Expresso to Beatniks
Why beer is better than coffee, Point 134: A teenage waitress overdosed on caffeine after drinking 14 shots of espresso. The link features a picture of the waitress and plenty of quotes from her. I'm guessing that she thinks this is her Warholian fifteen minutes.
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Docherty, a construction foreman, was accidentally hit by a co-worker's powerful nail gun last week.
A first-aid officer jumped in his vehicle and raced Docherty to the hospital, a couple of kilometres away. But about halfway there, the pair was stopped on Central Saanich Road by a police officer conducting a speed trap.
"We showed him the nail sticking out of my forehead but he didn't care at all," Docherty told A-Channel news yesterday.
The officer stopped the two for driving 92 km/h in a 50 km/h zone and for not wearing a seatbelt.
The police chief is defending the officer, saying that an ambulance should've been called instead, no matter that the car almost undoubtedly would've gotten to the hospital faster. Why do something for yourself when the State can be called to do it for you?
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My latest at Catholic Exchange: Beatniks and Madison Avenue. It first appeared in the esteemed Catholic Men's Quarterly.
Every manifestation of hip – from Walt Whitman to the Harlem Renaissance to the Beatniks to Kurt Cobain – has this in common: it lives for now. That's what makes it so cool, whether it's a heroin junkie playing a saxophone (see Charlie Parker) or a speed junkie who dies walking outside on a cold, wet night wearing nothing but a t-shirt (see Neal Cassady).
Compare that to the American marketplace. What does it want? It wants people to live in the present, preferably with no thoughts about the past and definitely no worries about the future, including second mortgages and 18% APR credit cards.
