Happy Coffee Milkshake Day!

And a happy birthday to Darlene Love, who is the best.

Here is a very sweet, but anonymous, pup, courtesy of our pal Bel-Ami

Happy weekend!

Today is National Coffee Milkshake Day. Coffee milkshakes are great and all, but do you know what is better than a coffee milkshake? No, not a frappuccino — a coffee cabinet.

Now, I couldn’t tell you why the hell it’s called a coffee cabinet, but it’s a coffee milkshake specific to Rhode Island and it is just … so much better than a regular coffee milkshake. The secret is making it with coffee milk instead of regular milk. What is coffee milk, you say? It is milk with delicious coffee syrup in it!

So if you ever want to fancy up a coffee milkshake (or just have coffee milk, which I assure you is very good and pairs beautifully with grilled cheese sandwiches), you can order some of that online. Or buy it at the store, if you live in Rhode Island or southern Mass. Then all you do is mix the coffee syrup with some milk and put it in a blender with some coffee ice cream, and there you go! I swear there is a slightly different texture than a regular milkshake, and I like it better.

Actually — fun fact, Dunkin’ now uses coffee milk for some of their lattes, and if you ever just want to know what the hell I’m on about, or if you would like to give your child an age appropriate coffee (flavored) drink of their own, you can probably just order the coffee milk by itself. I haven’t tried to order it, because I obviously have a bottle of Autocrat at home, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t do it.

Anyway, your first present this week is a very exciting 1986 self-help video titled Show Off!: How to Be Cool at Parties, hosted by Malcolm Jamal-Warner, who sadly died earlier this week. I figure it’s a nice tribute as well as a way to help all of you be very, very cool at parties.

Next up, because it is Darlene Love’s 84th birthday today, I bring you a video from her 1982 concert, in which she sings “He’s Sure the Boy I Love.”

In case you are unaware, Darlene Love, who has one of the most fabulous voices in history, was monumentally screwed by music producer/convicted murderer Phil Spector, who took this song and “He’s a Rebel” and sold them as songs by The Crystals, because they were popular at that time and he thought they’d do better that way. Because of how he was a terrible, terrible person who featured heavily in my childhood nightmares (I read Ronnie Spector’s autobiography "Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, or, My Life as a Fabulous Ronette" when I was like 8 or 9 and it was pretty harrowing!).

Here is one of the few songs Love sang on that was actually released as a single for her actual group, The Blossoms — who mostly sang backup for Spector’s other artists, many of whom he screwed over in other ways.

Luckily for all of us, The Blossoms were featured on a weekly music show called Shindig, so there are tons of videos available of them singing a variety of covers of songs by other artists or singing backup — like this cover of The Velvelettes’ “Needle in a Haystack.”

So if you ever wanted to know what various songs would sound like if Darlene Love sang them, you can spend several hours doing that. You are welcome!

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