Dispatches from America: "Tales of an Empire in Decline, or How I learned to stop caring and learned to love the absurd."

-HOOTERS for the Coffeee drinkers. The new rage in Seattle, Sexpresso cafes. Scantily-clad women serve coffeee at drive throughs. In a way, it is perhaps stunning that it took so long for entrepreneurs here to figure out that coffee, the fabled Seattle obsession, mixes very well with sex, the fabled human obsession. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-sexpresso4feb04,0,2618424.story?track=mostviewed-homepage

-What was up with that combination of every bad Olympic opening ceremony clusterfuck that was the pre-game disaster last night?

-You and daddy can spend a ton of money to attend a ball together and little daughter can pledge her virginity to daddy. http://www.glamour.com/news/articles/2007/01/purityballs07feb Studies show that about 75% of virginity pl edgers have sex after the pledge. The second peer-reviewed study, also by Bearman and Brueckner, looked at virginity pledgers 5 years after their pledge, and found that they have similar proportions of STDs and at least as high proportions of anal and oral sex as those who have not made a virginity pledge. They speculate that pledgers may substitute oral and anal sex for vaginal sex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginity_pledge

-An angry New York litigant calls a judge's office with death threats. He forgets that its 2007 and he is arrested after his number showed on the caller ID.
http://nydailynews.com/front/story/494926p-416863c.html

-John McCain has hired the very men he accused of running a dirty, lie-ridden campaign against him (working for Bush) in 2000 to work for him in 2008. The same men who also brought you Swift Boating and the Harold Ford racist sex ad. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/us/politics/04mccain.html?hp&ex=1170565200&en=d271f1e2495792a2&ei=5094&partner=homepage