• Hear about the weird stuff we go through which seems to make people feel better about their own lives
• Get a good deal on coffee now and then
• Satiate your thirst for new music options as we chat about that
• Get the inside scoop on the coffee trade (like dark roast doesn't have more caffeine than medium roast)

• Take it to the next level and become friends with Doug and get an inside peak at the cavernousge genius behind Foggy Bottom!

British Colonel John Hunt, leader of the expedition, chooses two Brits out of his team to leave the South Col where they are encamped at 25,940 feet elevation and make a bid for the summit. The prize; to be the first to climb the world’s tallest mountain, Mt Everest at 29,035 feet. But hours later, intimidated by a razor-like ridge, they return to camp.

The next day, Colonel Hunt turns to his back-up plan – a beekeeper from New Zealand and a local Sherpa guide. Probably the strongest of the group yes, but not Hunt’s ideal plan. It would be far better for British nationals to bag the summit. After all, the world was watching. The beekeeper, Edmund Hillary, and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay now had their turn.

World War II had ravaged Great Britain, tumbling the great empire from her long-held position of world power and influence. She could no longer maintain her colonies. The country was poor, relying upon loans from the U.S. (which they paid off in February 2007) to finance her slow reconstruction. Cripe. Groveling before one her old colonies.

One bright spot had been the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II a year before for maybe a new Queen meant better times ahead. It might have only been a straw to grasp, but even a small hope is still hope.

The Brits needed this mountain – this heroic achievement. And ironically, it now rested upon the shoulders of two men who were, well, not Brits. And one of them was a beekeeper (a beekeeper!). Hillary and Norgay had set out in middle-of-the-night darkness and had been gone much longer than the Brits of the day prior. No doubt Colonel Hunt wondered if like George Mallory (“Because it’s there.”) and Sandy Irving of 30 years before, Hillary and Norgay had disappeared never to be heard from again.

February 24, 2009

Next to the nasty winter we’ve been having, the common topic over the counter has been the spiraling economy. It reminds me of a story about the Italian mountaineer, Walter Bonatti (b. 1930).

July 1961

Three Italians, Walter Bonatti, Andrea Oggioni, and Roberto Gallieni arrive at hut on the col de la Fourche in the Alps. It is their jumping off point to be the first to climb the Central Pillar of Freney, a smooth rock obelisk 400 feet high that sits atop a 2,000-foot pedestal of broken granite. The three Italians were shocked to find four Frenchman already in the hut. Two teams. One goal: to be the first. In that unusual spirit of sudden camaraderie found only in the wilderness, they form one team.

Day One: climbed about a third up the pillar. The cracks were still heavily iced, slowing their progress. They bivouac for the night.

Day Two: reached the base of the obelisk when a brewing snow storm struck. Thunder and lightning flashed and roared. A Frenchman was struck and badly shocked, but able to continue. They settled down to wait out the snowy inferno.

Day Three: the storm intensifies. Summiting is impossible. So is retreat. But what storms deliver in hostility is juxtaposed by their duration. Storms of malice never last long. They would settle in and wait it out.

1987. I’m a manager at Wendy’s in Ann Arbor. These are the beginning of the boom days for fast food. We have more business than we can staff for. Everyday is a fight for survival to fend off the massing hordes at our doors. In these days of chaos, the franchise owner decides to put up lighted glowboards in the restaurants. On these glowboards we, the store managers, are to use special fluorescent erasable markers to list daily specials – you know, to give the place that homey Andy Griffith feel. Right. Can we please just live in the world as it is? Not the way we’d like it to be?

I hated these boards with the same intensity I hate those pictures of us they had to put up for everyone to look at (Like I really cared as the quote beneath my floating head said). By the second day I was out of ideas. I mean, we serve burgers, fries, and drinks. How many different specials can you come up with here? Where other store managers seemed to be able to play the game, I could not. My boss would come in time and again to find the glowboard pulsing in an incandescent smear of some poorly erased message. Picking up on my cynicism, some of the crew began using the board for personal messages to each other. “Ask Dewey why he always has a roll of quarters in his pocket!” I had to be careful.