With the switch, stores stopped brewing a second coffee in the afternoon, when brewed coffee is less popular, to reduce waste, according to the company. Some customers also said it became more difficult for them to find bold coffees at Starbucks in the morning. The changes prompted some complaints from fans of Starbucks's more-robust blends.

"Because of your many requests for a bolder coffee choice throughout the day at Starbucks, we are bringing it back in the afternoon to many of those stores that sell lots of freshly brewed coffee all day long," Starbucks said in a message posted on its customer feedback Web site Tuesday. The company said it will brew a bolder variety for customers when they ask for it. "This will sometimes mean a small wait, but it will also give you the absolute freshest cup of coffee possible," the company said on the site.

"When they ask for it?" Again. It's Starbucks Coffee. Coffee.

They should just suck it up and make the damn coffee.

This all I can get of the WSJ story:

By Janet Adamy

Starbucks Corp. is adding back bolder varieties of brewed coffee at some locations after replacing them with a smoother roast this spring.

In April, the Seattle coffee chain introduced a blend of brewed coffee called Pike Place roast and made it the default drip coffee at locations across ...

That's all I've got ... details forthcoming.

And to think I only complained about this yesterday.

You see, like all good Angelenos, we do most of our shopping at Trader Joe's, since Ralphs draws you in with double coupons and advertised specials while violating you big time on just about everything else.

So I don't get over to Ralphs all that often. There's quite a bit of construction going on at the market, but the bones of the Coffee Bean setup are there. It's built, but not ready for operation.

I don't have a photo (although there was another guy there shooting it with a digital camera), but it looks pretty much like the Coffee Bean kiosks at the Westfield Topanga and Promenade malls. I don't know if they're going to do any seating. It would be nice, but I'm not expecting it.

Parking at the Ralphs is dicey at best, but that's also the case at the Starbucks across the street. Seating for coffee-drinkers would be great, but again, I'm expecting nothing in that regard and will be pleasantly surprised if there is anything of the kind.

I said this when the Starbucks moved in, replacing the Red Chariot, a bar known more for having serial killer Glen Edward Rogers as a customer more than anything else. The bartender was very nice to me one day when I got locked out of the house clothed only in a pair of shorts ... but that's another story for another time.

As I was saying, I give Starbucks major, major credit for opening not one but four locations in Van Nuys and the best Starbucks in the East Valley (in an expansive former bank building on Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Victory Boulevard in North Hollywood), none of which are within spitting distance of Ventura Boulevard.

There was considerable vision at work, and I'm sure the whole enterprise has been very profitable for Starbucks, seeing as there is no competition whatsoever in the vicinity of each and every one of those locations.

And it may be years later, but Coffee Bean will have no problem siphoning off considerable business from its across-the-street rival.

While the Coffee Bean kiosk is being built, there is Coffee Bean coffee available in those big thermos-ish dispensers near the deli counter. But hopefully the full-fledged Coffee Bean will be ready for action in the days or weeks ahead.

And I know it's 111 degrees outside in Woodland Hills.

But I still want coffee.

I want the Starbucks dark roast of the day. Not Pike Place Blend.

But the very friendly barista at Starbucks, corner of Oxnard Street and Canoga Avenue in Warner Center says, "No dark roast, only Pike."

She sees the look on my face.

She elaborates, "There no dark roast after 12 noon."

I reply: "Ever?"

It certainly seems to be so.

For now, anyway.

That's one way to make the Pike Place Roast sales soar: offer nothing else. Hey, if it worked for the Soviet Union, it just might work for Starbucks.

The friendly barista took pity on me and wouldn't charge me for my hot venti drip of Pikes on this even hotter day. (Thanks! ... but what are those corporate people smoking?)

I can only hope that this is somehow related to the hot weather and that all will be righted when the ambient air temperature dips below 100.

I direct the rest of this entry to Howard Schultz, returning CEO of Starbucks:

It's called Starbucks Coffee. So make me some coffee. The good stuff.

Meanwhile: in other news, my neighborhood Starbucks is about to get some competition in the form of a Coffee Bean kiosk in the Ralphs market directly across Burbank Boulevard in Van Nuys.

I bet they have dark roast. Lots of it.

In the video above, BoingBoing TV does a tour of Intelligentsia's coffee kingdom and generally shows us why the Silver Lake establishment blows Starbucks — and just about everybody else, too — out of the proverbial brown water.

In case you want to check out Intelligentsia for yourself, it's at 3922 W. Sunset Blvd. rith where the Sunset Junction neighborhood appears to begin. There's plenty of parking in the neighborhood. Order a few cups and take a pound or more to go.

And according to the video title, this is only Part 1. Hopefully that means there's more geeky coffee goodness on the way.

All Intelligentsia needs is a bit of scale (and an outlet way closer to me) to dig a hole, pop Starbucks into it and shovel the dirt right back.

Well, I ate the first two tomatoes from the plant tonight, and they were extremely delicious.

Sweet and perfect. Perfect in a way that no store-bought tomato can be. Especially because it's hard to find them due to the salmonella issue. (Hopefully "the authorities," whoever they may be, will track down the offending tomatoes, tamp down the hysteria and get the now-in-season fruit back on the shelves, especially romas).

I grew a Sweet 100 plant a number of years back, but I don't remember the tomatoes being this good.

We got this plant as a seedling at the Tomatomania event a few months back.

Part of the secret is my homegrown compost blend. Here's how I make it:

• Throw old kitchen scraps, yard waste (leaves, grass, no Whitman), leftover everything into a can.
• Wait until it rots to hell
• Mix in liberally (not conservatively) with dirt
• Make sure plant has a giant saucer under it, because the water that leaks out is extremely disgusting — but nutrient rich!

Here's one:

I'm at the Sherman Oaks Galleria location on Saturday, watching all the "Sex and the City" moviegoers hobble on by in too-high heels, and I go to order a drip coffee.

My choices?

Pike Place ... and Pike Place decaf.

No dark roast. Not even House blend, which is better than Pikes.

If you think this Pike Place thing is working, Howard Schultz, rest assured that it is not. I don't know if you've done market research and concluded that 90 percent of customers prefer a weak blend to a traditionally Starbucks-ian dark roast, but please know that I am not among them.

This is grounds for ... just make sure there's dark roast brewing all day, every day, OK?

I found this baby finch Web cam site via Boing Boing. Just click on the picture above for all the baby-bird Web cam-ness you want/need.

Yesterday Ilene dropped me off on the way to her father's house, which is in the middle of nowhere (aka West Hills), and I took the bus home. It takes about a half-hour to get from the Warner Center Station (aka Owensmouth Avenue across from the Promenade mall) to the Van Nuys Station.

Today I'm taking the Orange Line both ways.

Yeah, it adds 20 or so minutes to my commute, but most of that is spent walking — healthy, it is — and all the money I'm saving on gas makes it very much worth it.

Sometimes the bus can be pretty crowded, but I've gotten lucky lately and not been crushed by all that humanity most of the time.

I met David Weiss — aka David Was of Was Not Was — who is in the process of starting a blog, and he rode to the Daily News offices on an electric scooter. It was a pretty sweet ride.

I didn't ask him how much it cost, but it couldn't have been too cheap.

Back to the Orange Line. To go one way on the bus costs $1.25. I hope the MTA isn't thinking that now is the time to dramatically raise fares.

When gas was still in the $2 range (remember those days not all that long ago?), I wanted to ride the bus, but nothing motivates me more than saving $5 a day on the gas that I'm not using.

After years of living on what by all appearances is one of the most pothole-pocked streets in the city of Los Angeles (those Mars lander photos look a bit too familiar), the L.A. street repair crew is rolling the heavy equipment up and down our little country road in Van Nuys.

Sure the entire house feels as if it's going to be shaken into a little pile of 1940s wood and plaster, but it's totally worth it.

I had a long, rambling stream-of-consciousness post that I'm sure you all would've loved, but just as I was uploading the art (thanks for the pictures, Ilene, who blogs about it here), the $0 Laptop gave up on me, Movable Type didn't autosave more than three lines, and I basically got sent back to the first square in Shoots and Ladders.

But the long and short of it is that our bombed-out-looking excuse for a residential street is getting the once over twice from the City of Los Angeles.

And while I'm in the mood, I'd like to thank, in Precise Modern Lovers Order, our neighbor Laura for keeping all the relevant feet to the fire these past many years, Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, whose tootsies must be pretty damn toasty by now, and my pothole-filling buddy A-Dog, aka Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, frequent visitor to the Daily News newsroom, who, whether he did anything or not, get his due because he's, by all appearances, a complicated man who will risk his neck for his brother man and all that.

For the foreseeable future, Van Nuys loves you all, baby.

Ilene did a fine job chronicling our time at this year's Pierce College Farm Walk. Here's a picture of our little one communing with a goat. On the same topic, goats now clear the hillsides at the Getty Museum. They do that.

But back to Farm Walk. Since the little girl recently announced that she's no longer a vegetarian like Ilene and I, she's been sampling all kinds of meat. She doesn't like anything but chicken thus far. She continually describes meat as "delish," even though she rejects all that isn't chicken. And mind you, she only gets to sample meat at school, since we don't -- and won't -- fire it up at home or when we go out.

We did take the girl to see the chickens, but it didn't really register. She's only 4, but with a will of iron. We've just got to ride this one out.

See Ilene's entry for why we're considering installing a chicken coop in our Van Nuys manse.

Once again, the Canoga Avenue/Oxnard Street Starbucks had Pike Place and House -- no dark roasts.

I tried the House today, and it's better than Pike Place. House has a little more character.