Strong Enough

I’ve just finished reading “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” the first two novels in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium-series trilogy about Lisbeth Salander.

Assuming that Larsson’s picture of daily life in Sweden is true, the Swedes are close to the world’s champion coffee drinkers. Of course it may be that a world filled with journalists, cops, and a quirky little girl hacker…the fascinating Lisbeth Salander…isn’t perfectly reflective of the quotidian life of the average Swede. But I don’t think so.

I’ve always thought that Americans were the most devoted coffee drinkers, but the United States annually consumes 4.2 kilograms of coffee per capita; the Swedes top out at 8.2 kilograms per capita. (Incidentally the Finns seem to be the champs, at 12 Kilograms per person…I wonder why.)

Still, we undoubtedly do a lot coffee drinking and that makes me wonder why so much of it is so bad. It’s heresy, I know, but we drink an awful lot of bad coffee…a kind of watery brown fluid which you might not recognize as coffee blindfolded. A decent cup of restaurant coffee is rare.

One reason may be that we make our coffee too weak, which might explain why Swedes apparently use twice as much coffee in their cup of Joe as we do. And why devoted coffee drinkers here go to specialty coffee houses.

Fun coffee statistics here

Read about Stieg Larsson here.

Cross posted to Blogspot

Lovin' It As It Is

The folks who are absolutely enchanted with their current health care plans are out in force jamming the phone lines, honking horns and demanding that things remain exactly as they are.

God help any member of Congress who tampers with the wonderfulness of things as they are! I’m sure they believe that such rational arguments as horn honks and sign waving are going to change someone’s mind.

I know it’s small-minded of me, but I’d like to know exactly what it is about the current state of health insurance that they love.

Is it being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions? Is it having insurance arbitrarily cancelled? Oh, I bet it’s the “donut hole” in their drug coverage. You know, the time you have to pay full-pop for your drugs.

If they’re self-employed, or don’t have insurance with their jobs, I guess they don’t want to have tax credits for the health insurance they buy for themselves. Having tax credits ‘forced down their throats’ would be simply dreadful. And of course it would be terrible to be able to keep their kids on their health insurance until the kids were out in the job market and getting their own insurance.

Cross-posted to Blogger.

Clearer Now

In my own case, thru vision changes following cataract surgery, which gave with one hand while it took away with the other. It meant that for a while my computer keyboard looked like it was being viewed trough the bottom of a Coca Cola bottle. That, and not boredom, explains a light writing  schedule here at the Data Port.

Happily things are on the mend.

House keeping note: The Data Port is cross-posted to its Blogger site where, on occasion, you might find posted additional grumpiness.