Starbuck's is named after________?

[Bossy Monkey]

Poll question: Starbuck's is named after________?

I'm reasonably sure that Choice 2 is the correct answer; if you know otherwise, kindly reply below. Or just have fun with it. I'm not particularly serious about this. :)

[ohiosmith]

1. The caffeine addicted sailor in Moby Dick.

[DivinBreuvage]

24. Starbuck wasn't addicted to caffeine, this is bogus. n/t

[Bossy Monkey]

26. Pssst, I think it may be one of those joke things ;) n/t

[DivinBreuvage]

30. What's the joke? I've heard several people offer this "explanation"

and they clearly bought into it. Sure, it's not going to make the Republic fall or murder kittens or anything, but it strikes me as more of a symptom of cultural ignorance than of anyone trying to be clever; unless you're saying that the originator of this myth was scouting at the greenness of the cits who swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat in the mouth of a whale.

There are two Melville references in that last sentence for you, and I'll acknowledge as my Lord and Master (or Lady and Mistress) anyone who can place them both.

Francoise

[LTR]

2. Dude from Battlestar Galactica

[Zomby Woof]

3. The first mate in Moby Dick

Starbucks Coffee started in 1971, and its original siren logo was more pronounced. Their bags of coffee used to tell the origin of their name, from Melville.

[BigMcLargehuge]

4. steady on boys... steady now...

Starbuck was such an interesting opposite of Ahab, though when the end came he led his men with the same deranged ferocity of Ahab and thus abandoned his penchant for moderation that so defined him as a penultimate company man and puritan.

Interesting.

Still, the coffee that bears his name tastes like Drano.

[curse10]

5. Yep, Melville

too bad Melville is atrociously boring :-)

[BigMcLargehuge]

7. BLASPHEMY!!!!

Lots of people have a hard time warming to Melville, it's true. I'm not one of them. I loved Moby Dick and have read it several times. This year I want to go to the annual read-around in New Bedford, Massachusetts and enjoy the whole book in one enormous sitting.

[Rabrrrrrr]

13. Agreed on the blasphemy charge!

Time for an inquisition at DU, to get rid of the Melville haters and the Zappa and Pink Floyd detractors, too.

Have you read Ahab's Wife, BigMcLargehuge? I loved it.

[BigMcLargehuge]

14. No but I will definitely put it on my holiday reading list!

thanks for the tip!

[Rabrrrrrr]

20. No problemo - I'm happy to recommend it to anyone

very beautifully written, and a pretty cool story as well.

[Zomby Woof]

8. *FLAME*

Just for that, I am eating whale meat for dinner! :P

[hlthe2b]

16. Ummmmm............Whale blubber!

slurp, slurp :evilgrin:

[YellowRubberDuckie]

19. Just thinking about that makes me wanna vomit...

:puke:
Duckie

[DivinBreuvage]

25. Curse10, you'd probably enjoy "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"

(just kidding).

I adore Herman Melville and will fight for him when he is slandered. Few women seem able to respond to him, but those of us who do love him fiercely.

For people who can appreciate rugged, dark, masculine, American writing of the Melville sort, I would also recommend the following novels by him: "Billy Budd, Sailor" and "Pierre; or the Ambiguities"; and these short stories: "The Piazza", "Benito Cereno", "The Lightning Rod Man", "The Happy Failure", "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", and "I and My Chimney".

He also wrote several volumes of poems, including a collection on the Civil War, which, in my opinion, contains some of the greatest poems ever written by an American.

Francoise

[Bossy Monkey]

27. Or for that matter "Bartleby the Scrivener"

source of the name of the world's greatest website (present message board aside), http://www.bartleby.com/

[DivinBreuvage]

28. Yeah, but "Bartleby" never did that much for me

Nor did "The Confidence Man", which, I think, derives a great deal of its reputation from the inscrutability factor. "Oh, this is so cryptic, it must be positively brilliant!"

I know. Burn me at the stake.

Francoise

[Screaming Lord Byron]

6. Mining camps near Mount Baker, fact fans.

[Enraged_Ape]

9. The dude from Battlestar Galactica!!

To my recollection, the original Starbuck's logo was actually a Cylon head. Not many know about this.

[BigMcLargehuge]

10. which is why the clerks always respond with "by your command"

when you order

[blueraven95]

11. Just got off the phone with Starbucks and the official story is...

that it was named by the founders (who were three college students) after Moby Dick.

This is the official story...now that I am interested, I am going to check with my uncle who is a regional manager. He might know more.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

12. When I went through the whole bizarre Starbucks training school

they said it was from old maps of mining claims on Mount Baker. Those claims could've been named after Moby Dick of course. Or they could be totally bullshitting us and Starbuck is the strange and terrible deity from Yog-Sothoth that the company sacrifices children to. You never know.

[sleipnir]

21. I hate stupid coffee shops with vague names, also see "Xando"

Or is it "X and O"

Damn stupid coffee shops that sell overpriced crap to insolent pricks.

[VOX]

17. "Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale?"

Imagine having Captain Ahab as a boss?

:toast:

[Hand]

18. I do...

Brainless little neurotic arsehole egomaniac....

:mad:

[DivinBreuvage]

23. Brainless? Obviously you've never read the book! n/t

[Hand]

29. No, no...

My boss is the brainless one! Also obsessive. He has all of Ahab's faults and none of his virtues.

Good lord--Ahab in one of the most brilliantly portrayed figures in American literature. I still get chills down my spine when I read the chapter in which he speaks to a dead whale's head... amazing book.

[DivinBreuvage]

31. Oops! My sincere apologies! And that's a great pick by the way!

One of my favorites too. For those who don't know the passage Hand refers to:

Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.

A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his cabin....

It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down.... Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outsretched, loving arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"

[Hand]

32. Whew...

I can feel the hairs standing up on the back of head again as usual!

I read in the introduction to the paperback edition that I have that Melville wrote Moby Dick shortly after discovering Shakespeare. The intro describes Melville as being in some kind of "intellectual frenzy" during this period, and it certainly shows in the book. Amazing man...

:toast: :loveya: :yourock:

[DivinBreuvage]

33. He is very good at provoking those pleasurable shivers!

And you're right, the influence of Shakespeare on him at this stage in his writing career is enormous. In fact it would appear that he had nearly finished a first draft of Moby Dick as a light-hearted romance in the general style of his earlier books such as Omoo, Mardi, and White-Jacket (which nevertheless had their hints of shadow); but after plunging into the intellectual stimulation of Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne he scrapped it to spend a year rewriting it as the dark and brooding masterpiece we have today.

He provides a harrowing description of what he went through during that year in "Pierre; or, the Ambiguities", the even darker book he wrote immediately after Moby Dick.

[joeybee12]

15. Star Jones, of course, another easy question

I'm just like a walking encyclopedia

[chiburb]

22. OTHER: Dana Scully.... n/t

.

[Character Assassin]

34. Moonlight....... Feels right...... Named after the 70's band.

Starbuck, baby.

[Bossy Monkey]

35. Why why why did I click on the thread again? Damn you Character Assassin!

Now I'll have that friggin' song stuck in my head for the next month! (Seriously, that was very very funny. I should have put it on the poll. Oh well!)