Bright sunshine and near-windless this Monday afternoon on California’s north coast, which makes for most-pleasant weather — no precipitation scheduled until Friday, though, the NWS says only a ‘Slight Chance Rain‘ even then.
The next 10 days appear ‘normal‘ in what’s already a most-definitely ‘not normal‘ year.

Also seeming not to conform is the changing health-wise attitudes toward coffee the last few years — a situation similar to marijuana — and java supposedly combats problems stemming from type-2 diabetes, or even heart attack and stroke.
And now add whiskey drinking…

(Illustration: ‘Surrealist Cup,’ by Japanese Latte Artist Kazuki Yamamoto, found here).

Although a coffee drinker for decades, I didn’t really become a java-head until the mid-1990s with the rise of the coffee-shop scenario, of course, headlined by Starbucks, and at one point was even a barista myself at the fabled, long-gone ‘Black Pearl Coffee House‘ down in Pismo Beach, producing/creating the caffeinated drinks, and the standard-regular cup of joe.
My only problem is coffee’s highly acidic, and if my gastric juices act a bit on sharp-assed side, I have to reduce intake levels, or sometimes stop all together — settle on tea for awhile. (Shit don’t work like coffee).
And after a certain space, I’d go back to drinking coffee again. I don’t drink much, about a cup-and-a-half in the morning, three-quarters cup about mid-afternoon, and that’s it.

After the ‘java age‘ had passed and a Starbucks (or some coffee shop) on every corner became the ‘new normal,’ coffee lost a bit of face, but now a revival of the old bean.
Last November from NPR and research on drinking coffee and living longer:

“In our study, we found people who drank three to five cups of coffee per day had about a 15 percent lower [risk of premature] mortality compared to people who didn’t drink coffee,” says one of the study authors, nutrition researcher Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health.
Decaf drinkers also saw benefits.

Beyond the pale — decaf coffee?

And released today, the latest in coffee’s health benefits, benefiting alcoholics everywhere — via Quartz:

The paper, published last month in Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, analyzed the data of 430,000 participants in total, of whom 1,990 had cirrhosis, from previous studies that examined the link between coffee and the disease.
In eight of the nine studies, researchers from Southampton University found that “increasing coffee consumption by two cups per day was associated with a statistically significant reduction in the risk of cirrhosis” and that the risks reduced as coffee consumption increased further.
Overall, they found that the risk of cirrhosis was 22 percent lower after one cup of coffee per day, 43 percent lower after two cups, 57 percent lower after three cups and 67 percent lower after four cups.
“An increase in daily coffee consumption of two cups is associated with a near halving of the risk of cirrhosis,” the authors wrote.

No longer a booze drinker (more than 20 years), I can still remember, however, that first cup of black, smoking ‘Pearl‘ coffee after a night spent with Julius Kessler, or others of his ilk — the uplift and joy to my liver.
Yeah, right…