Coffee Weapon

For people who appreciate a jolt of caffeine to get going in the morning, there is now a way to achieve the boost even before you make it to the coffee pot —AmazingSoap.com offers an all natural soap product containing caffeine to perk up one’s system while improving the appearance of skin.
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http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/1/prweb661674.htm

COFFEE drinkers in Malaysia were shocked to find out that a brand of instant coffee was laced with the same dangerous chemical used to make the male libido enhancing drug, Viagra.
Story here:
http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4136,155098,00.html

A false fire alarm and a coffee-saturated elevator phone led to charges for a 26-year-old man Stewart Street man, city police said.

Police said two men went into the second-floor reception area of the Social Services Building on Charlotte Street Jan. 8 at 2:40 p.m. because one man believed he had an appointment.

He was told he had the wrong date, police said, and the two men left.

Police said the two opened the phone box in the elevator and one man poured coffee onto the phone, an action captured on the elevator’s video camera.

As they left the building through the southeast exit door one man pulled the fire alarm, police said.

People began to leave the building and the fire department attended, police said.

Thomas Neil Nicholson was arrested at the police station Monday.

He’s charged with mischief and making a false fire alarm. He was released from custody and will appear in court Feb. 21.

A 75-year-old woman was arrested at a Clearwater McDonald’s drive-thru because police said she wouldn’t pull her car forward. Authorities said Jean Merola, a grandmother of eight, was arrested for disorderly conduct after she refused an officer’s orders to move her car while she waited for the coffee and fries she ordered at the drive-through window. Merola said the McDonald’s employees told her to wait there for her food.

Merola was handcuffed behind her back and put in the cruiser. Another officer arrived and took her to the Pinellas County Jail .

Merola said she was searched, photographed and fingerprinted.

“I was under arrest because I was in a wrong parking place. I says well, they told me to park here,” Merola said.

Author of ‘How Starbucks Saved My Life’ Michael Gates Gill considered himself a failure. He had lost his advertising job to corporate downsizing, his wife to divorce and his health to a brain tumor. One day Gill walked into a Starbucks near his New York home.
Sitting there sipping his latte he almost didn’t hear a young black woman ask, “Would you like a job?”
He took the job and also began keeping a journal of his experiences as he learned to call out drinks, operate the cash register and interact with customers and employees,  people he might not have talked to before he fell out of the middle class.

Gill’s journal is now the best-seller How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else. The book has been optioned by Tom Hanks for a movie.

Article here
By Jim Jordan
HERALD-LEADER BUSINESS WRITER