Today I visited a Tim Hortons, a Canadian donut shop chain named after some hockey player who killed himself in a drunken high-speed police chase. The sesame bagel with cream cheese was almost as good as you get at Dunkin Donuts, but what was that brown liquid?

Advertised as “coffee,” it tasted like a watered-down undercooked version of a Starbucks “Brewed Coffee” (the bottom-of-the-line Starbucks offering). Lots of cream and sugar helped, and it was a heck of a lot cheaper than my Starbucks fave, a Grande Caffè Mocha, so I didn’t complain.

Well, until now. It suddenly occurred to me that drinking even a barrel of this Tim Horton coffee wouldn’t have sobered up the hockey player enough to spare his wife and four daughters the misery of his loss.

From what I understand, Horton’s sports career had already left the building. You know, lots of trades and injuries, the typical warning signs that you missed your stop.

Okay, so you love hockey, you love Tim Horton, and you love his chain’s coffee. Fine with me. Some people like tea with milk. Some people think Sarah Palin could be President some day. There’s no end to insanity in this world.

So what’s my beef here? Well, drunk driving, for one thing. Never a good idea. Trying to escape the cops at 100 miles per hour – another bad move. Rich, famous people hanging on to their careers far too long, just sad. Becoming self-destructive to the point of letting down your remaining fans and devastating your family, well that’s plain selfish.

Watered down coffee never appealed to me, but I can understand some people wanting to avoid caffeine for medical reasons. Tim Hortons coffee fans criticizing the much larger and more successful Starbucks chain, petty jealousy.

But the thing that bugs me most about all this is the lack of possessive apostrophes in store names. No wonder the latest generation can’t spell, what with all the poor examples out there on banners and billboards.

Jim Lawter

• Rich or Famous? Which would you want to be, rich or famous? No fair going for both, or thinking that fame will bring you wealth or that wealth will bring you fame. Sure,...
• Razing Babel: Creating a Universal Language [/caption]Spoken language is a wonderfully complex mystery. Human's can't seem to live without it, yet the majority of us cannot speak to each other with 100% accuracy. Even within a...
• Pat Robertson Works For the Devil Enough already with this madman Pat Robertson! Now he's saying that God killed 75,000-100,000 Catholic Haitians because their ancestors made a "pact with the Devil" to break free from slavery....

• Love Them or Hate Them, Make the Most of Gift Cards this Holiday Season Today's guest post comes from PT, who writes at Prime Time Money: a site dedicated to helping you save more money, get out of debt, and live a more frugal...
• Effective Learning There are many techniques for and theories about effective learning. Some are as basic as Pavlov and his dogs, a reference to the early 20th Century Nobel prize-winning theory. The...
• The Money Trap Review My third read in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks series was the The Money Trap. The author of The Money Trap, Ron Gallen, has a formal education in business,...