At the Happy Center Café...

... checking the rules of the game.

***

Here's the game: Hive Carbon. That's an Amazon link. And if you happen to have any other shopping you need to do, entering Amazon through this link will — at no extra cost to you — send me: 1. some money, and 2. the message that you appreciate what this blog gives to you. (That link is always at the top of the page, under the blog's title: click "Shop Amazon.")

"Best hipster neighborhoods" identified...

... using somewhat square criteria (I mean, most of this stuff is also nice for middle-aged professional women):

We assessed each area’s walkability according to Walkscore.com; the number of neighborhood coffee shops per capita...; the assortment of local food trucks (and their ranking according to Zagat’s); the number and frequency of farmers markets; the selection of locally owned bars and restaurants; and the percentage of residents who work in artistic occupations. We also factored in Nextdoor’s Neighborhood “Hipness” Index, which is based on how often words associated with hipness (for example art, gallery, designer, musician) appeared on each Nextdoor neighborhood’s site pages, and Nextdoor conducted a survey in which members sounded off on their communities.

The big winner is Silver Lake in L.A. I was there, taking pictures, in 2008:



Anyway and obviously, the neighborhoods that get identified this way are targeted to be taken over by the middle-aged professional types who like arty ambiance and coffee and booze too. I mean, this list is in Forbes.

At the Pool Table Café...

... you can call the shots.

(The photograph was taken yesterday at The Raw Deal in Menomonie, Wisconsin.)

At the Caffe Dolce...

... life is sweet in Missoula.

(Caffe Dolce is a real place. We practically lived there for 3 days.)

ADDED: A second view... showing a more crowded time of day:



This place was great as a café for hanging out with our laptops, but it becomes a real restaurant with table service at lunch and dinner. There's breakfast too, but you order at the counter. The French doors open out onto a nice walled patio — it's a corner in a mostly residential area — and we ate dinner there last night: Montana steak, wonderfully tender. The place seems both elegant and completely casual, the food and the coffee are great, and everyone who works there is really nice.

Things seen at a Madison café just now.

1. A centipede was crawling up the counter. A man came over and kicked it, and it wasn't crawling anymore.

2. A very large man with his back to us stood up and leaned over to pick up a newspaper from the other side of his table. His t-shirt hiked up, revealing 12 to 14 inches of naked ass crack above the waistband of his baggy jeans. The display continued at least 30 seconds and was repeated again later.

Pictures of Austin, Texas.

Bicycle wheel chandelier at the Bouldin Creek Café:



Masculine fashions:



In the Spider House Café:



On Lady Bird Lake, a monument to the homeless...



... and a monument to Stevie Ray Vaughan (who died in a helicopter crash in Wisconsin):



Barton Springs:



Reflection in the Japanese garden:



At the Cherrywood Coffeehouse... outside....



... and inside:

Remontant foxglove.

That's the first thing we notice upon leaving the house today. We drive over to the east side of town to check out the signs...


... and get some coffee....



Waiting for my small cappuccino, I have plenty of time to read the parody lyrics taped to the espresso machine.

At the Chocolate Chip Café...

... sit down and hang out.

ADDED: I should have called this the Levitating Muffin Café. (Lem: "Is it me, or does the muffin appear to float?" It's not just you!) This cafe, in case you are wondering, is in Leadville, Colorado. That's 10,000 feet above sea level, and I know high altitude affects baking, but who knew the stuff would come out this light.

Althouse is a bit off.

For some reason, I find this mistake hilarious.

At the Café Café...

... let's settle in for some good conversation about anything you like.

"Am I the only person left in the world who worries about spilling his coffee on his laptop?"

2 years ago.

ADDED: I ran across that after reading the colloquy between AllenS and Meade in the comments to the post about Brett's fuzzy penis:

AllenS: Jenn Sterger (the woman) was hired because of some sexy pictures of her in Sports Illustrated mag, that Brent Musberger thought would be a good matchup for the male dominated football sports sceen. Jenn and Brent are just as much at fault here. I'm thinking of sending the woman a picture of my penis also. Could I borrow the fish bowl lens?...

Meade: It's a fish eye lens. Fish eye. It's for taking shots of massive objects or scenes which a normal lens can't take all in. A fish bowl lens would be for taking shots of tiny things. Like Brett Favre's... ability to make good judgments.

AllenS: Ok, ok. Can I borrow the lens that makes stuff look bigger?

But, in fact, the fisheye works really well to make something look large if you get the camera lens right up at it. Lots of other stuff is including in the picture, arrayed all around and looking comparatively small. Frankly — and this is not an offer to AllenS — it would be really interesting to take pictures of naked men and get the extreme closeup on the genitalia with a well-composed and interesting background. I went looking through my old posts with the "fisheye" tag to find some that prove my point.

The second picture here of the fisheye dog makes this point very well. Get right up to the nose. The scenery in the background isn't as interesting as I'd want for my proposed compositions, but you can see how tiny Meade looks in the background (when in fact he was quite close by). Here's another photograph that illustrates the point, albeit with the female body:



That's from the Khmer Dynasty room at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Here's the effect of the lens looking at the room from the other side:



Here's some male and female nudity, to be fair:



That's the Museum of Natural History — not Brett and Jenn. You may recognize that couple from the movie "Election" — which is a great cautionary tale about the inadvisability of cheating on... many things (including your spouse).

And then — searching through the fisheye pictures — I found something that was extremely important to me: the purple tree, which had this.

"Do you guys TRY to not get laid?"

At the Gin Rummy Café...

... deal with it.

"Cafes... have always been venues for conspicuous contemplation... places to read Camus’ most obscure collections of essays, places to doodle evocatively in your large Moleskin notebook."

Free WiFi users wreck the hip LoFi ambiance of the coffeehouse in Greg Beato's brain.


(Photo by John Althouse Cohen)

If you're traveling in the north country...

... where Highway 63 meets Route 2... there is a café... Casablanca Traders...



... where the nice lady kept the place open for an extra 15 minutes so that Meade could have a smoothie and I could have a peppermint tea with a shot of internet. We were the only customers, and Meade said you must do very well in wintertime, and she said that's what she, a transplanted San Diegan, thought when she moved up here and opened the place. But the truth is, no one comes in the winter. The customers come on the sunny warm days (which are few, up north).

In winter, where does everyone go? Don't they want to be somewhere cozy? We drove quite a ways in the Chequamegon Forest. And what we saw were bars, bars, bars. Bars and bowling alleys. The culture up north isn't so much about coffee and WiFi. It's more about beer and bowling. That was my observation, as I drove by....



... with my vision admittedly blurred... by speed, not beer. I was on peppermint tea...



... and to-go chocolate cake, leftover from lunch.

Portrait of an Italian worker.

This picture is hilarious. From an article about Fiat's efforts to instill a work ethic and the larger problem of the underperformance of the southern part of the euro zone.

“The less they work, the happier they are,” observed Vittorio di Giola, owner of the Caffetteria Vicky, a favorite haunt of Fiat workers on the Viale Alfa Romeo, Pomigliano’s main drag.

That view was acknowledged by some workers, union officials and even the town’s mayor, Raffaele Russo. “There are those who don’t miss a chance to miss work,” Mr. Russo said.

Just last month, Fiat erected large television screens inside the factory when Italy played in the World Cup to encourage employees to come to work, said Mr. Nacco, the longtime worker there. Still, some people did not show up. “And Fiat was paying us to watch the game,” he said.

Coffee and blogging in the Quad Cities.

Good morning, people. Did you get your coffee okay this morning? We went in search of a local café — I won't say exactly where — and after much maneuvering through numbered avenues and streets — let's just say the Mississippi River sets a grid awry — we found the place that seemed right. On inspection it seemed a bit twee — like a theme park recreation of a "café" — but what about WiFi? No! I need my coffee and blogging, even on vacation. This is what I do. Is it too much to ask? A little coffee and WiFi in the morning? So we take the latte to go — back to the hotel lobby, which has WiFi. The lobby also has coffee. Free coffee. But I don't like that coffee. Am I too fussy? I typo'd "fuzzy." Am I too fuzzy? Yes! I am! Without my coffee in the morning. And my WiFi. I am sharpening up now. The latte's half gone, and this post — the first post of the morning — is nearly written.

At the Good-Beer-Is-Not-Cheap Café...

... quaff some brew...



... down at the end of Lonely Street.

Don't be irritating while I'm caffeinating.

Come on, café people. Fix your wobbly tables.



(The main thing is: I'm learning iMovie. That was: My Very First Voiceover. Look out, dear friends. Now that I can voiceover, I might be saying anything about anything.)

At the Too-Early Café...

... it's hard to think of anything to say in this pre-dawn light. You start the conversation.

Coffee, pre-dawn, Mountain Time.

After driving 1000 miles straight through the night.

It's Spring Break at last.