That's some good anus

Last week was a special week at the agency where I'm currently working.

The Super Bowl spot they had produced for Acura featuring Jerry Seinfeld was a monumental hit, raking in more than 11 million hits on Youtube. It could be well over 20 million by the time this blog entry is posted.

And while it kills me that the guys down the hall had the opportunity to work with Jerry, hang out with Jerry and generally bust balls with Jerry, I am genuinely happy for them. And the spot speaks for itself.When writing commercials I generally do not reach for the celebrity card. It's overplayed, it's silly and celebrities, like children, animals and water, are difficult to work with.

But in this case, Jerry's love and Leno's love of fancy sports cars were organic to the spot.

While we're talking organic, let's talk about how the Creatives here at RP& celebrated this milestone spot. On a morning of rare quiet at the agency, my boss brought in a coffee grinder, an espresso machine and a pound of Kopi Luwak.

For the uninitiated, Kopi Luwak is Indonesian for MonkeyShit Coffee.

Call me abnormally curious, but when someone offers me a cup of MonkeyShit Coffee I've got to know the story behind the odd name. Turns out that farmers throughout Sumatra, Java, Bali in the Indonesian Archipelago discovered that coffee beans were being eaten by Asian Palm Civets, a small catlike creature that is technically in the Monkey family. (I don't think they could sell CatShit Coffee.)

It also turns out the civets could not digest the coffee beans and they would pass through whole, from gullet to sphincter. But on their journey through the monkey's intestines they picked up a wonderful concoction of enzymes and peptides. The local farmers, not willing to let good coffee beans go to waste, carefully and laboriously picked out the whole beans from the excrement.

When the slimy beans were roasted and brewed, the farmers found they had a rich, pungent coffee with hints of chocolate and peanut butter. So they did what any quick thinking 3rd-world farmer would do, they hired a clever graphic artist, a slick marketing team, and a slew of exporters, and then foisted this questionable delicacy upon gullible Americans eager to demonstrate their gastric bravery.

You can go online and order MonkeyShit Coffee from Amazon. It's only $400 a lbs.

I will tell you that it had a good nutty aroma with hints of cocoa and it finished well. But I'd never spend that kind of money for a pound of anything. I might spring $400 for a framed picture of the original artwork seen above.

My wife would never allow it, but that would look great in our downstairs guest bathroom.