Local coffee shops have a certain appeal for having products that you can't find anywhere else. What Starbucks offers Red Dog and dead mussels? None of them. NONE OF THEM.

Apparently, people don't like washed out pictures of dead animals and washed-up litter taken by an unwashed lunatic, so in order to increase blog traffic I've decided to follow the lead of several popular blogs and review coffee places. Local coffee places. And shower, but I still can't figure out how that's going to come across on the blog.

Local coffee shops. To be honest, I don't like them. The coffee they serve leaves enamel on the teeth and is entirely nonflammable. They usually have a lot of racoons out in front, to clean up the litter.

You don't get racoons out front at Starbucks. That's why I don't go there, either. A good coffee place will have racoons out front, either to greet you, or clean up litter. They understand that at Cups. All the locations. Faithful racoons.

You cannot kill a man with a scone from Cups, not without chemical propellants, which they DO NOT SELL. Do NOT ask the man behind the counter for such a thing. The scones are not as hard and lethal as a proper, British scone. A proper scone has a hardness of almost 2 on the Mohs scale, right up there with gypsum, but while you can burn and break down gypsum to make Plaster of Paris, you cannot do that with a scone. Scones can form Plaster of London, but that's something not even racoons will eat.

Above: The source of most scones, also where Starbucks gets the water for coffee that will not under any circumstance remove paint. If it removed paint, I'd go there. Good coffee should be mostly lethal.

Now, for a good, lethal scone, you need to go Seattle Drip. Unfortunately, they're mostly up in Madison, where I'm wanted for a variety of crimes against taste. But, you can fire one of those scones through a brick wall.

Finally, there's Koinonia, a nice place you can go that's close to Town Creek, which easily puts it into the top tier of local coffee shops near gar-filled creeks that can back up without warning and flood wide swaths of the city.

This concludes my informative, if informal, review of Coffee Shops in Jackson.

If you have any comments or questions or corrections to make, please just throw them in the river.