Two Odd Bits

I ended up having lunch earlier this week at Aroma, the hip new cafe downtown. This is the place I have mentioned once before as serving powdered chai but charging real chai prices. The food's good though and they have other non-coffee drinks on the menu. I forgot to bring reading material and the only thing handy was the Wall Street Journal, which interests me less than if Jehovah's Witnesses had left a Watchtower behind. A few glances at the Journal was all I could muster, leaving me plenty of time to think while waiting on my curry chicken salad wrap. I eventually struck upon this question: Do the artsy girls behind the counter exist only because there are coffee houses to employ them? If no such jobs were available, would they skip the piercings and emo glasses and just get a straight job in an office somewhere? I know none of them consciously decide, as the tattoo man is finishing the little butterfly on the small of their back, that if they want to support their alternative lifestyle they better learn how to make expresso. But it seems to me that these hip coffee houses enable them to live their lives that way. If suddenly everyone stopped drinking half-caf mocha enchirritos or whatever then these ladies would probably have to get a conservative haircut and buy some non-capri pants. Conclusion: we should all support the cafe industry more. Free-spirited hippy chicks throughout the nation are counting on us!

I was on Amazon.com checking out vacuum cleaners (ours just died) when I noticed a particular Hoover I was examining had two reviews: a "hey, it works!" five star seal of approval and a vicious one star panning. I usually take bad reviews much more seriously than ringing endorsements, so I decided to research this guy a little bit more via Amazon's handy "click here to see other reviews by this jimbo" link. First off, this guy had one bad hoover and decided to cut and paste his diatribe into the review section of every Hoover model sold by Amazon. His beef wasn't even with the vacuum I was looking to buy! Second, he gave Mein Kampf five goddamn stars. Jaysus. You can't give a book written by Adolf Fucking Hitler five stars and expect to be taken seriously. I don't care if it's the new goldleaf annotated complete Mein Kampf for the serious historical researcher. I don't care if this particular edition comes with a wish-granting genie inside. Hell, I may just start telling my friends to buy Hoover vacuum cleaners because Nazi sympathizers don't like 'em. That's a completely unfair assessment of this guy but you know what? I reserve the right to be completely unfair when motherfucking Nazis are involved.