Hipster Coffee Shop

02/05/2025 by Pat Shiplett 8 Comments

People at a coffee shopThe decor of our corner coffee shop screams a healthy disdain for tidiness and convention.

Its owner is either a genius at creating a welcoming underground, counterculture ambiance – the kind of space that retail designers charge tens of thousands to come up with – or he’s simply a bro who doesn’t give a shit.

There’s paint peeling around those enormous windows. Vintage floor tiles are cracked and gaping. There’s no effort to hide exposed conduits in the walls. An invisible film of neglect covers every surface.

Having said all that, the joint runs like a precision time piece. Service is crisp and friendly, lines short. The ugly dispenser of tap water is almost never empty. Customers double park and pick up orders fast enough to avoid parking tickets.

The place is an incubator for remote gig-workers, creatives, small LLC owners and university rats who set up shop and stay for hours. The energy is electric.

A room full of tattoos, piercings, pony tails, hipster knit caps and splashes of florescent hair offer you an opportunity for self-renewal. Osmosis on the cheap. Forget that trek through Nepal. Who needs Burning Man?

All you need do is sit quietly with a cup of coffee, breathe in the vapors and it WILL happen. When you’re in the moment, you’ll connect with a freer, looser, hipper, preservative-free version of your authentic self.

But fear not, wild thing, the minute you step out that door, you’ll return to the person your life choices and your dependents need you to be.

Jeff Boarini

01/28/2025 by Pat Shiplett Leave a Comment

People at a coffee shopJeff came through the door of the coffee shop with a fire in his belly.He’s running to be mayor for our small suburban town. The folks at our coffee shop applaud his decision, his neighbors are grateful.

It’s good to have at least one candidate sign up to challenge an incumbent. Issues are raised that might otherwise stay under the radar.

Jeff Boarini has never before run for elected office but here he is, an underdog, squaring off against a sitting mayor who easily won his last election and enjoys a serious funding advantage.

The village is debating fundamental questions about its future. Should it preserve the home-town feel of a vintage village? Or become more urban, like the first-tier metropolis it borders?

Jeff would like more information on how population growth and increased density are in the city’s best interest; and how they would create the affordable housing they are hoped to provide.

A city government, he believes. must adopt a budget it can live with long term, a financial plan its residents can afford.

During his professional career he was charged with keeping projects on budget and deadlines on track. But he’s aware that a city mayor carries much more than fiscal responsibilities.

As a recent widower and a father caring for an son with cerebral palsy, he’s learned first hand and knows better than most people that government exists to respond to the needs of its residents.

Whether win or lose, the fact that Jeff has stepped up to challenge the status quo is an uncommon service to his community.

Daniel Biss

01/27/2025 by Pat Shiplett 1 Comment

People at a coffee shop Daniel Biss is campaigning to serve a second term as a “weak mayor.”The term “weak mayor” has nothing do with the character of the person holding that office.

It’s part of the system in which a mayor shares responsibilities with a city manager. The mayor’s job is part-time and not well paid considering its importance. The power to officiate at weddings and attend the swearing in of police officers offers some compensation.

Daniel’s interest in public service began with political organizing, which led him to serve 8 years in the state legislature. In 2021 he became mayor of the city where he and his wife are raising their children.

His reelection campaign is based on a “bold and progressive” agenda. He’s searching for consensus on a long-term vision to guide the city, reading the pulse of 78,000 residents each step of the way.

Like communities across the country, his town is grappling with the issue of affordable housing. Will expanding supply make a difference? Will greater density energize economic development and moderate pressure on taxpayers?

Daniel believes climate-change mitigation and sustainability are challenges cities can’t afford to ignore. He believes there is an overdue responsibility to reckon with inequity.

These goals are possible to achieve only by building consensus among members of a city council, committees and their staff. This is work that can try a soul to its limit.

It takes a strong person to be a “weak mayor.”

John Kennedy

01/06/2025 by Pat Shiplett 1 Comment

People at a coffee shopJohn is notorious as a cheapskate when to comes to spending other people’s money.One of the regulars at our corner coffee shop is busy knocking on his neighbors’ doors.

He’s running to replace a council member, Melissa Wynn, who after twenty-eight years of service is retiring from the city council of this small, suburban community .

The village has been John’s home for four decades. He and his wife raised their children there, educating them in the public schools.

John’s three business start-ups created jobs throughout the community. He’s known for his decades of volunteering; establishing, funding, serving as a member and presiding over non-profit organizations.

Never timid about offering well-articulated, alternative ideas to the powers that be, civic commitment seem to be part of his DNA.

Few have John Kennedy’s knowledge of past civic initiatives and policy shifts. Time and again his town (like municipalities everywhere) has assumed that simply spending additional taxpayer dollars would solve problems that remain as challenges to this day. He believes the budget should be balanced without raising taxes.

Affordability, transportation, diversity, equity and the environment are more important to this community than most. And John agrees with those goals.

But the basis of his campaign is that they can only be achieved when city government is dogged in finding less expensive and more sensible solutions to its challenges, in protecting the families invested in it.

Knots, Zhenyi

11/06/2024 by Pat Shiplett 3 Comments

People at a coffee shopSlip knots, square knots, Windsors and all manner of Boy Scout knots are actually not knots at all. To mathematicians like Zhenyi, a ‘knot’ is a very specific phenomenon, a continuous circle, a ring with no openings. Rubber bands, wedding rings and fan belts qualify as knots. So do the tangles found in your DNA molecules.

Give a ring a half twist and you have a figure eight. Wrap it around your fingers and you create a cat’s cradle which can be changed into any number of playful knots.

Since the beginnings of Knot Theory in the 1800s, mathematicians have classified and tabulated all prime knots of up to 16 crossings and more than 6 billion other variations. The configuration on Zhenyi’s screen is the Legendrian trefoil knot.

Different-looking knots may actually be the same one in disguise. Proving or disproving ‘equivalence’ is part of what gets Zhenyi out of bed in the morning.

His work is “pure” mathematics, however much of scholarship once considered “pure” has found applications later. Non-Euclidean geometry became the foundation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Along with the elegance of the math, Zhenyi is fascinated by the labyrinthine calligraphy and knot motifs that have graced manuscripts and mosques for millennia.

He’ll soon submit his findings to pre-publication review and then beyond that to formal peer review journals. So the intense, young man who works standing upright in the windows of our coffee shop will be standing there for at least some part of another year.