Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 19

Diedrich used to be my favorite coffee chain. They were relatively small, and mostly based in Orange County – in 2005 they had a something like 20-25 cafes there, plus two each in LA and San Diego… and three each in Houston and Denver.*

The coffee was great. The atmosphere was great. I used to go to the Tustin and UCI locations all the time with friends and for takeout. The PCH location in Laguna Beach was a great place to hang out after the city’s fireworks show at the beach, have something warm (the ocean breeze is usually cool at night, even in July) and wait for traffic to die down. The one at the Irvine Spectrum was a post-movie and post-book-shopping hangout spot until the Barnes & Noble next to it moved (and added a Starbucks). Diedrich was off in a corner, and without the bookstore traffic it closed.

They also had a bit of an attitude. The cup sleeves were labeled “Of course it’s hot!” They sold T-shirts and travel mugs with slogans like “Not so big” and “Venti, Schmenti.” (I need to check whether that mug is still kicking around somewhere. I know I still had it in 2017.)

In 2006, after founder Martin Diedrich stepped down to focus on a single artisan coffee house in Newport Beach, Starbucks bought all the company-owned locations. There were a couple of franchised kiosks and one of the Texas cafes, but that was it. Over the next few years, Starbucks shut down or converted them all. Sometimes both: the one in Tustin had always been busy as a Diedrich. After it had been assimilated, though, I never saw it full, and Starbucks closed it in 2008. Amusingly, Martin Diedrich opened a second Kéan location there, and it’s still going strong 15 years later.

The last two Diedrich locations after the buyout were both in Irvine. Peet’s bought the one across from UCI in 2008, and the one at Barranca and Culver some time later. Within a year the Diedrich website was only handling online orders, and even that had disappeared by 2015.

I hate that Starbucks bought an (apparently) successful business and ran it into the ground. But I’m glad Kéan is still around, even if it’s too far from where I live now to visit regularly.

Notes

*It’s always funny when a chain has a whole bunch of locations in a smallish region, and then one or two halfway across the continent or even farther. Around the same time Diedrich’s was at its height, Kelly’s Coffee had something like 35 locations in Southern California, a handful in neighboring states…and one in Riyadh!

Wiki-Walking to Related Companies

Everything above is from my own memory or from blog posts I made across 2005 through 2015 (the later ones are completely incorporated into this page now, and I’m redirecting them here). Except I couldn’t remember which year the company sold off the retail business. So I checked out the Wikipedia article.

Apparently the company owned the US franchise rights for Gloria Jean from 1999, when they bought Coffee People, through 2009, when they sold the rights (back?) to Gloria Jean International. And then Green Mountain Coffee Roasters outbid Peet’s to buy what was left of the company. And Green Mountain is now…Keurig Dr. Pepper???

Coffee People appears to have been local chain in the Pacific Northwest, which explains why I wasn’t familiar with them, but now that I see the name again, I do remember it coming up in articles about the Starbucks buyout.

And the founders of Coffee People also went on to launch a new indie coffeehouse after leaving their chain behind! The good news is that Jim and Patty’s is still around, and still run by one of the founders! The bad news is that Jim Roberts died last year, and the two cafes are in serious financial trouble.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a weird cartoon. In a lot of good ways.

It’s sort of a combination of the movie and the original comics, combining the art style (now animated!) with the movie’s voice cast and a longer run time (eight episodes on Netflix) that makes it possible to actually dig into the characters and story. It’s sort of a reunion show, sort of a remake, and sort of a “What If…”

Because at the end of the anime’s* first episode it, well, takes off into a totally new direction, telling a new story focusing this time on Ramona Flowers and her relationships with her various “evil exes,” reacting to, bouncing off of and critiquing the comics and movie. (Several characters actually start filming the movie during the show…which goes off the rails in yet another direction.)

The craziness is dialed up to 11, with video game, comic book and anime tropes used to reexamine who these characters are. Scott could easily have become the next Evil Ex, and he had a tendency to rewrite his own backstory to make him look better. And Ramona wasn’t entirely blameless in her past relationships either, and she has to come to terms with that. By the end, you even have a better handle on most of her exes as people who made some really bad choices after their breakups.

And an over-the-top super-hero/villain team-up against Scott’s real arch-enemy. Who isn’t Gideon Graves. (For that matter, Gideon Graves isn’t really Gideon Graves either.)

It’s both wackier and more introspective than the source material, brings to the surface some of the themes that tended to get glossed over, and makes it clear that yes, those character flaws are character flaws.

Bryan Lee O’Malley made a remark in an interview about how he started the comics in his mid-20s, finished them at 31, and came back to the story in his 40s with a new perspective. (Huh, in some ways it’s the Tehanu of Scott Pilgrim, only with extra hijinks instead of depression.)

Lots of fun, highly recommended, and ultimately a better story than the movie (which is still a lot of fun, just highly condensed and shallow).

Very flexible, and can sync bookmarks across many different devices and browsers. Floccus is a solid replacement for Xmarks, though you do have to choose your own cloud storage. On the plus side, you get to choose your own cloud storage, and whether you use your own Nextcloud server, or store the bookmarks encrypted on Google Drive or another supported service, you know who has access to them, which is a big bonus for privacy.

It doesn’t sync other settings or send the current tab to another browser. But you can use Firefox Sync or Vivaldi Sync or whatever for their other features, just turn bookmarks off and let Floccus take care of those. Floccus can sync currently-open tabs, but it does it by actually syncing which tabs you have open, not just making them available or sending one on demand.

The desktop browser add-on is mostly set-and-forget and you just use your regular browser bookmarks. For as many browsers as you want. I’ve been using it to sync between Firefox and Chrome, and more recently Vivaldi, since 2020. While it had some problems syncing early on, it’s been solid for so long I can’t even remember the last time I encountered a sync error*.

When using Nextcloud for storage, it syncs faster with an app-specific password than with your regular login.

The mobile app syncs your bookmarks to itself, since most mobile browsers don’t let add-ons access their bookmarks. It took all of 30 seconds to set up the Android version with my Nextcloud, and the initial sync didn’t take much longer. The UI is simple, letting you do the basics of adding, removing, editing and moving bookmarks. They open in your default browser, and you can share a link from your browser to Floccus to bookmark it.

An odd but appealing mix of whimsy and horror, turning portal fantasy tropes on their heads. Baba Yaga, the ultimate witch of Russian folklore, is the quest-giver. Summer’s home life is shaped by her mother’s severe anxiety. A wolf isn’t a threat, but a staunch ally (and a were-creature who turns into a migratory house at night – you thought Baba Yaga’s house was the only one that walked around?). A lich refuses to move on until he finishes his to-read list. Geese are fierce warriors (OK, that part’s realistic, except these geese carry spears too), which is fortunate, because 11-year-old Summer herself isn’t going to be able to take down the mysterious Queen-In-Chains causing the rot that’s slowly destroying Orcus all by herself…or is she?

It’s a bit less cohesive than some of Vernon/Kingfisher’s more recent YA/older kids’ novels like Illuminations and A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, partly because it was originally a serial and partly because it’s a very kitchen-sink kind of fantasy world where anything goes, from an officious but kind-hearted goofy birds to creepy spider-horses. But it’s stuck in my head more than Minor Mage.

A cross-country road trip with a Sharpie pen, correcting grammatical and spelling errors in road and shop signs.

I’ve mellowed on the subject of typos since this came out, but it was still an interesting read. The best road trip stories are not just a list of events and locations, they’re about how the travelers change over the course of the journey. Deck starts out so hyperbolic and grandiose that he comes off as pretentious, but quickly discovers the issue is more nuanced – and more socially fraught – than he’d expected.

Retail workers vs. corporate policy, trying to avoid stepping in racial stereotypes, indie shopowners who might be more interested in fixing a misspelling but not have the resources to get it fixed.

It’s also a bit more complex than the “two friends on a road trip.” He has three different companions, one on each leg of the trip, each of whom brings a new perspective, and they get into the prescriptive vs. descriptive approaches to grammar.

And in the end, the legal consequences of doing the occasional “stealth” correction without asking first, as the National Park Service pressed charges for “vandalism” of a sign at the Grand Canyon.

Personal Notes

When I was in college in the mid-1990s, I kept a “Bent Offerings” newspaper cartoon on my bulletin board. One person was scrawling “I before E…” on a wall. Another was correcting a menu, muttering, “It’s Brussels Sprouts, not Brussel Sprouts!”. A third was examining someone’s T-shirt, disapprovingly asking, “Is that how they taught you to use an apostrophe?” The strip was captioned, “Roving Gangs of Rogue Proofreaders.”

So this seemed like a perfect choice when NPR ran an article on the book shortly before it was released in 2010, but I never got around to picking it up until 14 years later.

While I still collect photos of mistakes in signs, I tend to be more on the “at least you can tell what they meant” side of things these days, unless the typos themselves are funny. Autocorrect and autocomplete have made for an entirely new class of typos that look like they mean something else. Otherwise I’m much more inclined to snap a photo of a deliberately weird or funny sign.

My son, however, is currently in the “You mean ‘you’re’.” phase, and I’m surprised he hasn’t cracked it open himself.

Also, I may have actually seen the sign they corrected at the Grand Canyon, because I’m pretty sure my family stopped at the tower they mention back in the 1990s.