Tag Archives: history

Things I Learned This Week

Among the things I learned this week:
* V/A – Ruff Ryders, Volume 1 is an album that has held up surprisingly well. Let’s be careful and not confuse me for a Ruff Ryder fan. (Courtesy: Ruff Ryders)

* Painting a house is even worse than I expected, but I know it will be worth it in the end. (Courtesy: Personal experience)

* Popping one’s collar was the original style for polo shirts. (Courtesy: Valet.)

* “Retirement job” is a common phrase–Google has about 500k results–that people speak without hesitation. Its existence is both surprising and a reflection of the economy and people’s engagement with the economy. (Courtesy: CF)

The Last Coffee Crisis

Coffee futures continue to rise without an end in sight, meaning we are due for our own coffee crisis (my local coffeeshop has already stopped selling two origins). Not among the many coffee crises of the past about which I did know, I just learned of one in East Germany during the late 1970s. From the decade-old-Wikipedia entry on the history of East Germany:

Due to the strong German tradition of drinking coffee, coffee imports were one of the most important for consumers. A massive rise in coffee prices in 1976/77 led to a quadrupling of the annual costs of importing coffee compared to 1972-75. This caused severe financial problems for the GDR, which perennially lacked hard currency.

As a result, in the summer of 1977 the Politburo withdrew most cheaper brands of coffee from sale, limited use in restaurants, and effectively withdrew its provision in public offices and state enterprises. In addition, an infamous new type of coffee was introduced, Mischkaffee (mixed coffee), which was 51% coffee and 49% a range of filler including chicory, rye, and sugar beet.

Unsurprisingly, the new coffee was generally detested for its awful taste, and the whole episode is informally known as the “coffee crisis”. The crisis passed after 1978 as world coffee prices began to fall again, as well as increased supply through an agreement between the GDR and Vietnam – the latter becoming one of the world’s largest coffee producers in the 1990s. However, the episode vividly illustrated the structural economic and financial problems of the GDR.

You can find more information in footnote 17 on page 15 of Hans-Werner Hess’ Collapse of a Closed Society: The End of East Germany. I have not found more solid sources or information in my quick searches thus far.

Kyoto/Japanese/Cold Slow Drip Coffee and Internet Fail

The Internet has failed me. And I’m increasingly cynical about the state of journalism and, more importantly, people’s ability to follow-through on curiosity. But then I remember Mos Def and the state of hip hop:

Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
“Yo Mos, what’s gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?”
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, “You know what’s gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever’s happening with us”
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it’s some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople
We (are) Hip-Hop
Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin
So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is goin
ask yourself.. where am I goin? How am I doin?
Til you get a clear idea
So.. if Hip-Hop is about the people
and the.. Hip-Hop won’t get better until the people get better
then how do people get better? (Hmmmm…)

Therefore, in my hunt for some real information about Kyoto Slow-Drip Coffee Makers (aka Japanese Slow-Drip Coffee Makers, aka Cold Slow-Drip Coffee Makers), I have to stop criticizing everyone else’s sloppy reporting that focuses on where these devices are and not how these devices are constructed. Instead, I need to work on researching blueprints to build one.

The first step, though, is that if I want the coffee reporting to get better, and the coffee reporting won’t get better until the people get better, then how do we get the people better? Well, I’m going to jumpstart things by asking if any of you have experience with these devices and insight into how they work and how I can build one. That’s step one.

Step two is that I’m going to harass coffeeshops.

Stay tuned…and post a comment if you know something!

p.s. Thanks to ZS for exposing me to this awesomeness.