Nirvana = Coffee, Coldplay = I'll Call You Sometime

With a host of social problems that cry out for fixing and scientific mysteries that demand solving, it's always a pleasure to report on those institutions that are on the front line of investigating and helping us understand the ways of our world. Via the good folks at Buzzfeed.com I stumbled upon a groundbreaking piece of research into the inter-connection between musical tastes and promiscuity that was done by the socially-conscious people at Tastebuds.fm, a musical dating site. As you can see, this chart (click on it to enlarge) measures which fans of a particular musical artist are more likely to "come back for coffee" on the first date.

Is it any surprise that the fans of the only Seattle-based group on the chart are most likely to equate coffee with sex? Nomenclature as destiny in the case of Coldplay? Is it possible for Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich's ego to get any bigger? Got to believe The Strokes, of all bands, are a bit disappointed with these results; even the 40+ year defunct Beatles are more of an aphrodisiac! With Gorillaz charting so respectably, one wonders where that other great cartoon band, The Archies, would fall on the graph. Ahead of Coldplay I'm sure. Am I, who saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers way back in 1985 when they were actually a pretty good band, getting rock-senile because it took me like fifteen minutes to figure out what RHCP stood for?

Not to be outdone by the wonks at Tastebuds, the crack research team here at spitouyourgum (admittedly twiddling their thumbs lately with nothing better to do than ascertaining the obsolete date of steam shovels and determining the continuing commercial viability of Fresca) quickly crunched some numbers and came up with the following data.

• No surprise, I guess, but the people who responded most enthusiastically to the question, "Would you like to come up and check out my collection of Star Wars knick-knacks memorabilia?" are fans of the Alan Parsons Project.
• Surprisingly, to me at least, the people who asked, "What's coffee?" were neither Jonas Brothers fans nor Justin Bieber fans, but overwhelmingly fans of Dan Fogelberg.
• "It's too late for coffee, would you like to come up for a martini instead?" elicited the most favorable responses from the Sinatra-loving set.
• "I hate to be so personal on a first date, but could you come up and help me lance the troublesome boil on back?" scored high with Talking Heads fans.
• Devotees of the Motley Crue oeuvre frothed at the mouth to the question, "Presently I don't have anywhere to 'go up to' but would you like to go to 7-11 and distract the cashier while getting some Slurpees so that I can rip us off some burritos?"
• Fans of Bauhaus couldn't be found to participate in the survey.
• Ironically, fans of Bare Naked Ladies were the ones who scored highest on the question, "Would you like to come up and see the literature promoting the Abstinence Club I'm co-vice-president of?"
• For the forty-fifth consecutive year, fans of the Velvet Underground easily outdistanced all comers when it came to favorably responding to the statement, "Want to shoot some heroin? We'll probably have no interest in sex then, but we can sit around and nod off while talking about Kant." Time to retire that question, I guess.
• Regardless of their own musical tastes, participants in the survey unanimously voted Bob Dylan fans the sexiest and left the testing site involuntarily singing Bob's "One More Cup of Coffee" song.

I Dream Of Bad Coffee

A quasi- chicken-and-egg quandry has reared its head early this morning. Are dreams the reaction to the mind's wanderings or the foreshadowing of events to come? I'm sure the answer is both, but this morning's dream really has me thinking about what comes first. The dream in question actually woke me up for good this morning. I was in some dumpy diner or service station somewhere, and I poured myself a big cup of coffee from the pot that was sitting there. Well, good God almighty, that was some bad bad coffee. We're talking coughing, retching, spit it out coffee. The thing is, not only did I see myself reacting this way in the dream, I could actually taste that bad bad coffee in my dream (and what an aftertaste--I swear I tasted it after I woke up). The curious thing is that just a couple days ago, for what reason I have no clue, I was wondering about whether the senses of smell and taste "work" in dreams. When I was thinking this stray thought, I couldn't recall any dreams of mine where I could actually smell or taste anything. Makes me kind of wonder about the cosmic shenaningans going on behind all of our backs when I can think about tasting in dreams and sure enough, soon after I'm tasting wretched coffee in my slumber. Thanks for the info, Mr. Sandman, but you could have been a little kinder in your lesson: Guinness, Canada Dry Ginger Ale, or Tropicana freshly squeezed orange juice straight from the carton--next time.

But then I realized, shortly after shaking the bad taste upon waking, that this morning would be one of the few mornings where I'd be making my own coffee instead of buying it somewhere. You have to understand my culinary ineptitude and insecurity: I'd much rather chance a cup of Joe from a coffee pot like the one in my dream than one brewed by my own hands. So maybe my dream was all about forewarning me of the misery to come and getting me up early enough so I could endure and recover from the experience of drinking my own coffee in time for me to get to work this afternoon.

Who knows? Certainly not the on-line community of dream experts. Yes, I even indulged in a little oneirology this morning, which is the scientific study of dreams, though if I had had to guess, I would have said the word means the study of self-administered x-rays. Anyway, the half-dozen or so sites I checked out didn't have much to say about the sense of taste in dreams: a "secondary" sense that infrequently occurs in dreams.

All I know is I've never tasted worse coffee in my life (awake or dreaming) than that coffee I dreamt of this morning. But maybe that's a good thing. This real, "homemade" java I'm presently sipping doesn't taste that bad at all, though I suspect it's the stuff of most people's nightmares.