Dancing with goats.

Toscanini's (or Tosci's for short) Ice Cream shop in Harvard Square, aside from selling what is very likely the best ice cream in the country, offers a fine selection of coffees from around the world. My current favorite is this blend called "Dancing Goats", which I believe is Ethiopian. The name comes from the folklore that surrounds the discovery of coffee some twelve hundred years ago by a fellow in Ethiopia whose goats had dined upon raw coffee berries and, hopped up on caffeine, were dancing about on their hind legs. Or so the story goes. There was also an international Dancing Goat Society that sprung up in the 17th and 18th Centuries to promote coffee drinking and the intellectual freethinking that consuming too much of the divine bean inevitably lead to - the Green Dragon Coffee House, an American outpost of this society, became known as the "Birthplace of the American Revolution" when the Boston Tea Party was planned there in 1773.

Funny that the goat should be an iconic animal for coffee, since it is also inextricably associated with Dionysos and wine as well. But seeing that wine and coffee are two of the original mind-altering substances - a.k.a. entheogens - maybe it's not so surprising after all. Something to mull over, at any rate, while the goats do their dance and try to wake me up!