Coffee and COVID.

If you are as caffeine-dependent as I am, or even worse as my wife is, you may be asking yourself, "Self! How does the Chinese Death Virus affect the coffee service chain? We've had multiple scares with TP and canned goods and antiseptic wipes and paper towels and so on; now as we near the anniversary of the COVID knee on our national neck, can it cause problems with my morning fix?"

Well, friends, the National Coffee Association has some answers for you. 

If you are old enough you may remember this NCA ad from 1984: 

If you don't recall it, you may be surprised to hear that in the early eighties, coffee growers and sellers were panicked that the youth market was not as addicted to coffee as their parents. So the NCA put out a series of ads using ELO's song "Hold On Tight" -- a song I have denigrated -- to encourage coffee as fuel for achievement. Next thing you know, every city in America had a shop selling $5 lattes (no one knew what a latte was in 1984), Starbucks was everywhere, a coffee shop was the setting of Friends, and all the cool kids were ordering double espresso scuros with a sprinkle of cinnamon and a shot of anchovy. So I guess it worked. 

Anyway, here are the NCA answers to some of your coffee questions, questions supplied by me: 

Are people drinking more or less of the precious fluid of life in this time of crisis?

• Just as before the pandemic, the vast majority of coffee drinkers (about 80 percent) drink coffee at home, but more than one-third miss visiting coffee shops. More than half of Americans have already returned to coffee shops or plan to do so in the next month.
   
• 75 percent of coffee drinkers say the pandemic has not changed their coffee consumption.  For those who have changed habits, the most reported change is making more coffee at home.
   
• App-based ordering, including delivery, rocketed up 63 percent amongst those who drank coffee in the last week.  Drive through ordering increased 13 percent amongst those who drank coffee each day.
   
• Consistent with measures recommended in NCA’s June 2020 COVID-19 reopening guidance, to feel comfortable and increase visits to coffee shops consumers most want to see visible precautions like workers wearing gloves and facemasks (48 percent) and mandatory facemasks for all customers (44 percent).  

Will I get COVID and die from my coffee beans or the bag?

Since the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) public health crisis, NCA has received numerous questions about the impact the pandemic could have on coffee: Is it safe to drink? Can the coronavirus be transmitted or contracted via coffee or coffee packaging? What about the U.S. food supply in general -- is it safe?

Coffee itself has never been considered a means of coronavirus transmission, and the risk of transmitting the virus via coffee packaging is extremely low, according to the CDC.

So no matter how you buy or brew your coffee, rest assured that America's favorite beverage is completely safe to drink.

⛾⛾⛾

I think we can all be relieved about this. However, if the NCA wants to start a new campaign to get people more coffee-focused, I'll be glad to sell or rent these coffee slogans I wrote to encourage more coffee consumption:

COFFEE: Because Pot May Be Legal Where You Are, But Cocaine Still Isn't

COFFEE: Because Red Bull Is a Weenie Juice Box Drink

COVFEFE: How You Spell Coffee When You Haven't Had Coffee

COFFEE: Because No One Ever Braced Himself With a Shot of Tea

COFFEE: Avocado Toast's Best Friend

COFFEE: Because People on Zoom Can Tell if You're Drinking Vodka

COFFEE: You Can Be a Coffee Achiever! You Can Sit Around the House and Watch Leave It to Beaver! The Future's Up to You -- So Whatcha Gonna Do?

Okay, I borrowed the last one from Weird Al. He can have a cut for that one. But Jeff Lynne gets no money this time.

Fight with ferocious ferociously!

I have a friend whose son played football for Army, which here in the lovely Hudson Valley is the closest thing we have to a college team. College football is a big fat nothing in most of the northeast -- it's hard now to believe that Columbia was a football powerhouse in the early twentieth century.

Army football was pretty bad when I moved to this area, which is why I called for bringing back the military draft, assuming some talent would be swept up with the masses. But in 2016, some weird things started happening -- the Black Knights got a passing game, and started ending seasons with a winning record. My friend's son has been off the team for some years, so I told my pal that clearly his young man had set the wheels in motion toward their current success. "Yeah," he said, "or maybe they've been getting peewee opponents."

Regardless, this Saturday is the big Army-Navy game, and Navy's kind of sucking wind this year, so it should be a good one for Army fans and veterans.

But it got me thinking about college football fight songs. As I've noted before, my small college was so invisible to the NCAA that our division didn't even get a Roman numeral. I may have been mistaken when I wrote that the division was represented by an emoji (😜), as I attended in the pre-emoji era, but it was something like that. Maybe Division §. If we had a fight song, it probably had two power chords and was composed by a bad garage band called the Future Podiatrists of America. Or the Free Design.

Members of my family, though, knew the Notre Dame fight song (a.k.a. "Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame"), even though they were not Catholic or from Indiana or had ever been to college. Hell, they knew "Buckle Down, Winsocki," even though they weren't from the fictional town in the film Best Foot Forward. A good fight song is a good song.

Since my schools going back to kindergarten have been historically lame at sports, I've decided to pick some other fight song. Here are the ones I am considering -- note that I'm posting this on December 5, 2018, and if you're viewing this page in The Future, Where We Will Spend the Rest of Our Lives, YouTube will probably have reshuffled the videos and they won't appear below, because even though Blogger and YouTube are owned by the same company, they don't care if they hose the lowly blogmeister. Let's give it a shot.

Here's Tom Lehrer's, for Harvard, one of his first parodies, written when he was an undergraduate at said school:

When I posted Lehrer's song in the comments of the Great Lileks's site, a fellow commenter (I believe it was NH_Flier) posted "We Are Victorious," the military march from the film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

But I'm leaning toward Weird Al's most excellent generic sports fight song:

Any one of these is better and more sincere than that precious "Fight Song" that one hears from time to time, usually from people who have never landed a punch or gotten so much as a black eye. It isn't strong enough to inspire a Pop Warner team.

"Wrecking balls inside my brain"? You don't need a fight song, kid, you need Unisom. I'm sticking with Al.

Fat.

It's been thirty years since Weird Al Yankovic released Even Worse, the album best known for its parody of Michael Jackson's song "Bad." And say what you want about Michael Jackson, he was comfortable enough to allow Al to do parodies of his songs, unlike Prince and George Michael, who refused. Jackson was a big fan of Al's. He may have also wanted the money that came from a hit parody royalties; Purina Giraffe Chow can run up quite the grocery bill, you know.

When you admire the work of a musician or band, you always tend to prefer the stuff that gets less airplay. You'll have heard the hits ten thousand times; your interest lies in the B-sides, the instrumental fillers, the stuff that never gets on the radio or in the supermarket. "Sure, 'I'm Too Sexy' is a great song," you'll say, with a little scoff insinuated, "but to get the real measure of Right Said Fred, you need to listen to their rendition of 'Cherry Cherry' or 'Fräulein Wunderbar.'" And then you wonder why you don't have any friends.

On that note, I've always preferred Al's original songs to his parodies. "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota," "Generic Blues," "One More Minute," "Nature Trail to Hell," and what should have charted as a country song, "Good Enough for Now," are among his many excellent songs. And I'd like to thank Basil of IMAO for reminding me of the James Tayloresque "You Don't Love Me Anymore," which, as the penultimate song on the album Off the Deep End, sets up a practical joke that totally got me.

Today, though, I'd like to mention "Fat," the big hit off the Even Worse album and a takeoff of Jackson's "Bad." Yep, this is the one with the fat suit video, where Al became Fat Alfred. Apparently it's tricky to dance in one of those things: "I would turn and the suit would turn like a half-second later," he said.

While the video is terrific, I always admired the way Al put this song together. The lyrics are outstanding in that they use a ton of fat jokes, some I didn't even know, and as a Family Size kid I knew a lot of them. By my count, in a song just over three and half minutes (with Jacksonian repeats and dance breaks) there are 16 fat zingers, not counting little bits of side business like "Ham on, ham on, ham on whole wheat, all right..."

You've got some fat classics there, like: "When I sit around the house, I really sit around the house" and "all by myself I'm a crowd" and "Down at the beach... I'm the only one who gets a tan." And there are less famous ones, like "My shadow weighs forty-two pounds" and "When you're only havin' seconds, I'm have twenty-thirds."

And then you have improved versions of classics. "Got more chins than a Chinese phone book" is made into the slicker (and rhymier) "The pavement cracks when I fall down / I've got more chins than Chinatown." "Too fat to see his feet" is not much of a joke, but "When I go to get my shoes shined I gotta take their word" is, and it rhymes with the previous line.

It's not as easy as it seems to write words to a melody that have proper rhythm, length, and emphasis. Lyricists are often dismissed as the "words guys," a practice that goes back at least to the opera, where the jamoke who writes the book is nobody while the man who composes the music is a titan. But it's hard to make words scan right to someone else's melody, and to do it while cramming in every joke you can is an achievement.

The best thing about it is that by using the same brag approach as Jackson's "Bad," it's the singer who is obese, and he's proud of it. "My zippers bust, my buckles break, I'm too much man for you to take"; "the whole world knows I'm fat and I'm proud, just tell me once again who's fat." If the song had been outwardly directed, ragging on someone for being obese, it would have been cruel.

So we salute Al today for the thirtieth anniversary of one of his greatest parodies. Personally, as a writer and editor, my all-time favorite Al parody has to be "Word Crimes" (awesome video below), but that's another story.

Art rocks!

Apparently there is a fellow in the Hudson Valley who spends some time stacking rocks by the side of the road.

And he doesn't just stack rocks on each other; he will also stack rocks on tree stumps as needed.

Who is this mysterious man of mystery?

I have no idea, but a friend of mine says he's seen the man at work. In fact, those stacks of rocks were a good bit higher in the summer, but fall and winter weather have taken a toll.

To take a line from Weird Al, what on earth would make a man decide to do that kind of thing? Is it some kind of art project? A compulsion to impose neatness on a disordered world? Or just something to do while walking the dog?

My first thought was none of these; I wondered if he was a member of the Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things.

But I am informed that there may be a spiritual side to the practice; as a Baptist News writer says, "The spiritual practice of stacking stones claims ordinary moments of life for God and invites those who pass by to notice the holy ground on which they already stand."

And yet in today's world, it is impossible to do anything without pissing off somebody:

“It’s not one or two stacks. It’s when you come across an area, particularly in national parks, when there are dozens or hundreds. … The builders don’t necessary understand the landscape around them and don’t understand that others might be bothered by it. When you have one cairn it’s fine, but all the sudden you have 60 … you can be degrading habitat in that area. These fragile ecosystems are being harmed by this proliferation of stacking stone.”

So the problem is one of volume, which I can understand; if one person stubs out a cigarette butt on my lawn today it's no big deal, but if a thousand people do it it's going to look a bit messy.

Besides, rock-stackers, other nature buffs don't want to see any evidence of you:

First, if they're set in a random place, they can lead an unsuspecting hiker into trouble, away from the trail and into a potentially dangerous place. Second, we go to wilderness to remove ourselves from the human saturation of our lives, not to see mementoes from other people's lives.

I'm not going to wade into this rock-stacking controversy -- yay! Another freakin' thing to fight over! -- except to say that a world that has no place for the Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things is a world that's gotten much too serious.

Meeting adjourned.

Because it's Friday.

The ad our parody was based on first aired eons before I entered the third grade; you can see an early ad with the jingle below. The schoolyard parody lasted long after McDonald's was on to other jingles. As Weird Al has proven, you can keep a song alive by making fun of it.

Weird Al will outlive us all.

Today is Weird Al Yankovic's birthday, and although he turns 56, he should rest assured that he will outlive us all.

And he's happy about it!

Why do I say that? Not because of his vegetarian diet, which came as a shock to me---this was the guy who once sang that he'd "rather have a Big Mac or a Jumbo Jack than all the bean sprouts in Japan." No, the vegetarian diet is no guarantee of burying your contemporaries and their children. I just say he'll outlive us all because he's well on his way to outliving everyone he's parodied.

Some of his biggest parody hits include "Eat It" and "Bad" (takeoffs of Michael Jackson), "Another One Rides the Bus" (Queen), "Living with a Hernia" (James Brown), "Six Words Long" (George Harrison), "My Bologna" (the Knack), and "Smells Like Nirvana" (Nirvana).

Look at Al's body count: Michael Jackson: Dead. Freddy Mercury: Deady dead. George Harrison: Zen dead. James Brown: Hardest working man in death. Doug Fieger: Also dead. Kurt Cobain: He's not only merely dead, he's really most sincerely dead.

If I were Madonna, I'd be nervous.

Now you may well say, "But Fred! Look at all the others he's parodied, everyone from Toni Basil to Lorde. They're not all dead! Some of their careers may be dead, but they're not!"

I say: Give it time.

And note the key bit of information---dead careers. Al marches on, from success to success, while those he parodies wind up on the skids or in the box.

Weird Al is a career vampire.

So if you're Coolio, or the Offspring, or Billy Ray Cyrus, or the Backstreet Boys, or Don McLean, or anyone else Weird Al has ripped off, beware. He'll either take your career or your life... or both.

And he does it with an accordion.

And that's why he's so WEIRD.