Coffee porn

I'm in the middle of an intense week to ten days, so there might not be much posting besides food porn like this venti sized coconut mocha frappucino that is half off at Starbucks every day from 3 to 5 from now until May 13.

My busy weeks have me living in and on Starbucks and/or Coffee Bean.

I would also like to not that my iPhone keeps autocorrecting "porn" as "pork."



This succinct email was sent from my iPhone.

...

[UPDATED] Maybe it's supposed to be accents grave and aigu

I guess "chinky eyes" really is becoming a thing:

Last month at a Starbucks Coffee location in Alpharetta, Georgia, two Korean customers -- who are not native English speakers -- discovered that their barista had identified them by drawing "chinky eyes" on their drinks. You know, where they usually write your name? OH NO THEY DIDN'T. Yes, they did.

You cannot tell me those are both just two random squiggles on those cups. I'm told that the customers immediately complained to the store manager, who did not defend the drawings or offer some kind of bullshit explanation, but simply apologized. And that's it. Oh, sorry for the racist way we run our coffee joint.

I guess he's not "angry asian man" for nothing. I would have suggested the pair hold out for free Starbucks vouchers — that's what I got when Starbucks gave me the worst bout of food poisoning ever after they kept using the milk in their refrigerator in spite of a four-hour blackout that had hit the place.

Anyway, along with Chick-Fil-A, this seems to be an Asian-mocking trend, started by Miley Cyrus (I know that's not true; please don't send me letters), so I'm going to suggest to all who are on the fence about whether or not this is offensive, that they avoid the following emoticons.

` ´ 

We've already established that this is a no-no. 

OO

If you work at a Starbucks in Seoul and this is 

how you wish to identify your White customer, please stop.

O O

   >

No, that's even worse.

O O

oo

Don't make fun of people with big noses or flaring nostrils.

oo

´ `

Don't make fun of people with Pancho Villa mustaches. 

o

OO

/ || \

/ \

Identifying big-boobed women is also a no-no.

I shall stop now. The humor here is starting to exhibit diminishing returns. Plus, it's very, very late here. 

UPDATE:
I finally realized why the cups looked so familiar: With the rounded "heads" formed by the lid and the "chinky eyes" accents grave et aigu, they're supposed to be the mushrooms from Fantasia! And that's not racist at all.

UPDATE 2 (February 15):
It took him nearly a week, but The Marmot's Hole (the K-blog of record™) finally put something up on this. (I had thought linking to TMH in my own post might have gotten his attention; also, someone in his own comment section mentioned it, I think.) The Marmot is a busy man.

UPDATE 3 (February 19):
OMG! It looks like some Starbucks employees really are doing the "big nose" thing on their cups (the third icon in my list above, after 코쟁이 and its variants, a derogatory indicator in Korea for foreigners, especially White people).

Courtesy of hardyandtiny at The Marmot's Hole, I give you "beady-eyed big nose":

Of course, that "nose" could just be a big "L." Does Starbucks sell anything that begins with "L"?

... 

Starbucks plans a double shot

[source]

Still short of their goal of having a franchise in every South Korean living room, Starbucks has announced plans to nearly double its presence in the Republic over the next five years. If all goes as planned, we will have 700 shops in South Korea by 2016, up from the current 370.

At the same time, they're planning to triple their presence in China. Just great. The last thing we need is Chinese Netizens who are angry and suffering from insomnia.

...

Looks like they were serious

And it looks like I was wrong about Starbucks changing their logo. They really went ahead and did it, even though I thought this story was just a way to drum up free publicity.

And not just the mugs but the paper cups, too. This is apparently their midlife crisis response to turning forty.

In this picture, however, you can still see an old-logo holdover in the bag (which contained the free "petite" they are offering Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons this week.

The coffee, by the way, still tastes the same.

Starbucks drops outer circle from logo

Story here.

Will Starpreya follow suit?

Enjoying Starbucks tax day special in Kailua

Starbucks is giving out free Pike Place Roast to anyone who brings in a reusable container. So after a day of visiting Byodo-in Temple (a "Lost" location) and then kayaking to a bird sanctuary off Lanikai, we're warming up with a free cup of coffee.

Yeah, it actually gets chilly here when the wind kicks up. Now to find an academic reference for Korea's healthcare scheme being a way to appease leftist workers.

Google Moon

Phht. Figures.

And speaking of travel to the Moon...

(C = Starbucks?!)

Remember when green tea just came as green tea?

I'm sitting at Starbuck's trying to get some work done, but the procrastination gene that runs dominant in my brood has taken over yet again. I've spent half the morning installing Firefox on my 4.5-year-old Mac because Safari has permanently crapped out. I have been using Microsoft Explorer, which is like an octogenarian driving through Leisure World in a 1982 Oldsmobile: it's going mind-numbingly slow when it's not crashing.

One of the staff members (excuse me—baristas, reputedly named for the Barism separatists of Bilbao who liked to drink a macchiato venti before attacking the federales) came up and gave me a sample of green tea latte. Some may find it terribly weird, but I have never tried this latest rendition of the bitter but therapeutic nectar of unfermented dried tea leaves.

I am old school when it comes to green tea. I love the stuff, but it is meant to be a bitter brew, sipped on a cold day (I will drink iced green tea in the summer, however, my one concession to green tea's recent faddishness). In matters like these, I am a purist.

Green tea is not meant, in my opinion (which is usually right), to be adulterated with sugar, milk, cream, or anything other than water. On my list of green tea heresy are green tea ice cream, green tea powder over pastries, green tea crackers, and of course, green tea latte.

My father, usually dinosauric in his preferences, absolutely loves green tea ice cream. So much so that when we were in Italia a little over a year ago (where I saw the top of the Pope's head), he made me ask each and every gelato vendor we saw—from Roma, Viterbo, pretty much everywhere in Lazio, Napoli, Pisa, Firenze, and Venezia—if they had green tea ice cream, er, gelato.

Mind you, I don't actually speak Italian, but for one month, I did a very good job of faking it, thanks to three hours of reading a "Speak Italian in Just Three Hours" guide and my trusty Lonely Planet Italian Phrasebook. Not able to find the phrase "green tea" in my phrasebook or dictionary, I just told the gelateria managers: "We're from America and we've come all the way to your gastronomically rapturous country so that we could consume foods we can easily find in a supermarket back home. Do you have any ice cream with the flavor [pause, then switch to English] green tea?"

Incidentally, this was also the way I ordered butter for my mother, who could not get over the fact that Italians did not always eat the yellowish emulsion of salt and butterfat with the copious amounts of bread they consume. Eventually, I just truncated my request to, "We're from America. Do you have any butter?"

Prior to today, I have in fact tried green tea ice cream. My father, a generous sort with food who doesn't mind sharing things that have touched other people's mouths, had offered me a taste of his, which I managed to sample before he himself took a bite (my mother's a nurse and she has made me fearful of sharing food even with myself). I wasn't a big fan. I tried a green tea shake, but it was only marginally better.

So about a half hour ago, I sipped my first green tea latte. And while I didn't spit it out as the Baptist Lord supposedly does with lukewarm Christians, all I can say is "meh" (a Simpsonian utterance akin to 별로).

You'd think my affinity for coffee in all its lacteous varieties would have prepared me for a love of green tea latte, but for some reason it doesn't work that way. To me, coffee's bitterness is a distraction from its aroma and taste, but with green tea, the bitterness is an enhancement to the purifying, salutary experience. It shouldn't be masked with sucrose and dairy products. Also, I shouldn't have to pop another lactase pill just to drink green tea.

I should also add that the surface of an open cup of green tea latte looks like a layer of pond scum. The kind of pond scum you might find if someone hadn't chlorinate the swimming pool properly [if someone would recommend a good digital camera to buy, I'd take a picture of this to show you what I mean].