The Evolution Of Starbucks

Ah, Starbucks. Like the sirens of yore, you have seduced me with your song, and you have sucked me in to a fifteen year addiction -- but I am winning my battle with you and your pricey drug. You can now find others to tempt!

In 2006, just about everybody worldwide knows of Starbucks. The ubiquitous coffee house displays its well-known logo everywhere. But did you know this is only the latest, cleaned-up-for-corporate-expansion logo?

Take a closer look at the logo. What, exactly, are those shapes on the sides of the female figure? And for that matter, who or what is this female supposed to be?



As the uncropped predecessor logo shows more clearly, she is a mermaid, or a siren. A special siren with two tails. Two tails, unabashedly held open wide, for all to see. You won't find her in a Disney movie. This logo is still on a few old Starbucks in Seattle. (I once had a prized 1990 coffee mug with this logo, but, alas, I seem to have lost it.)





Going back even farther in the Starbuckean Evolution, we see an older logo that still remains on the original Starbucks in Seattle's Pike Place Market. The siren is less stylized and more of a woodcut, but she's still holding her tails wide open, with more of a come-hither look. Click here for more detail.






We can trace the logo even farther back, all the way to the 15th century. This engraving obviously inspired the Starbucks logo. Note that the tails are much more like legs.

Now you know more about Starbucks than you probably ever wanted to know.

Enjoy your coffee!






Bonus Starbucks Trivia: The chain takes its name not from the 70s soft-rock band, or the Dirk Benedict role on Battlestar Galactica, but from Mr. Starbuck, a coffee-drinking character from Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick.

Stoned Spiders And Wacky Webs

It's not easy, but I'm doing it. No coffee, no caffeine for 2 days now. It's not too hard. Mild headaches are alleviated by aspirin.

Today I found an interesting website (here, PDF) about a test done by NASA researchers that used spiders to test the toxicity of various chemicals. Check out these images:


The first image is a normal spider web, spun by a sober spider. Next is the work of a spider who smoked some marijuana. It looks normal, except the spider did not finish the web. Perhaps he just went looking for some doughnuts? The mescaline-dosed spider also looks normal but unfinished. Perhaps the spider had to go vomit and then have a vision quest? The LSD-tripping spider's web looks like the work of an artist singularly focused on its deep beauty. And lastly, the caffeinated spider? A complete mess. The spider was disoriented and incapable of creating even a single organized cell. It barely even looks like a spider web.

If you ever get the chance to hang out with Spider-Man, please don't give him any coffee!

Coffee, Tea, Or Me?

Hello, my name is FreeThinker, and I am a Caffeineaholic.

Yes, it's true, I am an addict, a slave to the drug found in many forms - tea, colas, and coffee - which is my drug delivery device of choice. I need caffeine. If I don't have it, I suffer withdrawal symptoms: headache, fatigue, irritability.

Oh, it's nothing really chronic. I'm just a one, maybe two, cups of coffee in the morning only kind of guy. That's it. Any coffee (or caffeine in any source) after noon affects the quality of my sleep that night.

Yes, this is just coffee; we are not talking about heroin or tobacco or crystal meth. But still, it's an addictive drug, and its legality and popularity don't discount its addictiveness. I want to be in total control of my body. I like my freedom, and don't want to be anybody's slave, or any drug's slave.

As long as I get my one-or-two-cuppa-joe-in-the-morning fix, I'm good. I get alert and the day really gets rolling. It does wear off, but I don't coast on more caffeine to get me through the day. I know it will mess up my sleep.

I never even tried coffee until college. It was just an occasional thing to drink if it was offered. (Like most kids, I drank Colas and iced tea while growing up, and I'm sure I did get a caffeine buzz but did not realize it at the time.)

The coffee addiction began in earnest in 1990 when I moved to Seattle and worked long hours at an advertising agency. I still remember my new employee orientation, when I was introduced to the goodies in the break room. "This pot has the decaf, this pot has the French Roast, and this pot has the good stuff called 'Starbucks,'" said the office guide, as she poured a sample of the Starbucks for me. It tasted like mud, but a yummy kind of mud. My coffee addiction began. The first one's always free.

For over 15 years, I've needed coffee daily. Never as much as some people (For a while I dated a woman who used her coffee maker as her alarm clock!), and it never got to more of a four-cup-a-day habit at the most. On the occasional days when coffee was not available, or even not available until later in the day, the headache and fatigue would come a-calling: My body would tell me "Give me caffeine, I'm suffering!"

A 12-step program is not my kind of bag, so I am tapering off and eventually quitting coffee and all caffeine products. I want to test my resolve, and I want to regain total control of my body. I also want to save a little time and money and hassle every day. I want to wake up and smell an addiction-free life!

This won't be a total personal prohibition. I will still enjoy coffee, tea, and other caffeine products after I end my dependence. The goal is to not NEED a daily caffeine fix.

Rocking The Boat: Day Three

This isn't the Bahamas we saw on the brochure! The weather is bad -- so bad, our port-of-call in CocoCay has been cancelled. Apparently, it's unsafe to dock, so the captain announces we are having a "sea day." Our planned activities of parasailing and snorkeling vanish. However, we spend the morning having a long and pleasant breakfast with other passengers, trading concert stories over coffee and many trips to the buffet. We learn that Dave Matthews felt so bad about last night's aborted concert that he arranged to get on the boat about 2:00 AM and play the rest of the show for the lucky people who got wind of it! This was not officially announced, to prevent the inevitable chaos, so most of us were in dreamland at that time.

After breakfast, we participate in a "Classic Rock Trivia Contest" in which a couple seconds of a song is played and each person guesses the song name and artist name. Only one person gets a perfect score- FreeThinker! Here's my sheet. I even had to convince the DJ that the Chicago number was "25 or 6 to 4," not "25 or 6 to 1" as he originally insisted. The "prize" was a VH1 keychain. Just beating all the other music fanatics was good enough, thank you.

The next game was something called "Rock and Roll Bingo" but I split before it started, retiring at the top of my, um, "game."




Finally, a bit after noon, the constant cloud cover began to disappear and more and more people are moving out to the deck. Now this is what the Caribbean is supposed to be like! True to my vow, I chop off my 47-day old beard and bask in the sun. After lounging, drinking, dancing, and all-around frolicking in the sun for the afternoon, Garret Dutton - a.k.a. G. Love - entertained us on the top deck with his modern take on John Lee Hooker. During his set, the sun also sets.

It's Super Bowl Sunday, and everybody on the deck is served potent kamikazes in the "pre-game tailgate party." The game itself is on a monster screen in one of the concert rooms, but due to international broadcast regulations, no commercials are shown. For anything else, this would be great, but a Super Bowl without the commercials? We'll pass. There so much music, and so little time!

After another big buffet dinner, we lounged in one of the ship's many makeshift concert arenas for the Michael Tolcher show. With his early 60s Dylanesque hat and acoustic playing style, he had a good number of the audience up and dancing - and audience that should be thoroughly pooped from three fun-filled days and nights on this very novel cruise. It was either sheer exhaustion, or the mellow reggae vibes, that made the late-night Toots and the Maytals concert such a relaxing finale to the almost nonstop partying before everybody disembarks early the next morning.

Rocking The Boat: Day Two

Sleeping in is sooo nice ... Except when you're on vacation and don't want to miss a waking minute of the fun. Ugh! The wake-up call is unpleasant, but we deal with it and get crackin' for our first full day on the cruise, and our first port-of-call. We enjoy a big breakfast at a window table to watch the approach to Nassau. Once docked, we disembark and start exploring the town. Hundreds of vendors are at a market very close to the boarding area, aggressively selling everything from wood carvings to jewelry to, naturally, mon, handcrafted pipes. Things are different a bit further away. The pace is slower, and time seems to stand still. If the sun was shining, it might be even mellower than this! A walk through a poor residential area was pleasant, as was a nap on a beach. (It was barely warm enough to lay down in clothes!)

On the way back to the boat, we see a limbo dancer doing his thing. I guess that's something you have to see when in the Bahamas. It's time to eat and prepare for the cruise highlight: The Dave Matthews concert!

As the concert is on a "secret island," we have to follow the captain's announcements. We are instructed to disembark and wait on the dock for a tender to take us, one big group at a time, to the concert location. The choppy waters probably caused some delay, but we eventually get to the concert site - not a separate island, but near the Atlantis resort in Nassau! This last-minute change is in place because the looming storm makes the "secret island" too dangerous.

The show starts out with Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds playing a riveting "Bartender." There are some sprinkles from the sky, but everyone is transfixed by the next songs by Dave and Tim: "Dancing Nancies," "Jimi Thing," "Too Much." By now, the sprinkles have become a light rain. Trey Anastasio joins Dave and Tim on guitar, and along with Brady Blade on drums, Tony Hall on bass, and Ray Paczkowski on keyboards, "Dave Matthews and Friends" give the next batch of songs the full band treatment. But the rain is getting harder, and the wind is picking up. It's too wet to take any more photos and risk damaging my camera. Roadies are scrambling to cover the band equipment with plastic. The stage has a canopy, but the wind is sweeping in the rain at all angles. The audience can't do anything but get progressively wetter. Eventually, the concert has to stop because the equipment is beginning to get as soaked as the audience was 20 minutes ago. Dave Matthews gamely announces "we'll be back as soon as we get our equipment dry again" and stops the show. The rain is really coming down now, and the cold wind makes it worse. Word spreads quickly that the tenders are taking everybody back to the boat, so a long line of shivering, soaked concertgoers waits - and waits - in the increasingly hard rain - for the tenders to dock and take us back, group by group. The water is so choppy that we watch, helplessly, as the tenders fail to dock properly, only to move back out and keep trying until they get it right.

What a mess! Everybody eventually gets back on the dry boat, almost as wet as they'd be if they swam back. Fortunately, my camera survived the all the water, but many others were not as fortunate. It's a wonder the boat had enough hot water for all the hot showers that must have been taken as everybody cleaned up after the aborted concert!

Rocking The Boat: Day One

Sometimes spontaneous excursions are the most fun. When my friend's traveling partner backed out of a planned cruise at the last minute, I was able to step right in. Three days and nights in the Bahamas, on a luxurious cruise ship, jam-packed with live music, featuring a special Dave Matthews and Friends concert? Hey, mon, I'm on board!

After a red-eye flight to Orlando, Florida, we shuttled our way to Port Canaveral where our ship - the Sovereign of the Seas - was waiting for us and a couple thousand other passengers. This is gonna be good: Live music, great bands, unlimited food and drink, and the warmth and sunshine of the Caribbean! After boarding, getting settled, and eating a big meal, we start sipping drinks (Bahama Mamas were a favorite) and checking out the massive ship. Hmmm, it's overcast and windy and not exactly warm. It's even sprinkling rain now and then. That will change as we set sail, we tell ourselves. I make a vow to shave my beard when some sunshine finally arrives. Maybe tomorrow.

There's lots of fun stuff on the top deck - swimming pools, hot tubs, a rock-climbing wall, a running track ... but since it's too chilly and wet now, we join the "welcome party" in the center of the ship. With free drinks flowing, and Mofro entertaining, everybody's dancing and getting real drunk real fast as we set sail for the first port-of-call, Nassau, where we plan to dock tomorrow.

As night fell, we checked out sets by Mike Doughty's Band and John Brown's Body (with the guys from Ozomatli sitting in). Then, after a late dinner, we catch the entire concert by Bob Weir and RatDog. The next show is at midnight, and despite it being the worthy North Mississippi All-Stars, we skip it in favor of much-needed rest. The red-eye flight the night before did not really count as a good night's sleep!

This has been a rockin' day on a partyin' boat, and there's much more to come. By now, one thing's for sure: the old canard "Cruises are for the newly wed and nearly dead" can be buried once and for all.