"Waiter! This Coffee Does NOT Taste Like (poop)!"

Mack Hall

Each generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

-- Henry David Thoreau

If you take a cow-floppy and roast it in the oven, what you pull out of the oven is a very hot cow-floppy.

Re-naming a cow-floppy something vaguely exotic sounding, such as Impedimenta-Et-Malbowel-Fleur-de-Loo, won’t change the reality of what a cow-floppy is.

If you do the same things with cat-(poop), it’s still cat-(poop). And you don’t put (poop) in your mouth.

Well, maybe you do.

A recent fashion among imbibers of exotic coffees is something called Kopi Luwak, which is a Sumatran phrase meaning "Those stupid Americans will pay ten dollars a cup for brewed cat-(poop)."

In Sumatra lives a cat called a luwaks…but let me tell you a story about a couple of hunters lost in the woods. Hey, it worked as an opening for Brigadoon, eh?

I imagine a couple of fellows hunting those weird cats in the forests of Sumatra a few years ago, observing the cat-(poop) on the ground much as we note the rabbit-(poop) as we walk our woods.

"Wayne," said Arthur (Wayne and Arthur being traditional Sumatran names), "I’ll bet ya lunch we can persuade those stupid Americans to consume this cat-(poop) and pay for it, too."
"No way," said Wayne. "Americans aren’t that dumb. The Irish, maybe, but not the Americans."

"Yes, they are," replied Arthur. "We merchants persuaded them to wear knee-pants, didn’t we? And backwards baseball caps. And leather holsters for cell ‘phones. All at wildly inflated prices. I tell ya, Americans have no critical thinking skills whatsoever. Tell ‘em over and over that something really dumb is now cool, and they’ll line up obediently to buy it. They’ll buy cat-(poop), all right, if we can only figure out an angle to make it cool."

"You’ve got a point. Hey, we could make this cat-(poop) into coffee, advertise it with a lot of high-falutin’ adjectives, and charge big bucks for it!"

And so it came to pass that cat-(poop) was harvested from the jungle floors of the Far East by barefoot women singing their quaint native songs, such as "Catanooga Chew-Chew," "The Camptown Outhouse," "Splish-Splash, I Was Takin’ a Dump," and "One Ton o’ Guano." It was then carried to well-lit and well-ventilated (no doubt) factories to be ground and packaged. The cat-(poop) coffee was then exported to the USA, where a cuppa cost more than the workers made in a day.

Cat-(poop) coffee was given the Imprimutter and Nihil Thermostat by the talk shows, and the American people obeyed and bought, leading to new forms of discourse in the coffee shops of this great land:

"Is this cat-(poop) fair-trade?"

"Waiter, my coffee doesn’t taste like (poop)."

"Today’s Senior Special is one egg, one sausage, toast, and coffee with cat-(poop)."

The chalk-boards in coffee kiosks in all the college towns will soon feature expensive (poop)y coffees from all over the globe:

Jamaican Blue Mountain Cat Diarrhea
Australian Dingo Dooky
Tim Horton’s Canadian Loon Plop
French Roast DeCaf DeCatte La Belle Stool Specimen
All-American Cuppa Yankee Doo-Doo
Brazilian Number Two
Danish Defacatte
Portuguese Potty
English Royal Flush
X-treem Norwegian Fecal Impaction Action
Colombian Colo-rectal Mocha

I sure hope FEMA lays in a supply before the next hurricane.