Someone visited Beck’s Cafe looking for puns about coffee. I wish I’d had some, what a hoot that would be. So, in lieu of that I offer up these fine jokes on coffee…sure to make you grin whilst savouring that first cup of the day.

That Irish Cofee has quite a kick!
(courtesy of Vikar’s Rant Blog)

An elderly Irish woman goes to the doctor and asks his help to revive her husband’s sex drive …

“What about trying Viagra?” asks the doctor.

“Not a chance,” says Mrs. Murphy. “He won’t even take an aspirin for a headache.”

“No problem.” replies the doctor. “Drop it into his coffee, he won’t even taste it. Try it and then call me in a week to let me know how it worked out.”

A week later, Mrs. Murphy calls the doctor and he inquired as to how things went. “Oh, faith and bejaysus and begorrah it was terrible, just terrible, doctor.”

“What happened?” asks the doctor.

“Well, I did as you advised and slipped it in his coffee. The effect was immediate. He jumped straight up, with a gleam in his eye and with his pants bulging fiercely!!! He swept the cutlery off the table, at the same time ripping my clothes off and then proceeded to make wild, mad, passionate love to me on the tabletop! It was terrible!”

“What was terrible?” said the doctor. “Was the sex not good?”

“Oh no, doctor, the sex was the best I’ve had in 25 years, but I’ll never be able to show me face in Starbucks again.”

Of coffee prices and Men
(Courtesy of Coffee Links)

A man walks into a cafe and asks the waitress how much the coffee is. “It’s $4″ replied the waitress. “Well how much are the refills then?” asks the man. “They are free” says the waitress. “Hmm, well I’ll just take a refill then!”.

Why Coffee is better than Men

* You can make coffee as sweet as you desire.
* A cup of coffee always looks good.
* Coffee smells good.
* Coffee tastes good.
* Coffee doesn’t take up half your bed.
* You can have a good conversation with coffee.
* You can have coffee anywhere, anytime, and not get arrested.
* You can have as many coffees as you desire.
* Coffee doesn’t care what you look like.

(Photo of woman drinking coffee courtesy of lil-azorean’s photos, used under Creative Commons License)

You know when your conversation with your colleague is going down hill. Your voice pitch goes up and your focus on facts goes down. Your heart starts beating faster. If you have a stress ball nearby you start squeezing it such that your fingers leave permanent indents in the ball itself.

Generally the conversation starts well enough only to slowly climb the “Ladder of Conversational Intensity” as depicted in this hand graphic:

So what to do?

One suggestion is slip back to IM – yep, that’d be Instant Messaging.

The thought goes something like this. When your conversation is so intense, and escalates to such a degree that you can’t get past the emotions to have a very important conversation then you need to have some way to remove the friction points of emotion. You also want the conversation to occur in real time, not via email. Enter in IM. You could use Skype (my personal fav), Yahoo IM, GoogleTalk, MSN IM, whatever, but going to that medium can accomplish a few things:

• It removes the emotions. You can’t hear the frustration in real time so while you might still “hear” the other person’s voice, you don’t actually hear it so that may reduce the intensity.

• Typing makes you think. you have to slow down and think as you type. That makes you think twice about what your going to say.

• Typing via IM makes forces your tongue and brain to come back into synch. Ever had a situation whereby your tongue started to let flow communication seemingly on it’s own? That’s what we are trying to avoid here.

So give it a try next time your relational interaction is getting too hot, a little IM may cool you both off and allow you to talk about the issue once again.

(Angry smiley face and source material for graphic courtesy of WP Clipart, thoughts to get me thinking on this from Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal)

(and now an actual conversation….)

High Tech Indian Dude: “So we’ll get together at say 9AM right?”
Becki: “Yep that’s great 9AM”.

*silence*

Becki: “is that 9am India or 9AM my time?”
High Tech Indian Dude: “umm, 9am my time”
Becki: “isn’t that like 1AM my time?”
High Tech Indian Dude: “I have no idea, can you make 9AM India time?”
Becki: “Umm, I’m not sure, I mean I don’t know what time that is for me”
High Tech Indian Dude: “Perhaps you can have more coffee and just be ready for our call”
Becki: *stunned silence* “Yeah well I guess I could do that; wouldn’t it be better to like pick a time that works for us both?”

With business being more and more multi-national and all of us wage-slaves taking on more tasks, having meetings in different time zones (and dimensions) is not uncommon. The problem comes in coordinating those meetings with the right times so people are actually awake at some reasonable hour for everyone and can have an intelligent, collaborative meeting.

The question is how do you do that?

At the Frugal Techie we tackled this problem with the gusto of a St Pauli Girl beer maiden brandishing steins of rich ale to thirsty Oktoberfest patrons. The answer we found was effective and cheap – key measures of a Frugal Tech’s dream!

The key tool is called Time and Date, and it’s alot of things, it’s a calendaring system, a world clock, a calendar generator, world time search, and, most importantly in our caffeine induced view, an outstanding time meeting planner.

Using the tool is a snap,

1. Click to the main page at: http://www.timeanddate.com/
2. Then click on the meeting planner option: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
3. Then you choose your month, day and date
4. Then you can pick up to four cities to display
5. Then press the Show Timetable button and voila! A table of time zones by location. Each one lined up so you know when it’s 9AM Thursday in Boston, it’s 2PM Thursday in Casablanca.

One of the real joys in this tool is that it uses tables and color instead of graphics in it’s output. Because of this it’s easy to use and understand and it’s very fast.

So for your next conference, don’t be left scratching your head on what time to get everyone together, give Time and Date a try and make surprise everyone that you know what their time zone really is!

(Photo of clock courtesy of Elaron’s Photos, used under Creative Commons License)

Just a few jokes to get you giggling (or gaffawing) for hump day! Courtesy of the November 2006 Reader’s Digest, “Laughter, The Best Medicine.

• Funny, Funnier, Funniest
• Funny: Why did the clown eat the dollar bill? (It was her lunch money)
• Funnier: Why do clowns wear loud socks? (So their feet won’t all asleep)
• Funniest: Why did the clown go to the doctor? (He was feeling a little funny)

• A reason to breakup?
• “I had to stop seeing my girlfriend, the biologist,” a guy told his friend.
• “Why?” the friend replied
• “I couldn’t take it anymore” he said. “She kept trying to expose me to different cultures.”

• Be cafeful how you build ‘em!
• The company that makes LEGOs is shutting down its U.S. factory and moving it to Mexico. LEGO employees say it’s their fault becuase they made the factory too easy to take apart and rebuild somewhere else.

(photo of couple laughing courtesy of Bartimaeus Photos, used under Creative Commons license)

So what do you think femininity is anyway? Is it the same as femaleness? This quote,from Feminist Reprise, might start your thinking:

Femininity is men’s idea of what women should look like, not a description of how women actually are—that’s why it’s so much freakin’ work. Femininity has nothing to do with femaleness, which is why drag queens and transsexuals are able to adopt it. And women who are unable and/or unwilling to do femininity convincingly have a life experience of ridicule and ostracization from men, avoidance and fear from other women for being lesbians (whether we are or not), and serious difficulty getting and keeping professional jobs regardless of our qualifications–all of which give the absolute lie to the assertion that conforming to femininity is a “choice.” (source: Feminist Reprise)

There’s alot in that quote to digest and the article as a whole. The piece I’d like us to consider though is that part about conformance. Conforming to standard thoughts and roles on being feminine (or masculine for that matter) and if they matter in society. My thought is that they probably do, at least as a starting basis.

As kids grow they are finding themselves and trying to figure out the world for themselves. And they naturally choose what society projects to them is the norm or the standard for their gender and for what they are trying to do. I think it’s not just society at large (with the incredible influence from advertising) but also smaller peer groups too. The geeks look pretty similar, as do the jocks, the goths and the preppies. Why is that? Conformity, and conforming to how the group will accept you. Acceptance for who we are is a powerful thing in our lives as is acceptance by a peer group for who they think us to be.

I would submit that as trans-women and trans-men that same thing is happening to each of us – how the hell DO we look, act, or smile? The way to at least start is to look at the culture and those around us and learn, like anyone else does. And that generally means conforming to cultural norms. It seems to me that once we do that, as difficult and conformist as that is, then we can figure out own style or way of being if you will.

Back to conforming to femininity though. Is conforming to society standards for femininity what needs to be done or is it a matter of what you want to do? And what the hell is that list of standard femininity anyway?

Here’s another woman’s opinion. Her name is Jennifer Dziura and she’s got some interesting things to say on this topic:

There is also, however, privilege involved in conforming to norms of masculinity (and, as has often been observed, being a tomboy is usually more socially acceptable than being a sissy). And masculinity has, of course, changed greatly over the years (Louis XIV wore tights and, if he’d had a car, wouldn’t have fixed it himself all greasy-James-Dean-style).

And if you reject norms of femininity and masculinity but enjoy the companionship of other humans, you’ll probably find yourself in some kind of academic queer/feminist circle with privilege awarded to those who conform to much, much stricter standards of conformity (here one could digress about (some) lesbians-hating-on-bisexuals, or men being physically barred from campus women’s resource centers, or the disturbing trend of liberal academic institutions to perniciously censor conservative speakers or silence any speech that might be offensive to anyone, or feminist charges of “betrayal” to women who marry, have children, or, god forbid, stay home to raise them; incidentally, I was once bitched out by a co-chair of my university’s LGBT organization for using “LGBT” and “queer” as synonyms, because “LGBT” didn’t include asexual, intersexed, and possibly other groups of queer people).

There is, to continue on this track, a certain amount of privilege in conforming to anything, which is why people conform. Basically by definition. (source: On the Topic of Femininity)

Here’s a thought, maybe the answer to the riddle of what is femininity is something more like this:

It’s not about if you conform or don’t conform but it is about how are you true to yourself? Do you feel comfortable in your own skin enough to not hide in the dark but to be a light in the world? How are you adding value to other’s lives? How are you helping to turn over the dark, ugly places in the world to make them shiny, And how are you blessing the world around you? How are you making it a more beautiful place for you and others to live in? Maybe it’s not so much about what’s on the outside as it is about what’s on the inside of your heart. How’s that “conforming” to being someone others would like to be with, would be drawn to, despite your pink eye shadow, Martha Stewart looks or even “Give ‘em Hell” tattoo.

(photo courtesy of Semshine’s Photos, used under Creative Commons license)