rattus rattus’ blog

Here is a simple recipe for making good coffee:

• Get good green beans, e.g. Jamaica Blue Mountain.
• Roast them yourself using a home coffee roaster.
• Wait about 24 hours.
• Use a good burr mill and grind at the appropriate grade.
• Brew the coffee immediately after grinding.
• If you want espresso use a good espresso machine, e.g. a Vibiemme Domobar.
• For coffee other than espresso use a French press.
• In any case use fresh water.

For more in depth information about making coffee I recommend Wikipedia’s entry on Coffee, Sweet Maria’s Coffee Roasting Library and The Coffee And Coffee Makers’ Guide (on fantes.com until 2014).

If you follow this to the core you will get delicious coffee, yet in no way is following even the best recipe a guarantee for good coffee. In fact, a complex thing such as coffee is likely to show you every side of life pretty much always.

Someone uttered: Stop making sense!
Being asked: What’s making sense?
I answered: We are.

And that’s where all the trouble and the fun started.

I was just listening to Dion‘s album “Bronx in Blue” when it occurred to me why Blues is called Blues: It’s because it is not Black and White.

Why then Blues is not Reds? Nonsense! But, why listen to a liar like me if you could as well listen to Dion? E.g. at NPR‘s World Cafe “Dion Rediscovers the Blues on ‘Bronx’“. Enjoy.

When we just started to grow up, when we are yet a little child and everything around us is still big, huge, high, and tall, we have no idea what a horizon is. As time goes by, we get taller and taller and we overlook a lot more of what’s around us. As we start to actually see a horizon we get an idea of what it is and where it might be. Eventually we grow older and the horizon moves away, far and further, into the distance. So far, far away that … one day we find it again, in ourselves.

Whatever this means, it came up listening to “The Horizon Has Been Defeated” by Jack Johnson, to be found on his great album “on and on”.

Imagine you have just found a beautiful box and you decide to put into it all that wonderful senseless stuff that compiled up all around over the years. On the box cover you write in big letters NONSENSE.

Of course, that makes sense. A box that holds nonsense in it might well be named after its contents as such. Certainly, we could argue about what nonsense means. But, let’s keep it simple. Let’s say, nonsense means that it makes no sense; that it’s stupid, confusing, and absurd. A nonsense text, for instance, could even be paradox, contradicting, or plain wrong.

No, wait, what does the cover say? It says that the contents do not make any sense. But the contents do not make any sense. That’s why we put them in the box. So, the box says that (its) things that do not make any sense do not make any sense. But it does make sense that they are in there.

You see, and this is also what flUxUs is about.

It is not as it is not.