Here were the first two things I was aware of when I woke up this morning:
1. A dream I’d just had about my friend Mike who, in an effort to drum up publicity for a project he’s working on, made a long-form travel documentary in which he visited, among others, Ted Nugent and Mavis Staples. I think it was supposed to divine the intuitive from non-intuitive stories like some Malcolm Gladwell book or something. It also seemed like a really expensive, if cool, way to garner publicity.
2. Weasel poop coffee exists and people drink it.

So, it’s been a weird morning.

Five-star hotels in Honk Kong, have – up until recently – served coffee from berries that have been eaten, partially digested then excreted by animals called civets, which resemble weasels. The coffee beans themselves are not fully digested by the civets, but their digestive juices apparently give the beans a “smooth, chocolatey, earth flavor” (I have seen Caddyshack and I am pretty sure that is not “chocolate” but OK.)

According to a New York Times story from 2010 – people have been drinking weasely-ass coffee for three years and I am just now finding this out?!?!?! – this coffee sells for several hundred dollars per pound because some people have too much money and the only way they can possibly spend it all is to drink weasel poop coffee. (Oh and apparently fake weasel poop coffee is a problem, too.)

These same hotels now say they will stop serving the coffee because of the cruel and inhumane way the animals are treated. Which, great. Let the civets run free, no longer to be trapped in cages, their poop harvested for literally shitty coffee. It is way easier to cite that as a reason than, say, making the residents of Hong Kong’s finest hotels squirm over income inequality.

Apparently, this is not the only animal whose poop is used to make coffee. Someone on Twitter made me aware of jacu bird coffee, which is harvested in roughly the same manner as the weasel poop coffee but in a more humane way because the animals are allowed to freely roam their South American farm, crapping away the day. “Imagine taking part in natures [sic] own selection process. Survival of the fittest, as Darwin would proclaim.” It seems to me if you are drinking coffee shat from an animal, you have already made your feelings on natural selection known and have deliberately chosen to take yourself out of the running. Somewhere there is an collective of individuals who have written “people who drink coffee pooped out of animals” on their list of the first ones to go during the revolution.

But hey, let me tell you about this idea I have for a certain type of gourmet corn…