Is Coffee Included?

What does this say about us? New York City Gap stores have introduced a service that guarantees delivery of any phone or fax order from a 21-item menu within two hours. Gap to Go delivers (usually via bicycle messenger) the clothing item wrapped in a waterproof metallic sack.

Now, spilling a cup of coffee on your slacks on the morning you have an important meeting will only cost you the $10 delivery charge plus the price of new slacks. You get to go to the meeting with clean, pressed slacks and no one’s the wiser.

But before you say “only in New York,” Gap to Go service will expand to other cities by fall. (From June 22 Newsweek)

* Think about it: Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday looked at data on the prevalence of rape in more than a hundred cultures and based on the data, grouped them into high- or low-rape cultures.

She found that high-rape cultures are very militarized and sex-segregated, with a great difference in status between men and women, the care of children being devalued and delegated to subordinate females. She also found that the creation myths of high-rape cultures recognize only a male deity, rather than a female deity or a couple.

Another interesting finding was that high-rape cultures had recent experiences (meaning within the last few hundred years) of famine or migration.

Sanday’s conclusion: ” … when we tally up these risk factors, we’ve pretty much described our culture.” (From May The Sun magazine)

* Facts of life: Percentage of fathers who care for preschoolers while their wives work: 18 (From June Men’s Health)

* Nostalgic for the ‘80s? The first paragraph from “66 Things to Think About When Flying Into Reagan National Airport” by David Corn (as a nod to the renaming of Washington National Airport in our nation’s capital earlier this year): “The firing of the air-traffic controllers, winnable nuclear war, recallable nuclear missiles, trees that cause pollution, Elliott Abrams lying to Congress, ketchup as a vegetable, colluding with Guatemalan thugs, pardons for FBI lawbreakers, voodoo economics, budget deficits, toasts to Ferdinand Marcos, public-housing cutbacks, red-baiting the nuclear-freeze movement, James Watt.” (From May Harper’s)

* Quote of the week: “There used to be magazines everyone read — like Life or Time. Now there’s Gay Indian Biker magazine. You don’t just get your coffee. You get your decaf Frappuccino latte. … Everybody has a magazine and a channel. There are 500 channels and 500 magazines, and we wonder why we’re not united as a country.” — Bill Maher (From May-June Utne Reader)