This clip from The Daily Show is dedicated to our pal, Mark David Gerson, who (up until recently) enjoyed sitting in Borders and composing his books, such as The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write and other works.

We understand Mark David is a new fixture at Starbucks. We’re sorry, MDG!

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Our BARNES and NOBLE *cough* affiliate link to your own copy of The Voice of the Muse, if you’re a writer, wanna-be writer or know a writer who has a birthday coming up..

The Voice of the Muse:
Answering the Call to Write

For EVERYONE we recommend Mark David Gerson’s epic fantasy, The MoonQuest..

The MoonQuest:
A True Fantasy

Did you hear about this new drink size that Starbucks is rolling out?

They’re calling it the “Trenta,” and it’s ginormous.

It’s going to be seven more ounces of drink than their current largest size, the “Venti,” which is pretty big already. I don’t think I’ve ever ordered a Venti anything. Grande has been enough for me, and I always have to pee excessively after consuming anything Grande size, so I can’t imagine a Venti and especially can’t imagine a Trenta.

I just had to go and make this silly quip on my Facebook yesterday after reading about the new drink size..

Then I found out that it’s going to be for iced drinks only and not for coffee, other than iced coffee. But you can still put a little boat on it and go pastry fishing.

Hell, you can take a bath in it.

I read somewhere else that the contents of this cup will be about equal to the contents of an average human stomach when full. My bladder aches just thinking about it.

There’s a 24-hour Starbucks here in San Francisco, so I think a good application for this drink size would be to get in there at about 10:00 pm with a laptop, order a Trenta sized iced-coffee and finish it up at about 6:00 am after an all-night session of book writing, homework or porn-surfing.

Then, wipe the empty Trenta cup out really good and take it home to use as a trash can.

Tammy Trenta of The Apprentice

While prepping for this post, I googled the word “Trenta” to get a picture of the Starbucks cup but instead got pictures of a pretty lady named Tammy Trenta who evidently  was on that show, “The Apprentice.”

So now I revise my suggestion.. you should take Tammy Trenta instead of a laptop to the 24-hour Starbucks here in San Francisco and order a couple of Trenta-sized iced coffees as you stay the night doing whatever you’d do if you got the chance to spend a night with Tammy Trenta in a 24-hour Starbucks.

I have to pee just thinking about it.

I found a 24-hour Starbucks here in San Francisco.

There were rumors floating around of such a place, but it took some doing to locate it. This is because there are about a hundred-jillion Starbucks outlets in this city, just like there are in any city, and I had to look at a bunch of them and check their hours.

Finally, I checked the one on California Street and there it was – “we’re open 24-hours!”

All of this checking was done mostly online of course, because I haven’t time or inclination to personally visit every Starbucks in the city, plus I probably won’t live long enough. But I did go to the one up on Powell because Edna at The Coffee Bean told me she thought that one might be the 24-hour one, but it’s not. Way to go, EDNA.

As you’d imagine, the 24-hour joint was full of laptops and assorted people of all ages, but mostly 20-somethings, sitting at those laptops pounding away on keyboards while surfing Facebook, streaming music downloads and doing their homework.

Tables were scarce, but I finally ended up sitting next to this guy at about two in the morning..

This is Julean Rai. He’s a musician, and all around cool-cat who just floated into San Francisco a few months ago on a sea of hopes and dreams.

In a boat made of inspiration.

With an anchor of hard-work tethered by a rope of determination.

Okay then.

He’s quite nautical, this guy.

We talked, and to make a long story short (you’re welcome), we hit it off. He actually seemed to like me which doesn’t happen very often, and I liked him, which I’m sure happens to him all of the time.

Plus he looked and sounded exactly – and I mean EXACTLY – like my brother-in-law, Joel.

It was kind of freaky.

Okay, so he’s a black guy and Joel isn’t, but I swear it’s like he and Joel are twins and one day Julean fell into a vat of brown sauce while working at a fish & chips shoppe.

Or maybe Joel fell into a vat of vanilla ice-cream while working at a Baskin-Robbins.

But nonetheless, there you have it, two cool-cats who’ve never met and are brothers from different colored mamas, yet they look exactly alike similar and sound almost identical when they talk.

Oh, and Joel is a musician too. He plays sax in a jazz band and Julean plays guitar and God-only-knows what else, because he seems to exude talent from his pores. It smelled kind of nice.

Now, I know that few of you — practically none of you, really — know Joel personally or even know who he is, but I’ve known him since he was about the size of a saxophone. Here’s a picture of him taken the same year I met him..

So I know what I’m talking about when I say that Julean has the same voice, inflection and speech-patterns as Joel, which is downright uncanny.

By the way, here’s Joel all growed-up and standing on a mountain..

And here he is skydiving..

Now here’s my friend Drew skydiving..

Drew wasn’t at the 24-hour Starbucks and he doesn’t look or sound a thing like Julean and Joel, but he is a musician who likes to go to Starbucks, so there. But really, I just threw in his skydiving pic because Joel has a groovy skydiving pic too and they’re very similar.

I don’t know if Julean has a skydiving pic but that would be awesome, wouldn’t it?

Okay, so let’s recap. Here are Julean and Joel, side-by-side..

Vanilla ice-cream or brown sauce, Baskin-Robbins or H. Salt Esquire.. which is it?

I’ve posted a video below of Julean talking on a TV program. When my mother-in-law sees it she’s going to freak-out and vehemently deny ANY involvement with Denzel Washington 30 years ago.

But before we get to it, I just want to close by reiterating what a cool-cat Julean is, mainly because he gave me all of his music on a memory stick and it’s good. So I need to help get his music out there in any way I can, which is pretty much just talking about it on this blog.

Here’s hoping some big-shot in the music industry reads this and  signs Julean to a lucrative record deal (do they still call it that?) and then hires Joel to play sax on every track. Or maybe starts up a new act kind of like ALY & AJ, but with a twist or two.. or seven..

Sorry I couldn’t find any pics of Aly & AJ skydiving (in their lingerie).

Okay then, onto the smokin’ hot Julean Rai videos..

CHECK OUT..

Julean Rai on YouTube

Joel’s kick-ass photo stream on Flickr

Rhodester on the train platform in front of AT&T Park, a couple of hours before game #1 of the 2010 World Series gets underway

On a whim today, we decided to get on a train and take the half-mile trip to the area of AT&T Park here in San Francisco, because today the San Francisco Giants are facing off with the Texas Rangers in Game one of the 2010 World Series.

We’re not exactly big baseball fans, but we don’t have anything against it — we’ve just been too busy to pay much attention.

We last paid attention in 1984, and yes, we realize that was a really long time ago.

We lived in San Diego then, when the Padres won the National League Pennant and went to the World Series for the first time. We lived close to Jack Murphy Stadium (now Qualcomm Stadium) and we could see the lights and hear the roar of the crowd on game nights. We remember Steve Garvey hitting some kind of incredible fly ball that won something-or-other for the team during the pennant race.. oh, that was exciting!

We went in person to a few of those games at the nearby stadium while dating a girl who was a Padres fan, and endured the humiliation of her explaining the rules loudly as the game was played. But we liked her, so we continued to go.

We learned a lot, about the game AND her.

Nowadays these baseball teams have their own stadiums that they don’t have to share with football — the Giants have AT&T Park while the Padres play at Petco Park down there in San Diego. It’s all very commercial.

But the palpable excitement of an underdog team going all the way to the world series is something we’ve not forgotten since the Padres, and the fervor is the same here in San Francisco with the Giants, even if they DO have their very own billion-dollar ballpark. We understand that they’ve never won the series and haven’t made it all the way to the end very often, so there’s this feeling of electrifying hopefulness that permeates the city right now.

But if we were a true fan, we suppose, we’d be somewhere actually watching Game #1 of the series while clad in our own orange and black jersey, instead of sitting in a Starbucks a block away and blogging about it. But we’re doing this just because we can. We live in San Francisco now.. we can do a lot of things!

We came down here to check out the crowd, which is pretty much a sea of orange and black (the Giant’s colors) as far as the eye can see. Finding a place to sit and log-on has been the challenge you’d imagine it to be. We got a nice start at Panera Bread a few blocks from the stadium, but after finding that the wifi provider blocks the very blog you’re reading because they think it’s PORN (we KNOW, HUH?) we decided to move on.

Starbucks is never a favorite of ours, but the orange and black clad crowd has moved out now because the game has started, and the Starbucks wifi provider doesn’t block our porn site.

We seldom enjoy crowds, but this one has been entertaining..

• The multitude of men wearing cardboard signs that say “Need tickets!”
• The hobos who’ve managed to snag Giants jerseys and make themselves up in the team colors so as to make a killing in handouts as the crowd goes in.
• The man on the train earlier who shouted out to all of us, “Hey, why is this train so damn QUIET? We’re all going to the WORLD SERIES, people!” The train wasn’t quiet after that.. he got the result he was looking for.
• The cops, EVERYWHERE. Not only San Francisco PD, but agencies from all over the bay area here to help out, plus the train station near the stadium that’s thronged with officers from homeland security. We talked with one of them.. nice fellow. We were glad we didn’t bring our bomb, though.
• The Texas Rangers fan who entered the men’s room in his Rangers jersey.. brave fellow!
• Tiny babies clad in orange and black, whooping enthusiastically from their strollers as mommy and daddy push them along toward the ballpark.

Yes, we’re caught-up in the energy of it all. And now we’re actually watching the game, because the Starbucks manager came out and placed a huge widescreen TV on a platform and turned it on.

What in the hell are we doing BLOGGING?

GO GIANTS!

Rhodester's view from the Starbucks just outside AT&T Park as the 2010 World Series gets underway.

]]> http://rhodester.net/there-are-giants-among-us/feed 2 http://rhodester.net/dems-good-eatin http://rhodester.net/dems-good-eatin#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 07:06:00 +0000 David Rhodes http://rhodester.net/dems-good-eatin

photo by by clarkk on Flickr

Tommy the homeless guy got kicked out of Starbucks.

He was never actually in Starbucks to begin with, he was on the huge patio outside, but I guess his salty language got to be too much for some people.  They complained to the management and the management ousted him faster than a trash can tumbling down the street in a gale force wind.

I’d only spoken with him once before — it was while waiting for a bus downtown and, having decided to bide the time on that particular patio on a busy Saturday afternoon, I found nowhere else to sit but at the table next to his.

I thought, “Well this guy is kind of wacky, but maybe it’ll be interesting,” so I sat down in anticipation that he’d strike up a conversation, which he did after I’d waited approximately 2.4 seconds.

“Nice fuckin’ DAY, eh?” said he.

I’ll warn you now, he got booted because of his frequent use of the F word, and when I quote someone, I quote them — I don’t hold back. It’s not my practice to write that way, but if they said it, they said it. I don’t water down anything but my Starbucks house brew because it’s so damn BITTER.

“Yeah, it’s pretty awesome,” I said. “I’m glad it’s finally cooled down.” (This happened in Palm Springs, where it’s 78 degrees on Christmas day).

“You evah eat gaytuh?”

photo by The Suss-man (Mike) on Flickr

It took me a second to recover from the abrupt conversational left turn and to figure out that “gaytuh” was “gator.” He went on to explain that he was from “Floriduh, where the gaytuhs is good eatin.”

I said, “No, I don’t think I’ve ever had gator.. unless I thought it was chicken or something and someone was playing a joke on me.”

That was a joke in itself and I admit it was lame, but I quickly found out that Tommy the homeless guy had left his sense of humor behind a dumpster somewhere, so it didn’t really matter. He didn’t laugh at anything I said during the entire conversation, which was like hanging out with my high school gym coach all over again, except Tommy didn’t smell like Old Spice.

I missed my old gym teacher.

“Oh man, if you eatin gaytuh you KNOW it! That’s some good eatin theyuh. Dey’s hard ta kill too, but if ya git um unawayus (unawares) yu kin sink dat knife in and slit em from da throat all da way down to da nuts and all dat gut spills out and dey is dead fastuh dan you can count tuh ten.”

I thought it funny that you never hear tough guys talk about bunny rabbits that way. “Dems good eatin if’n you can sneak up behind one and kill it dead.” It’s always crocs, gaytuhs or beahs.

I wanted to ask him if gators really had nuts and I was really curious how you sneak up behind one and catch it unawares, but I didn’t get a chance to ask him about that because a pretty girl walked out of the store right then.

He abruptly shut up and watched her intently as she crossed the street, latte in hand, and ducked into the art gallery on the opposite corner. This inspired another vivid description from him, but it had nothing to do with reptiles – it was a loud, brash and awfully uninhibited rant about what he’d like to do to that young lady should he ever catch her in a back alley.

photo by Stuck In Customs on Flickr

I was growing increasingly thankful that Mrs. Rhodester wasn’t with me, not that she’d be shocked or anything, but for her own safety and mine.  If he tried to harm her I’d have to try and stop him — I say try, because Tommy weighs over 300 pounds and stands about 6’4”. He’s a huge, smelly maniac with women and reptile issues.

He bragged about this “bodacious fucking hutch” he’d built over by the medical center about three miles “down yonder,” and how much he missed being able to crawl into it and just get away from civilization because he’d made it virtually invisible, being behind the dumpster the way it was.

His impromptu homestead came to a quick end one day when some staffers from the medical center tried to toss medical waste into the dumpster but missed, so it all landed on him instead. He said he stormed into the lobby and threatened to grab the little woman behind the desk and “string her up by her boobies,” which is the point where security came along and informed him that police were on the way.

He seemed to actually be surprised by this. A huge, smelly homeless guy covered in medical waste bursts into the lobby and threatens to string up the receptionist behind the counter, and he’s surprised when they call the cops on him.

I didn’t say he was bright.

Of course, this is the same guy who was describing his dumpster estate as if it were a mansion in Monte Carlo.

As I approached the Starbucks patio yesterday, he was standing on the public sidewalk just outside of the waist-high railing, gazing sadly at the plastic chair he’d formerly occupied day after day.

“How ‘bout dem gaytuhs, huh? Dem’s good eatin!” I said, as I came up behind him.

He turned and looked at me with the same expression he must have worn on his face when the cops destroyed his beloved dumpster hutch months earlier.

“Dey went and kicked me outta heah man, now wheah I’m gonna go, huh?”

He looked like he was going to cry. I was tempted to invite him to stay with us, but then I pictured what Mrs. Rhodester would look like wrapped up in plastic bags and stuffed in a freezer, and changed my mind.

“Sorry to hear that, Tommy. You can’t just hang out at that Coffee Bean patio across the street?”

“Naw man, dat bitch ovuh dere don’t like me none. Said I called her a bitch to her face one day.”

“Did you?”

“Hell ya,man.. she didn’t let me use da bathroom ta wash up in, dat bitch. But now dat I called her dat she don’t let me in dere at all and I can’t even go neah da place. Woman is stuck up if ya ask me.”

I hadn’t asked him that.

I offered to get him something from the Starbucks, because I’m just friendly like that and I don’t judge anyone and I really don’t want him to sit on me, but he declined and said he was “jist gonna move on, maybe to anuthuh town where da bitches ain’t so stuck up and shit.”

I wished him well. Then I went in and ordered an iced passion tea, which I took back out to the patio and enjoyed along with a nice, peaceful solitude.

A very quiet and peaceful solitude, free of gators.

It was lovely.

Aunt Bee got me a Starbucks card!

..well, technically she wasn’t really Aunt Bee, but the story still bears telling.

I once worked as a security dispatcher at the Hollywood & Highland complex right there on Hollywood Boulevard. I was cooped up all day in a camera surveillance room in the security office and our receptionist was a lady named Addie, who we used to call “Aunt Bee” due to her unfortunate resemblance to the character from the Andy Griffith show, played by the late Francis Bavier.

I say “unfortunate” because Addie was approximately 35 years old and it’s probably not the most desirable thing for a woman of that age to be compared to Aunt Bee, but hey – she brought it on herself with the hair-do that she wore.

Addie herself didn’t bear an exact resemblance — it was more like she was the Aunt Bee TYPE. She wore a security uniform because she was technically a security officer, but in that respect she was more like Barney Fife. She was also Latino, so picture an Aunt Bee/Barney Fife type Latino woman of about 35, and you’ve got Addie — not too many of those out there.

Even though she was a security officer, they assigned her to the reception desk because they had reservations about putting her out into the complex where she’d have to deal with the riff raff. I’m sure they thought that if she were sent to disburse a group of gang members who were loitering, that instead of approaching with her hand on her mace, she’d be carrying a picnic basket of fried chicken with sweet tater pie for dessert. She’d probably scold them for loitering and then give them a little lecture about how they should be in school. Then, after they’d finished their fried chicken and sweet tater pie, they’d slit her throat.

Addie wasn’t the shiniest bullet in Barney’s shirt pocket either, which is probably why she let us call her Aunt Bee in the first place. The real Aunt Bee could probably whip her in an IQ test — if you can imagine that — so I myself had reservations about having her assigned to the reception desk. But it was better than having her out among the thieves and gang members, and she was a nice lady.

One time she offered to get me something at the nearby Starbucks. She was going down there on her break and while asking me to cover the phones for her, she offered to buy me a coffee, which was her routine. She was always offering to do something for someone, which is another way that she was just like that beloved matronly icon of Mayberry.

I politely declined and thanked her for the offer because my own break was coming up shortly, and I was planning to head down there myself. When she returned to the office about fifteen minutes later she popped into the camera room to let me know she was back, and to give me a nice little Starbucks gift card that she’d picked up.

“David,” she said, “it’s nearing Christmas and when I saw this card I thought of you because you’re always so nice, and it’s such a pretty card, I thought you’d like the design on it.”

It WAS a nice gift card!  It was one of the holiday designs with holly and ivy on it, so I thanked her very much and tucked it into my shirt pocket for use on my upcoming break. About a half an hour later I’d placed my order for a grande cappuccino and handed the card to the young lady behind the counter, all the while thinking of how sweet it was of Addie to treat me like this.

“I’m sorry, sir, but the card is empty.”

“Huh? It can’t be.. our receptionist was just down here less than an hour ago and she got it for me.”

“I’m sorry, but there’s no money on it.. it’s an empty card.”

I paid cash for my cappuccino and stopped at the reception desk on my way back into the office.

“Addie, uh.. thanks again for the card.”

“Oh, David, you’re so welcome! It’s such a pretty card, I just knew you’d love it!”

“I do, Addie, I do! Hey did you know you can put money on those things too? Like a gift card.. did you know that?”

Her mouth fell open and she looked at me like I’d just told her that Opie had robbed a liquor store.

“NO! Really? I just saw it in a little stack by the register so I grabbed it for you. Gosh I should have done that! That would have made for an even better Christmas gift!”

I smiled and patted her arm.

“That’s okay, Addie, don’t worry about it.. maybe next time.. I’ll just keep it right here in my wallet so that it’ll always remind me of you.”

I returned to the camera room having learned a small lesson on the value of the meaning behind gifts. It’s not just a cliché that it’s the thought that counts, so I want every single one of my blog readers to head down to the nearest Starbucks and grab one of those little gift cards that you’ll find by the register.

Be sure and pick the nicest one and just slip it right into your pocket – it’s on me, and you deserve it for being such a faithful reader!

You’re welcome.