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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, May 19, 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black Java jive They drink an awful lot of coffee in Brazil Venerable song lyric No doubt - but they also drink an awful lot of coffee in Brampton, Brandon, Brockville and Berthierville, P.Q. We Canucks like our coffee. In my home town, which is a small one, I can count four coffee houses within a sugar cube's toss of one another, not one of them a franchise. I bet it's the same story where you live. When it comes to enthusiasm for downing mugs of java, Canucks are dedicated slurpers, eight out of ten of us drinking the beverage at least occasionally. On a daily basis more Canadians (63 percent) indulge than Americans (49 percent). We may not be as wired as Finlanders who manage to process 12 kilos of the stuff per capita per annum, but we're 'way ahead of dainty dabblers in the U.K. Australia, France and Germany. And Canada has made a seminal contribution to worldwide coffee culture. We gave the world Tim Hortons. Man, I'm so old I can remember when Tim Horton was a Maple Leaf defenceman. (Hell, I'm so old I can remember when Toronto had a hockey team - but I digress.) What started as a dinky donut shop in Hamilton nearly half a century ago has blossomed into an international powerhouse with outlets in virtually every town and city in the country, plus 12 U.S. States. You can find a Tim Hortons in places as various as Michigan and Kentucky; Rhode Island and West Virginia. There's even one in Kandahar. Needless to say, not everyone - even in Canada -- is a fan of Tim Horton's coffee. Indeed, caffeine freaks tend to split into one of two camps: the Tim Horton's crowd or the Starbucks fraternity. Broadly speaking, Tim's is blue collar while Starbucks is Uptown. Tim's is fluorescent lighting and plastic tables; Starbucks is overstuffed sofas, MoMA wall posters and Norah Young soundtracks. At Tim's you see plenty of customers with trucker's wallets sticking out of their back pocket; Starbucks customers trend more towards laptops and newspapers folded to the New York Times crossword. Oh yeah, and one more thing: Tim's is cheap; Starbucks, not so much. I'm a touch schizophrenic when it comes to coffee loyalty. I'm more likely to pop into a Tim Horton's than a Starbucks. It's not the clangy, high school cafeteria ambiance that attracts me - it's knowing I can get what I want without a lot of screwing around. I don't want a six dollar vanilla crème doppio half-caff foamless soy latte frappuccino and it'll be a frosty Friday in downtown Hades before I order a Venti anything. I just want a cup of frickin' coffee. A cynic might say that I'm missing the point - that Starbucks is not about selling coffee, it's about selling a lifestyle. They might argue that what Starbucks is offering is a non-hostile, predictable, everso-slightly snobby haven for the upwardly mobile to hide in. How else can you charge six bucks for a mystery beverage that's mostly hot water? Perhaps customers are catching on. Starbucks closed nearly 700 outlets in 2008. Last year they closed another 300 and laid off 6,700 workers. The company's latest attempt to stay relevant saw the opening of a Starbucks café that doesn't call itself Starbucks. It calls itself for reasons best known to company marketing geniuses - "15th Avenue and Tea." And yes, it features an in-house 'Tea Master' available for solemn consultations. One other sign of apparent desperation in the Starbucks family: the decision to allow customers to carry firearms openly (in the 29 states where it's legal to do so) - into their local Starbucks. Now there's an attractive consumer option: sipping coffee next to an America Firster jacked up on a double espresso and wearing a Glock Nine on his hip. Sounds to me like a corporation that's circling the drain -unlike Tim Hortons, which just keeps getting bigger. The Canadian company has announced plans to open 900 new U.S. outlets in the next three years (they've already got over 3,000 across Canada and they hope to add a thousand more). Imagine. Seventy-seven percent of all the percolated coffee served in Canada comes out of a Tim Hortons coffee pot. They serve 1.5-billion customers every year. Not bad, for a business scheme brewed up in the head of a hockey player who patrolled the blue line nearly 50 years ago. Clarke goes European by Maggie Savage Students from across Canada returned from their European destination just over two-weeks ago, where students were taught to be thankful for the freedom Canada now has today. On Saturday May 1st, 45 Clarke High School students traveled to Europe to celebrate the 65th anniversary of World War Two, also known as Victory in Europe. Students went to Europe as part of a history trip, set up by EF Educational Tours, for students who wanted to participate. Clarke students and teachers visited France, and the Netherlands, including many war sites such as Vimy Ridge. Most of the students wanted to go to Europe to get a real picture of history or they wanted to see where their relatives, who were killed in the war, were put to rest. Clarke students got to experience first hand most of the Second World War sites such as Vimy Ridge, Passcendale, Ypes and Vermont, where students got to walk through the battle grounds and trenches. As well they visited the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, a cemetery in the Netherlands, and sites in France. The official ceremony took place at Arnhem Cemetery in the photo supplied Clarke students, from left Sarah Osborne, Natalie Vanstone and Mackenzie Gunn, are shown at the ceremony at Arnhem Cemetery in the Netherlands with soldiers and veterens. Netherlands where Clarke students and teachers participated in a 45-minute silent walk, listened to speeches from the Mayor, who had each student stand behind one of the soldier's gravestones and light a candle in rememberance of the fallen soldiers. Clarke students were joined by thousands of other students, veterans and current soldiers from the war in Afghanistan. The students of Clarke High School came back with a much different outlook on life, war and freedom. "I'm thankful we are in a country where there was no fighting, I feel the war was dumb because they were fighting over ethnic backgrounds and I'm very proud to be Canadian," Mackenzie Gunn stated during her interview. "I learned that for each country a soldier is from, they have different shaped headstones and sadly there were a lot of unknown soldiers," Megan Coles recalled from the ceremony at Arnhem Cemetery. Clarke students were supposed to return from Europe on Sunday, May 9th, but due to the volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajokull, their flight from Amsterdam to Chicago was delayed 3 hours, which caused them to miss their connecting flight to Toronto. Monday, May 10th is when students got back on the plane to Toronto and arrived at about 1:00am Tuesday morning. Very few students came to schoolthe following Tuesday, due to their late hour of arrival.