In Corby Kummer’s  (super-long) blog post on the Atlantic’s website about Mario Batali’s new artisanal Italian supermarket, Eataly, he somewhat casually mentions that the Eataly in Turin “prominently features coffee beans …roasted locally, over a wood fire, by apprentice roasters in a Turin prison.” Gangster! When are we going to get our prisoner-roasted coffee? I’m tempted to immediately stop drinking any roast that has not been personally hand-fired by a convicted felon. Once you get to a certain point in your life, you come to appreciate the finer things, and one of those things is coffee beans flame-kissed by a 300-pound white supremacist whose hobbies include spending time in “the hole.”

Where were we? I’m lost in my thoughts. Oh yeah — Corby, dude? A two-page blog entry? I don’t care what magazine you write for or how awesome the logo is…I have places to go! Second, the full version of that pull quote is not really any more illuminating. I can’t tell whether the roasters really are prisoners or they conduct their little roasting academy at a prison because the rent’s cheap. You can read the whole article below if you have hours and hours to kill:

http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/09/new-york-eataly-what-the-frenzys-about/62371/

In other news, coffee futures rose 0.8 percent to $1.8625 a pound. You know what that means, don’t you? Me neither. Coffee prices could rise up to thousands of dollars per bean but you would still drink it. It’s like how they can charge $14 for a pack of cigarettes in New York City but everyone who smokes will still buy them because they’re smokers and that’s what smokers do. You’re a coffee drinker and that’s what you drink, especially if the beans have been roasted by a man whose gentle touch makes him a favorite of the casual sodomists in Cell Block D.