Regarding health care reform, I wasn’t on a warpath months ago when it was the topic du jour, but I was close.  Today, it’s financial regulation.  I’m fascinated and repelled, at the same time, by the economic meltdown and its causes.  I’ve been compelled to break it down into terms I can grasp and, having done so, am angry and disappointed in my historic belief that there was nothing I could have done personally to stop it.  That’s not hubris, or lack thereof.  Human beings who put their pants on one leg at a time, just like you and me, created this mess.  With a shared voice, those of us who cocked our heads and asked, “Can they do that?” or thought, “Dick and Jane and their friends can’t afford to buy those houses,” could’ve chosen to speak up loud and clear to those in authority and registered our concerns.  I didn’t.  Did you?

“Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”  – Margaret Mead

Unfortunately, the mess is the mess.  Going forward, we can only hope to learn from the economic collapse and try not to let it happen again.  But let’s back up for a minute (or ten or twenty) and talk about how it happened.   And stay with me.  I’m sorting it out as I go along.

None of this global economic debacle matters a wit unless we understand how it personally affects us and/or our neighbors.  We care about our neighbors, yes?

Okay, so Dick and Jane want to buy a house for $1 million.  Forget that they’re underemployed and that their income can’t support a jumbo loan.  Put aside the fact that they have no money to put down on the house.  The Bank of Bubba wants to give them a loan because loans make money for the bank through interest accrued over the 15 to 30 years Dick and Jane will take to pay the money bank.  They give Dick and Jane the $1 million, who in turn give it to Dave, the developer, or Henry, the homeowner.  In other words, the Bank of Bubba is out $1 million and Dave or Henry puts it in their pocket.  Many have conspired to inflate the value of Dick and Jane’s home, while others have been stupid enough to think that housing prices would continue to rise at ridiculous rates until the end of time.

For the simplicity of this post, one of two things happened.  Either the Bank of Bubba kept the loan and watched as Dick and Jane continued to fall behind in their mortgage payments, or they bundled the loan up with a hundred other mortgages (say each one was for $1 million) and sold them to outside investors.  We’ll call one outside investor The Bank of Yang, headquartered in China.  They agreed to pay Bubba ten thousand dollars over the $1 million per loan (these are random numbers, but the concept is sound) because the Bank of Yang believed, ultimately, the loans would yield more than ten thousand.  They didn’t.  They won’t.  Dick and Jane have either walked away, declared bankruptcy or fallen six months behind in their payments, never to catch up.

Okay, so I have a friend who works in Human Resources at a company in Santa Barbara that basically makes a product used to put out big, bad industrial fires.  Last year was one of their best on record and yet she had to fire several employees over the last few months.  Why?  Because their publicly owned parent company, who we’ll call Bertha, had lost gobs of money they invested in their stock portfolio, which they use to service pensions.  Bertha has to fund the pensions any way they can, even if it means letting people go in profitable subsidies of the corporation.

Bertha’s stock portfolio was ultimately decimated because Dick and Jane couldn’t repay The Bank of Bubba or The Bank of Chang, both of which are enormous financial institutions suddenly taking a nosedive.  This created a lack of confidence in financial markets, the “henny-penny, the sky is falling!” scenario ensued, investors freaked and either sold stock or stopped buying, the market tanked and bye-bye ten years of $$ gain.

My husband has never traveled a lot during his current job, but now I can’t pay his boss to send him on a business trip (when I would then stay in my pajamas all day, read People magazine and turn on Oprah, serve the girls ice cream for dinner, stay up into the wee hours and watch chick flicks).  Company wide cutbacks mean he doesn’t buy a plane ticket to Okeefanokee (the airlines lose money), he doesn’t book a hotel room (hotel loses revenue, fires two bell-boys from the night shift), doesn’t eat out at the Okeefanokee Café (they fire the sous chef and the dishwasher), and doesn’t buy souvenir trinkets at the airport for the girls (small companies like Trinkets ‘R Us watch their orders go way down and can no longer afford to buy health insurance for their twenty-four employees).

Dick and Jane can’t pay their mortgage so a teacher in Wisconsin loses her job because the sub prime loan fiasco has affected local and state governments.  It wouldn’t be impossible to link the proliferation of Highway Patrol officers sitting around with speed guns back to Dick and Jane.  Here in Los Angeles, our mayor has asked homicide detectives to reduce their overtime in the name of budget cuts.  Traffic cops make less money than detectives and write revenue-generating tickets.  It’s not a ridiculous suggestion.

I’ve got stacks of notes I want to touch upon here, but this will have to be part one of two or three parts.  Eventually, I want to make a point that encourages us to steer the conversation regarding financial regulation.  And by “us”, I don’t mean Democrats or Republicans.  Individuals from every point on the ideological spectrum have been affected, even though Senate Republicans are the ones digging their heels in and refusing to even debate the issue.  That’s insane.

More insanity to come in parts two and three.  I’m going to get you as riled as I’ve become and together we’re going to make a bipartisan difference.  (Okay, now I’m insane.)

On the 3^rd day of Christmas…coffee, my true love gave to me THREE cups of French roast –

I’m flying!  Had coffee this morning with my ex-fiancé I hadn’t seen in eighteen years (that’s another post), and then proceeded to consume three cups of half-caff French roast to be true to my 18 days and counting and while my feet are still firmly planted on the ground, my arms are flapping wildly with all the caffeine.  (Just look at that run-on sentence!)  It’s a wonder I can keep my fingers on the keyboard to type this up.

What can I say about French roast, especially if it’s from Peet’s?  Like a puppy’s breath, it’s perfect.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not a complete coffee snob.  If you invite me over for Folger’s (and again, do invite me), I’ll happily drink it as long as you brew a strong cup.  Weak coffee is like light beer.  It’s a half-ass version of a very fine product.  Why bother?  Go for the real thing and pay the consequences (if there any) later.

We spoke yesterday (didn’t we speak?) about Trader Joe’s and how it’s important and good for property values if there’s one nearby.  Well, if there’s a Peet’s within a two-mile radius of your home, you know you’ve arrived.  Peet’s are not ubiquitous like Starbucks.  Far from it.  Maybe that’s why I find their coffee so alluring, because it seems as if they bestow their establishments upon neighborhoods they deem most worthy.  I thank them.

I bought a pound of half-caff French Roast this morning at my Peet’s and had them grind it on number 4.  Their strong, espresso grind is a number 3 on their machine and they grind for a cone filter on number 5, so I split the difference.  The closer you grind to espresso, the more flavor your coffee is going to have, especially if you do one good scoop per cup of water (marked on your carafe or on the coffee maker itself).  Some people do one scoop per two cups, but I say “feh”.  Don’t be an amateur.  You may grow hair on your chest, but you can always shave it off.

French Roast is dark and strong like my men.  Kidding.  My husband and ex-fiancé are both blonde.  Oh, and did I mention that my ex-fiancé is gay?

Today’s coffee gets a perfect 5.

Tomorrow: 4 coffee beans AND Everyone should have a gay ex-fiancé

DailyCupofJo.com is as much about my addiction to coffee as anything else.  And yes, it’s an addiction.  Without my morning/afternoon/evening cup, I get headaches, okay?  Okay?!  So while I’m not proud that I can’t live without the stuff, I am proud that I ran 3 ½ miles today during a break in the rain, and in between the hot chocolate I made and drank for my Examiner.com article, and the gingerbread latte I slurped for these 18 days that I’ll tell you more about later.  The mileage was as much for my LA Marathon training as it was to counteract the extra, empty calories I consumed today strictly because of the holiday season.  Most of us are accosted with goodies left and right during December and I’m afraid if we partake in all of it without doing some exercise, too, we’ll all gain a collective gazillion pounds here on the liberal left coast and possibly sink into the ocean from the added weight.  I know the conservative Eastern half of California probably wouldn’t miss us, but they’d eventually become pinkos, too, because that’s apparently what happens when you live too close to the ocean.

So, I did the 8 days of Thanksgiving last month and it was a HUGE success.  I’ll be recording and then touring with the song next year.  The 18 days of Christmas…coffee, probably not.  There will be no 17 sips of Sumatra or 3 French roasts; just 2 ½ weeks of coffee advice, reviews and observations to take us into December 25^th, where gift opening, especially if you have children, is so much easier with a perfect cup.

Don’t drink coffee?  Neither does my husband (and yet we still got married – go figure) so I’ll hit him up for a word or two about tea.

Don’t celebrate Christmas?  Those 8 nights of Hanukkah can be pretty rough, too, without a little pick-me-up.  Add whiskey and some whipped cream, raise your mug and say Mazel Tov.

I love their secret codes.

One: I visited my local Starbucks because I’ve received not one but two of their gift cards already.  I waited patiently behind three customers, one of whom must have been snarky because the guy who took my order was pretty surly about something.  I asked him for a tall, low-fat, one-pump gingerbread latte with whipped cream and he asked me three times if I wanted non-fat and three times I told him no, because while I like drinking non-fat by itself, I don’t think it belongs in coffee.  Fortunately, my barista in the elf ears and hat was pleasant, though he only knows what he knows and he handed me a “tall, non-fat gingerbread latte!”  I wasn’t in the mood to get into a discussion on the merits of fat in milk, so I took the drink and figured it was one less mile I’d have to run tomorrow (okay, one less quarter of a mile).  I order the sweet drinks with just one pump of the syrup because otherwise it completely overpowers the taste of the coffee.  The non-fat option made it taste kind of watery, but as soon as I tasted that ginger, it felt like Christmas.  On a scale of one to five, today’s drink got a 3, but with low or full fat milk, it would have easily received 4 ½ stars.
Tomorrow: Trader Joe’s Wintry Blend.  (Isn’t this fun?)

I heard “All You Need Is Love” on the radio today, which made me think of that Blackberry commercial recently that sadly uses the Beatles song to promote their product.  The spot ends with the words “Do what you love…love what you do.”  My mind travels in directions I can’t always control and I contemplated how smug and dangerous that slogan is, because if all of us tried hopelessly to do what we loved and loved what we did, all of us, who would clean out the Andy Gump porta johns?

We did some construction on our house last year and I was, regrettably and coincidentally, always on site Thursday afternoons when the guy came in his truck with the giant cylindrical-shaped cab on the back, took this large blue hose, entered the Andy Gump and proceeded to suck out the contents left inside.  You’re making a face, right?  Well, let me tell you, if you love what you do, generally you smile.  This guy never did.  Happy was not a word I would use to describe the look on his face whenever I saw him.  I think one afternoon I saw the right corner of his mouth curve up slightly when I offered him a Red Bull with my right hand while I held my nose with the left.  But an actual smile?  Yeah, no.  And what about the guy at the 7-11 or Piggly Wiggly selling you whipped cream at 4pm on Thanksgiving afternoon, because you forgot and who wants pumpkin pie without it?  You think he loves what he does?

My point: let’s be careful with sanctimonious slogans and pandering quotes.  Not all of us can be Jeff Probst (he accepted his Emmy Award last September and shared with the audience that he was “living his dream” – go figure).  In the grand scheme of things, maybe we should just all try and do what we’re supposed to do, and not feel bad about it.  I love what some people do for a living because then I don’t have to do it myself.  Can that be enough?

Well, Sunday at my local park I was at an informal dog party (is there any other kind?) finishing my 3^rd Krispy Kreme doughnut because I’m constitutionally incapable of eating less than two of them if they’re cold, four if they’re hot (Sunday, I split the difference) when it became time for party games.  “Pin the tail on the donkey” was out of the question because dogs have that opposable thumb issue, but dancing is right up their alley.  The rules were simple: dance with your dog.   A judge then walked around to decide which pair deserved to be crowned the next Fred and Ginger.  (Wow, that’s a dusty reference.  How ‘bout Baby and Johnny?)  My middle daughter danced with our dog Shelby, and the judge rewarded them with 1st prize: a squeaky chew toy.  My daughter was proud.  I was tickled, because only in L.A. does the judge at the dog birthday party end up being Dean McDermott of Tori Spelling fame.

It was random, like the time Slash showed up at a lasertag party my youngest daughter went to this past summer.  I’m not comparing Dean McDermott to Slash – they look nothing alike and only one of them plays the guitar really well (as far as I know).  My point is, only in L.A. do you come across the famous (I didn’t say “important”) and semi-famous as you go about your daily grind (there’ll be more of these coffee references littered throughout the site).  We rarely make a big deal out of any of it because it’s not a big deal, not here anyway – but it is amusing.  Today, the Time Warner cable guys were over fixing my wireless connection and they asked me to open a large file, like a photo, to see about the speed of the upload.  I was in my email and clicked on a 6694KB picture that my friend had just sent me from the dog party.  And there he was, Dean McDermott, standing among us, so I shared my stupid little story with the Time Warner guys.

Daily Cup of Jo is so that I can share it with you, too.

Thanks for reading.