Hermanita, Abuelo, and Arjewtino at a sidewalk café not named Starbucks

Starbucks recently announced it is invading expanding the company into Argentina, a cotuntry where, along with its traditions of great wine, beautiful women, and World Cup championships, is rich in coffee and café culture.

The prospect of ordering an acidic “cup of José” from a surly — yet gorgeous — Starbucks barista is pretty depressing. After all, stopping in to sidewalk cafés in Buenos Aires for a cortado is part of the charm of visiting the city.

I remember meeting my grandparents for coffee after school when I was 9-years-old. Mi hermanita and I would chat over glass-bottled Coca-Colas while people-watching on Avenida Cabildo. And on my most recent trip to Buenos Aires, joining for breakfast at her favorite café/restaurant was always the best way to start the day.

It’s not that I hate Starbucks or boycott its shops. My mom regularly sends me $25 gift cards to Starbucks for no reason, which I happily spend on dulce de leche frapuccinos.

It’s just that I know what Starbucks does. It takes over. It shuts down independent coffee shops and other chains as easily as Guatemalans bow down to Argentineans. It overruns local coffee commerce like Maradona shredding an England defense. It sucks the life out of unique, independent shops with its homogenized and ubiquitous green logo.

I really have no idea if my fellow porteños are excited by this infection expansion or not. I’ll e-mail my cousins soon to find out.

But for now, let’s hope the next time I visit Argentina and sit down for an espresso and medialuna, it doesn’t cost me more pesos than my uncle makes an hour.

Update: sent me this photo of McDonald’s in Cairo; if you look closely at the left side of the photo, you can see the Little Caesar’s:

As I write this, Catalina Island is burning.

Marine helicopters are fighting the blaze and rescue workers are evacuating the small, mostly tourist island located roughly 20 miles off the LA coast. The fire broke out yesterday in the hills near Avalon, the island’s only city. The photo above is a Google hybrid map and the arrow shows the distance between my hometown of Woodland Hills and Catalina Island.

I went to visit the island for the first time nearly three years ago with Papi, Hermanita, and Hermano. We rented a golf cart and toured the island (no cars are allowed), did some sightseeing, and my brother nearly got arrested on the ferry ride home when he sassed an arrogant Homeland Security officer.

Tourism is Catalina’s only industry. When we were there, we spent money on food, karaoke (my dad sang Help! by the Beatles), and air hockey. This Mother’s Day weekend was supposed to be a cash cow for the island and now they’re fielding calls from visitors who don’t understand why their reservations won’t be honored.

This is a video my brother and sister shot while chasing me in the golf cart. I know it looks like I’m running like a girl but, in my defense, I was running downhill and trying to evoke pathos by acting like a dork (not much of a stretch, I know).

Men are weird.

We have , weird sports allegiances, and weird senses of humor. We are weird in ways that women are not.

We are so weird, in fact, that we actually joke about banging our friends’ moms. Banging. Our friends’. Moms.

A typical conversation between two guy friends might go like this:

Guy #1: I’m so tired.
Guy #2: That’s not what your mom said last night.

Since each of us is eternally a mama’s boy and takes offense to the slightest insult of our maternal makers, I find mom-bashing humor particularly mystifying. And though it might differ among cultures, it is typically acceptable to most men.

But women are different. Women will never say, “That’s not what your dad said last night” to each other nor call each other “fatherfuckers”. Women don’t have words like FILF and find even the smallest implication of their dads as sexual vomit-inducing.

I asked The Princess one night why this phenomenon exists for men and not for women and why she’s never joked to a female friend about banging her dad. She responded with one word: “Gross.”

I continued my research by e-mailing Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post humor columnist and self-described arbiter of all humor, whose returned this week after a long hiatus.

This was my question:

“Despite the prevalence of men joking through implication and innuendo that they’ve had sex with their friends’ moms, why don’t women equally (1) make the same kind of jokes and (2) find it gross that men do?”

Gene responded:

“Hm. I can’t help you. I am good friends with a twentysomething woman who regularly informs me that she has had sex with my mother. My mother is dead. This does not deter her.”

If even the mighty Gene Weingarten doesn’t know, there might not be an answer. Maybe women take these jokes too literally. Maybe the “Daddy’s little girl” icon is too embedded in their brains to be able to suggest — even humorously — their friends’ fathers are sexual beings. I don’t know.

I hope someone has an answer for me.

And no mom jokes. I’m looking at you, GoPats.

If there is one recreational game that EVERY man – and most women – claim to be good at despite their actual skill, it’s ping pong.*

Mention to people that you want to play them in ping pong and you’ll be met with many responses, including:

“I’m AWESOME at ping pong!”

“I’ll TOTALLY kick your ass!”

and

“It’s called ‘table tennis’, you moron.”

Why does this game bring out el machismo among men? Why do we believe so genuinely that we are highly skilled at a game we play, on average, maybe once a year? Why do we think we can beat ANY opponent despite never having assessed his own skill?

That said, I am a regular Forrest Fucking Gump at ping pong. Hand me a paddle, a 9 ft. by 5 ft. masonite table, and a 40 mm in diameter, celluloid ball, and I’ll make you cry. I’ll alternate between shakehand and Seemiller grips, loop backhands and side-drives, and slice and push-block shots back at you.

From what I remember, and this may sound quite apocryphal, my grandpa used to be a ping pong city champion in Buenos Aires. I remember him visiting LA when I was 11 years old and we lived in Oakwood Apartments. The assisted-living facility had a table outside for residents and my then-64-year-old abuelo wiped the floor with me, mi hermanita, y mi Papi.

Since we didn’t have an original name for ping pong in Spanish, and because mi gente likes to overuse definite articles and prepositions, we called it “el ping de pong”. It’s one of my many, favorite memories being with my grandpa.

*The other one is air hockey.