Posts by Paul Campbell
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I have to disagree - sometimes it happens the other way around - Alf Garnett/Archie Bunker for example
My fave American "let's just use the first year's script of the UK show" was 3's Company in which many of the jokes were because the male character was named "Robin" and people kept assuming he was female - the 'Merkins named him 'Jack' and then were sort of stuck, which resulted in a bunch of mincing and "people keep assuming I'm gay" fudges to try and get around it
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Well any US diner will have a pot there, it's probably been there all day - many US cafes though went through a filter coffee thing about 5 years ago - filter coffee came back - but instead of just pulling the joe off from where it was steaming they would make it to order, they installed little rows of funnels on the counter and would pour a measured amount of the coffee of your choice and let you grab it when it was done - this was particularly common at places that roast their own - it was a bit of a passing fad many of those rows of cones are now gone
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Talking about coffee in Taiwan (there are Starbucks everywhere) - I always wondered about the english name of the coffee place on the street below the supplier I've been visiting a lot recently: "Coffee cake touched"
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Oh – one other thing about coffee and language in California – a lot of places have hispanic people working behind the counter – at my old local the Mexican crew would service a line out the door every morning far faster than any NZ counter I’ve ever seen – one guy taking money, another gets pastries and a third, just one guy, makes coffees – he writes nothing down and has 4-5 orders in progress at once and never forgets – there’s a strange mix of language you often hear people ordering in, a mix of coffee-italian, english and spanish, “two non fat lattes por favor”
There’s also a tradition of busing ones own table, not required, but it’s polite, something that’s hard to do in NZ because there’s nowhere to put the stuff – I keep looking around for a dirty dish basin in the corner somewhere but there’s never one, I still feel like I’m letting the side down when I leave with dishes on the table
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My father was turned on to coffee in the desert during the war - he still cooked it the same way they did in a billy in the desert - it was just the way he liked it - he'd buy beans (almost impossible in Dunedin, there was only one supplier), grind them, throw them in a pot of boiling water, wait a little, then use a little salt to settle the grounds .....
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Oh yeah and you notice I didn't say "barista" - while the name is starting to be used more widely in the US originally it was a term popularised by Starbucks to make their employees look more important or better trained
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I have to stand up for US coffee culture, but not Starbucks, spit
We moved to the SF Bay Area in '84, NZ had almost no coffee culture at all, San Francisco/Berkeley/Oakland had lots of small cafes that made great coffee - great by all your standards ... there's a very old Italian espresso tradition probably coming out of North Beach, passed around by the Beats in the 50s - there were no chains.
Mind you much of the rest of the country had diner swill.
Berkeley had/has Peets, not really a cafe, but a small chain of coffee roasters - I used to bring tens of pounds of Peets dark roasts back to NZ as gifts, some time in the mid to late 90s they stopped being a big deal.
So where did Starbucks come from? well Peets started a Seattle shop, after a year or so the people running it quit and started Starbucks, doing the corporate business school thing with coffee - there's a lot of bad blood between Peets/Starbucks
A few years later Starbucks started to open stores in our neighbourhoods, they'd buy the lease out from under little local cafes, or if the couldn't they'd open across the street trying to shut them down - local people hated it, lots of people still boycott Starbucks (myself included, I've never been into the Dunedin one, though I occasionally use one in an airport).
The other evil thing is that Starbucks has tried to change the language of coffee - in the US people use different words for their coffee from NZ (no one has the 'right' words it's a cultural thing) - I still can't buy what a "double non-fat latte" gets me in the US in NZ - I don't think there are words for it, (there 'double' means 'more' - here 'double' invites a discussion with the person behind the counter about how many shots are already in there) - if I ordered a 'flat white' in the US I'd get a blank stare, same for a 'bowl'.
Anyway Starbucks has tried to change the language of ordering coffee so their customers can't order coffee elsewhere - want a small coffee, you have to order a 'tall', want a really large one order a Vente (TM) - yes they've trademarked the names for some of their coffees - my favourite joke is asking the counter person "Vente, isn't that Italian for 20?", "yes ...", "20 what?" "ounces", "couldn't be, they use metric measurements in Italy, wouldn't it be litres or millilitres?" "um, litres" .... Of course Vente is 20 in Italian and it does mean 20 US fluid ounces - and it's not legal in the US to trademark a number.
So there is great coffee in the US, if you look for that little independent cafe in the right part of town with the great book stores - same basic rules apply, look for the servers with the piercings and tattoos
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Lea: we lived in the Berkeley/Oakland for 20 years - there is 'local' drama on TV - the problem is it's all filmed in LA - there seems to usually be at least one cop show full time (currently Monk, used to be that Cheech/Don Jonson thing, ...) and a sitcom about half the time
Of course they're all filmed in LA sound stages with outdoor scenes occasionally cut with a pic of SF.
What there really isn't is viable local TV except occasionally for public TV (sadly kqed sucks at that with the one wonderfull exception of 'Tales of the City') any non networked station is in for a quick financial demise (just look at CH 4 when it lost its NBC affiation)
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I just love "You’d’ve" as a word, I try and use it whenever I can - probably causes generations of English teachers to cringe, but then also remark "well at least you got the apostrophes right"
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oh that's great - where are the people dressed as bees or clowns
(speaking of which anyone remember that great McPhail&Gadsby faux ad for "the Red Squad Sings" with their hit rendition of "Send in the Clowns")