#52 soon lee

thanks for that link! i didnt know that connection between the timing of the birth of the espresso machine & the italian migration to melbourne.. interesting stuff!! (ok, yes, i am a coffee nerd, guilty as charged)

i just got back from my first trip to europe actually (for sonar music festival in barcelona), was interesting to observe a bit of euro coffee culture.. a latte in barca is a caffe con leche (coffee with milk), but they have a great tiny latte number called a caffe cortado (a "cut" coffee)
..but generally they dont seem to have a really strong coffee culture, they prefer to drink beer (it was summer tho i guess).. in paris the closest they have to that is a cafe noisette (which is stronger, more like a macciato).

the really bizarre thing about all this is the fact that the coffee shop refuses to serve a drink that is an italian tradition.. maybe over in the US you dont have too many actual italian cafes but here in Melbourne they are everywhere. Want a great iced coffee ? Walk into any cafe here and order a caffe freddo. you'll get a shot of espresso, a glass of ice and a small jug of milk. Any cafe that has some kind of idiot policy about no espresso over ice clearly has no clue about good italian coffee & should be avoided at all costs..

wow.. talk about battle of the nerd frames, i think Pesco takes the gold with his SpaceWar '88 Cyber-Translucents.. :-)

Buyers beware of imaginary tshirts. I order 7 shirts from these happy fraudsters several weeks ago, and have been shipped exactly nothing (perhaps i did receive some imaginary shirts in an imaginary box though - or maybe i just imagined i did). Several emails later, starting off nice and getting progressively more threatening as they totally failed to respond in any way & i'm now in the hole $240 for tshirts that were going to be christmas presents but now will have to be imaginary christmas presents. My next step will be to contact the police. These people are at best lazy slackers and at worst dodgy fraudsters.

ian holmes > on the money. Boosh, Barley & Snuffbox whip ass on The IT Crowd. It had potential- Richard Ayoade's Moss is gold, and nice to see Matt Berry in there now, but the canned laugh track, katherine parkinson's wooden acting, and the blokey & clumsy writing mean that its never going to go anywhere really funny.