Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Caribou & Starbucks Take Over The World

So you think you’ve seen everything (or most everything), but then you see something that makes you pause…look again…and say, “no way!”

Yesterday I was walking in the South side of Kellogg Blvd going from work to my car when I saw just such a thing. I looked and I saw a squirrel on top of a garbage can. The fact that the squirrel was on top of the can is not what was so interesting, it was what I saw on my double take that made me stop and stare.

The squirrel jumped down from the trash can and was carrying a cup from a gourmet coffee shop in its mouth. And it didn’t just drop down from the can with it, but then – to my shock – it started bounding across the lawn toward a tree with the cup still in its mouth.

At this point I had pulled out my phone that has a camera on it, but I knew that I had to get fairly close in order to get a picture where you could actually see the intended subject. Once I started moving toward it, the squirrel began to climb the tree…STILL HOLDING THE COFFEE CUP!!!!

By the time I was able to take my first picture, the frightened squirrel had lost its grip on the cup and it had tumbled to the ground. The squirrel jumped down and attempted to get it a few more times before resigning to get away from me by itself. So, my first picture shows the squirrel with the cup on the ground, and the second is when the cup had fallen and the squirrel is hidden by the tree. With my final picture, I was able to get fairly close to the tree so that you could (somewhat) clearly see the squirrel and the coffee cup.



So, in my endless pursuit to answer the why questions of life, I asked the same question as to why this occurred and I came up with two plausible answers:

  1. I was on a serious caffeine buzz and what I saw was merely a hallucination that had the creative power to produce these digital images. You may laugh, but with the post-modern “whatever you believe is true…can be true” kind of thinking, this should not be laughed at. (but in reality, this is a completely stupid and asinine idea, so yes, please laugh away at this idea with me)
  2. The consumer concerns for mom & pop coffee shops has come to a full and terrible conclusion…Starbucks and Caribou (combined) have infiltrated and taken over every market possible, and all types of…animals…are flocking to their seductive call.

If I’ve missed some observation of dire importance or a conclusion just must be made, let me know so that we can all learn from each other.

I’ve gotta go, my Caribou Coffee Mocha is getting a bit cold…maybe I need a refill…?


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