Coffee vs. Beer

James Lileks, reporting from a Caribou Coffee outlet:

It's just a coffee shop. It's the modern version of the neighborhood bar, except that everyone's wired instead of sloshed, no one's smoking, no sad drunk is playing the same song over and over on the jukebox, and the window does not consist of a 3-foot-by-2-foot slit bricked up with glass blocks.

On the other hand, this is no place to drown your sorrows. You can't drown your sorrows at a coffee shop. All you can do is wake them up and jab them with a sharp stick and make them run around. Drowned sorrows never stay dead, but at least they stop moving.

Capt. Leland Stottlemeyer, on last night's episode of Monk:

Don't you have an off-switch, Monk? Here, have mine. Beer: Nature's off-switch.