Sunday, August 12, 2007

Espresso: is this stuff legal??

I've long said (well, for a few weeks, anyway) that there are three things that do not mix:

- drinking and driving
- Alzheimer's and sport parachuting
- coffee and flying

The first two are obvious and universal. The third is dependent on your person BCI (Bladder Capacity Index), an area where for me, at least, long-ish plane rides can cause discomfort as the result of 16 oz of coffee forced into a 12 oz bladder. I don't dare fly without my morning cuppa, though, as the ensuing headache that results from ignoring my caffeine addiction is murderous, and impervious to all known analgesics.

I've waited decades for the Mr. Coffee folks to make the next logical enhancement to their coffee brewing products, which should have been as patently obvious to them as it was to me. That is, of course, the Mr. Intravenous (tm) (Patent Pending). Plug yourself in at night, set the timer, and the coffee brews directly into your veins. I just can't see the downside of that, but market researchers must know something that I don't.

In any event, I recently acquired an Espresso maker and tried it out for the first time yesterday. While you still have to go through the machinations of getting all of the ingredients into the machine, it doesn't seem nearly as burdensome mostly, I suspect, due to the fact that it is a lot like a pressure cooker - there's that tiny element of risk involved. You just never know when a machine that super heats water under pressure to well past the normal 100C boiling point is going to explode, spewing parts and liquids all over everything.

All that aside, the benefit of Espresso over coffee is immediately apparent: all of the bouncing-off-the-walls zing of a huge caffeine infusion, packed into a Dixie cup volume that is well below my BCI.

Really, it surprises me that this is even legal in our ever-growing nanny state. But for as long as it is, Mr. Coffee is going to be mighty lonesome.

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