come through the digestion process fairly intact, still wrapped in layers of the cherries' mucilage. The enzymes in the animals' stomachs, though, appear to add something unique to the coffee's flavor through fermentation.

Mountanos says, "It's the most complex coffee I've ever tasted," attributing the unusual flavors to the natural fermentation the coffee beans undergo in the paradoxurus' digestive system. The stomach acids and enzymes are very different from fermenting beans in water. Mountanos says, "It has a little of everything pleasurable in all coffees: earthy, musty tone, the heaviest bodied I've ever tasted. It's almost syrupy, and the aroma is very unique." While it won't be turning up in every neighborhood cafe any day soon, Mountanos reports that Starbucks bought it for cuppings within the company.


Best money-making scheme since televangelism.

I lost $20 bucks last night.

May 10, 2004 -The remains of who was thought to be the Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarch are instead those of two different people, DNA tests have confirmed.

Analysis of a tooth and one of the ribs exhumed from Petrarch's tomb in Arquá Petrarca, the village near Padua where the poet died in 1374, showed that they belonged to a man and a woman.

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Laura? E possibile?

I caught a small section of a discussion on NPR this morning about blogging. Turns out there are good blogs and bad blogs -- the good ones post links to the world, offer well conceived op-ed articles re: said links, and stay away, far away, from discussions of one's PhD dissertation and/or daily trip to the grocery store. I realized that I'm the proud owner of a bad blog. A blog so full of navel gazing that at times it takes one into the belly of the beast, a blog so unaware of an audience beyond the author and the author's intimates that its status as "public" material is almost laughable.

But I'm okay with that. And as a weird matter of fact, when I visit the good blogs, the blogs of note with more links than text, I find myself wanting to read about someone's favorite movie or recent trip to the grocery store, so long as it includes the sale price for bumblebee tuna fish and/or a side note about the metronome used in the bedroom scene.

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Note: I don't eat tuna fish but my grandmother did, and always knew when it was on sale.

Note: Bedroom scene sounds a little steamy. Reference taken from a conversation with sunshine about Morgan Freeman sleeping with a metronome, and how commonly real people lack these fun, artistic little quirks.

Note: Umbilicus. I wonder if the phrase navel gazing comes from Freud at all...

Note: Nope: OED: 1856 R. A. VAUGHAN Hours with Mystics I. VI. vii. 300 "They call these devotees *Navel-contemplators"