{"id":211,"date":"2008-02-24T06:41:14","date_gmt":"2008-02-24T13:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/wordpress\/?p=211"},"modified":"2014-01-06T07:04:45","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T14:04:45","slug":"laws-of-coffee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"Laws of Coffee"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\">If you know me at all, you already realize that I don&#8217;t take kindly to people who refer to their 600-calorie mutant milkshakes as &#8220;coffee.&#8221; But last Thursday in Baton Rouge, my disdain for these newfangled whatever-accinos soared to new heights.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>I stopped at what looked to be a respectable establishment in hopes of sating my coffee addiction (Charley&#8217;s Coffee on Coursey Blvd &#8211; throw a rock if you ever pass by). There were lots of fish tanks and all of the customers looked happy and communal and intelligent. So far so good. But when I ordered my coffee, the self-styled &#8220;barista&#8221; informed me that she no longer brewed &#8220;drip&#8221; coffee, that everything nowadays was blended or mixed and that the best she could do was an Americano (two shots of espresso diluted with some hot water) and that I should try new things.<\/p>\n<p>If that little anecdote didn&#8217;t register with you, permit me to summarize: last Thursday, in Baton Rouge, I walked into a coffee shop that didn&#8217;t serve coffee.<\/p>\n<p>Well, that was the last straw. I&#8217;m laying down some rules.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>There is nothing American about an Americano.<\/li>\n<li>In America, &#8220;barista&#8221; is not a word. You&#8217;re a cashier, and you&#8217;re paid by the hour. Don&#8217;t you forget it.<\/li>\n<li>If the name of your drink order has more than three vowels in it, it&#8217;s not coffee, and you are not fit to reproduce.<\/li>\n<li>If you have testicles, you will order a single black coffee and move on.<\/li>\n<li>If you do not have testicles, you will order a single black coffee. You may then proceed to the condiments table, where you you won&#8217;t be slowing down the long line of people trying to get their fix. There you may corrupt your coffee to your heart&#8217;s content.<\/li>\n<li>Tea is neither coffee nor American, and has no place in this country. There was a war fought over this. You may remember it.. the American Revolution?<\/li>\n<li>Europeans: that powdery black Nescafe shit that you guys guzzle like mineral water isn&#8217;t coffee. As far as I&#8217;m concerned, it isn&#8217;t even edible. I can&#8217;t stress this enough. You&#8217;re not astronauts. You don&#8217;t even have a space program. So there&#8217;s no reason you should be drinking freeze-dried anything.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Granted, the military lacks the resources to enforce the aforementioned laws on a wide scale. But rest assured: if you&#8217;re ever in a New Orleans coffee shop and you experience a sudden, intense pain in the back of your head, that&#8217;d be my foot.<\/p>\n<p>Consider yourself warned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you know me at all, you already realize that I don&#8217;t take kindly to people who refer to their 600-calorie mutant milkshakes as &#8220;coffee.&#8221; But last Thursday in Baton Rouge, my disdain for these newfangled whatever-accinos soared to new heights. I stopped at what looked to be a respectable establishment in hopes of sating [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":221,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}