Coffee is still rad.

Check out this excellent piece in the New York Times.

It's an article on "Direct Trade" coffee, the method of importation favored by Intelligentsia, Stumptown, and George Howell, and other top-tier coffee roasters.

This process still amazes me -- the coffee buyers from these fairly small businesses travel around the entire world, from Guatemala to Indonesia to Rwanda, doing what it takes to ensure quality product, which often involves stuff like donating bikes to rural African farm workers. It also results in top-tier farmers making far more money for their product than on the coffee commodity market, even for Fair Trade-labeled product.

It seems seldom today that capitalistic interest dovetails so squarely with development and humanitarianism: although this was not always the case, it's refreshing to see things going the right way sometimes.

Man I am such a sucker for coffee. Fuck. I'm going to go drink like eight cups right now.

JESUS VIDEO NEWS

Welcome to the JVN network. First up tonight: I am definitely going to hell.

I have been working on my submission for the soundtrack, and well, here it is.

It's my cover version of a traditional spiritual that I have an album of Lightin' Hopkins singing. Anyway it's a pretty straightforward deal with me signing, no fancy production or techno-dance beat -- I'll save that for the Trent Reznor style single.

And even better, I've actually started editing the thing after I figured out that basically every free option out there is actually worse than windows movie editor.

This is happening people. I mean, it may suck, but whatever.

Extra Rich.

Did you know about this? Clover Stornetta Dairy of Northern California (my personal favorite milk producer, apologies to some other prominent dairies) makes milk with extra fat. Notice that label though: more milkfat than state minimum requirements. This isn't straight off the cow by any means -- this milk is made up of constituent ingredients (milk, non-fat milk, and in this case, cream) like most commercial milk, then blended to the required fat content.

Now, I'm not complaining -- this is obviously the easiest way to do it from a commercial standpoint. But it does kinda destroy the image of a pure, natural ingredient.

This post has been dedicated to Richard J. Seymour.