Quick Roundup 277

Not One to Monkey Around

En route to a different point, Andrew Dalton touches on one I've made here before, but with greater word economy and some laughs thrown into the bargain.

No Voice Mail from the Big Guy

Commenting on a sign in front of a Baptist Church that reads, "YOU'LL NEVER GET VOICEMAIL WHEN YOU CALL GOD," Johnny Virgil -- who set up God's voice mail a while back -- says the following:

God's kinda old-school, though, and by that I mean He isn't very technical. Put it this way - his VCR has been blinking 12:00:00 since 1975. Yeah. It's Betamax. I was over there last week and we watched Spiderman 5. Where he got that on beta I'll never know. The small miracles amuse him.

The problem with the voice mail thing is that it only rings 4 times before going to VM, so He always turns it off when he's going to just be hanging around. Unfortunately, he's not great at remembering to turn it back on when He goes out, so I can see how the church people may have been under the above impression. Seriously, most of the time when you call, it just rings off the hook.

Read it all. It's hilarious! (HT: Adrian Hester)

Ron Rosenbaum: Stanley Fish Does Starbucks

It's a little old, but I remember coming across it and intending to blog it, only -- with Google as my witness -- not to do so. In any event, this article is a classic:

It seems that professor Fish is a real man of the people who has been getting his coffee served to him amidst the regular folk for years, at the kind of place where you could order your coffee and cheese Danish, and "twenty seconds later, tops, they arrived, just as you were settling into the sports page."

You can tell he's a down-to-the-earth guy, not some pointy-headed intellectual, because he uses phrases like "twenty seconds later, tops" and reads "the sports page."

But our professor seems to think he has encountered a brand-new cultural phenomenon: coffee places that are disturbingly different from the lunch counters of yesteryear.

Well, I did a little Googling, and it turns out he's right! There are hosts of these coffee chain stores, including one with the improbable name Starbucks, infiltrating our cities. I don't understand why the Times' cutting-edge "Styles" section hasn't done something on this before. Wake up and smell the coffee, "Styles" section editors!

Enjoy! (HT: Adrian Hester)

Positively!

There's a roundup of some positive blog posts over at Mike's Eyes. Mike N kicks off with a link to a Joseph Kellard piece about a 79-year-old businessman that starts off with a bang in the form of this priceless one-liner: "They have a cure for old age now[:] Die young." I haven't gotten to read these posts yet, but am looking forward to it.

And speaking of positive, commenter Dismuke notes that even Hugo Chavez is good for something!

-- CAV