Life “A Venti of Fucking What?”
I spent last weekend in Vancouver, attending its fringe festival and staying in the cheap, conveniently located, and charmingly bizarre Shaughnessy Village, which was like staying on a boat. The rooms are tiny, like cabins, and the place is decked in nautical kitsch, from the model boats to the non-functional portholes everywhere to the shuffleboard (shuffleboard) to the, uh, uncircumcised sculptures.
Folks in Vancouver were maddeningly polite, except for a refreshingly cranky—and vulgar—cafe owner who had posted this sign on his espresso machine:
(The smaller note at the top says: “Unrully [sic] or unsupervised children may be given a free double espresso.”)
“You like that sign?” the owner asked. My friend and I said yes, that we were from Seattle, that we thought it was funny. “The coffee industry is fucking bullshit,” he growled. “It so fucking pretentious. I mean, venti, in Italian, means twenty. So you go over there and ask for a venti and they’ll ask: ‘A venti of fucking what?’ It’s ridiculous. You know what I mean?” We said we did.
But the most memorable thing in Vancouver—more striking than the socialist architecture, the procedural politeness, and the over-the-counter codeine in the drug stores—was this tag, which we saw in several places:
wow. i'm totally ripping that tag off and screening myself a tshirt.