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Today is National Coffee Day, which we're assured is a 100% legitimate holiday and not just something cooked up in a Starbucks marketing department somewhere, and baristas everywhere are celebrating by...well, by being forced to work even harder to accomodate all the mooches wanting their free cup of coffee. But is coffee all it's cracked up to be? Sean Adams and Randall Cleveland argue their points as fiercely as they would fight for the mud cup...

On the path to enlightenment, there are no stops for coffee by Sean Adams

Does the sun require caffeine to rise? Must the rooster indulge in a mug of dark roast to greet the morning? Is the Earth’s spinning aided in any way by the consumption of warmly brewed beverage? The answer to each of these questions, my friends, is no.

Waking up is my motivation to wake up. Each morning when I open my eyes at 5am, I say, “congratulations, Sean. You have won! The darkness did not take you prisoner! The night did not consume you! You are whole and you are wonderful!” And then I leave the house and roll in the lawn, bathing myself in the only water source I can trust: the fresh morning dew.

We, as a race, need not fear the effects of sleep. When you drink a cup of coffee each morning you are essentially smothering your sleeping self with a pillow. You are telling the tired you, “I am far more concerned with the heaviness of your eyelids than the validity of your ideas.” But if you gave your tired self a chance, you might find that he’s actually an amazing human being.

I, myself, often get some of my best work done when extremely tired. I’ve written some of my best poems and whittled some of my most detailed wooden bird sculptures just out of bed, crafted some of my finest vegan paninis, performed a few of my greatest one man shows, and trimmed some fantastic hedge sculptures after restless nights of little to no sleep. And yet, for some reason, society tells me that I require coffee to function? Ridiculous!

Man invented the car, but now man takes after the car, filling himself with a dark, dangerous liquid in order to move forward through life. But it does not have to be this way! We can overcome our dependence on coffee, just like we can get overcome our dependence on foreign oil by trading in our cars for alpaca-drawn-carriages!

Please join me, and we will let our eyelids droop in happy unity!

Coffee is the Only Thing Keeping Me From Killing You and Everyone Else in This Office by Randall Cleveland

Let me be honest right off the bat, here: I don't give a flying crap if you like coffee. Your wants, needs, likes, and dislikes are absolutely subatomic on my radar of stuff to worry about. But in order for you to understand the importance of a day like National Coffee Day, let me make one thing perfectly crystal clear:

Coffee is the only thing keeping me from murdering you in your pathetic little cubicle right now.

Mankind was not made to waste away at a desk under fluorescent lighting while staring at various flickering screens. But hey, I recognize the status quo, and since I feel like mankind was also not made to live in dumpsters I understand that I have to hold down a job. Which means 40-60 hours a week in here, sitting at a desk.

With you people.

But on the weekends, my time is mine. I can do whatever I want! I can run and laugh and jump and swim and kayak and mountain bike and hang glide, or at least I would do those things if I wasn't so beat down and defeated by the end of the week that I can barely muster the energy to sit upright on the couch to watch whatever Jamie Kennedy travesty Comedy Central is running eight times in a row. And when I close my eyes every Sunday night, after I wipe the tears away and accept that yes, tomorrow I will have to go to work again, I dream. I dream of flying through an endless, cloudless sky as blue as any sapphire. The wind rips along my back and through my hair and I laugh, joyously, at the freedom I've never felt but always knew I needed to feel.

And then, like some unsympathetic prison guard, the alarm clock jolts me awake. And I'm forced to trudge to my car, still half asleep and longing for the blue sky, and drive through an hour and a half's worth of commuter traffic to finally reach my destination: a place I hate with the fire of 10,000 suns.

And then you show up, all chipper and stupid, and say things like, "I don't know how you can drink that stuff! It stains your teeth! Hee hee!"

You know how I can drink this stuff? I grit my g** damn teeth and I drink it. I hungrily savor the decadent stuff from Kona, and I pull a John Wayne and tough through the gritty instant crap when that's all we have. I drink it because it's the only thing that kills the pain. I drink it because even as I'm explaining this to you, even as I'm doing my best to explain my situation and try to earn your understanding, all I can think about is grabbing your tiny muppet head with both hands and squeezing.

I want to squeeze your head so f*&^%ing hard your eyes explode like over-ripe cherry tomatoes. Do you have any idea how many items in a typical office could be used to commit cold-blooded murder? Because I do. I think through a new scenario every morning before 8:15 rolls around and there's finally a fresh pot. I could push the snack machine over on top of you. I could force feed you Post-It Notes until you're fully taxidermied. I could probably put enough force behind a Dry-Erase marker to lodge one in your skull. Hell, I could bludgeon you to death with this very coffee mug if it weren't the vessel for the life force that keeps me and you and everyone else in this s*&t hole alive.

So yeah, you could say I'm a fan of coffee. But if you're going to say it, do me a favor and say it way the f&%^ over there, because my head is killing me this morning.

(All photos are stock photos purchased by Woot.)

Since it's Pet Week on the Woot blog, we've asked some of today's most brilliant thinkers - ourselves - to explore the most vital question in human-canine relations today: should dogs be allowed into the workplace? Jason Toon and Randall Cleveland debate the question like two back-alley mutts fighting over a discarded bag of Jack in the Box curly fries. Remember, we kid because we love...

Put A Little Kennel In Your Office by Jason Toon

If everyone in America can agree on anything anymore, it’s this: office work is boring. So imagine my delight when I was leaving our building the other day and almost walked into an explosion of snarling, frothing fur and fang. Dogfight in the atrium! Now that’s excitement! Nobody got hurt – the owners were able to yank the combatants apart before the blood flowed – but this whiff of primal bloodlust certainly enlivened an otherwise dull afternoon under the fluorescent lights.

That’s the kind of unexpected little gift you’ll only find in a dog-friendly workplace. Sure, there are some other kinds that are less fun, especially if you step in them on the way to your yearly performance review. But given the standard of hygiene on display in this building’s human restrooms, the dogs come off looking pretty good on that score.

Dogs open the sterile environment of the office to the natural world, to the mysteries of life and death, to the rich variety of mammalian parasites. To be deeply focused on a particular work task, only to have your concentration broken by the yelp of a dog in a nearby cubicle, is to rediscover the anxiety experienced every day by our primitive ancestors. To be annoyed is to be alive.

Indeed, if you ask me, open-dog policies should be expanded to other species. Bring your goat, your iguana, your unemployed brother-in-law! I feel like I’d be a lot more productive if I could bring my beehives to the office with me instead of fretting about them all day from afar. My pretties need me.

Or, wait: what about bringing your kids to work? Like, say, an on-site daycare, so working parents had one less trip to make at the beginning and end of every day, and could spend a little more time working instead of driving, and come a little closer to that fabled “work-life balance” that everybody talks about?

Nah, that would be ridiculous. Dogs it is, then!

If I Wanted to Work with Dogs, I’d Have Gone Into Euthanasia by Randall Cleveland

What kind of office encourages people to bring their pets to work? The vapid kind desperate to adopt something, ANYTHING, as their own “kooky culture!” so that their pathetic Monster.com ads have something to offer. And since we work in just such an office, I see you’re taking full advantage and bringing your mangy, aggressive Presa Canario into the office. I’m sure it will be more than happy to just sit idly at your desk all day while not barking or distracting anyone as you seem to expect.

I’m sorry. Am I the only one who comes here to actually work?

Don’t get me wrong, I like dogs. “Man’s best friend” and all that. But here’s an idea: try bringing your best HUMAN friend to work. Have him or her sit in the corner and just stare balefully at you all day. Position some trash cans so they can’t walk out of your office and run free. Let passersby feed your buddy from college the occasional piece of jerky. See what the boss thinks about that. And what’s the difference? That ONE distracting layabout contributing nothing to the office has fur? Why does THAT get a pass?

Not to mention that there are people in this office who have allergies to pet dander. I’m not one of them, but boy I wish I was. I’d OWN this office after my lawsuit. You can’t turn a white collar fluorescent paradise into some low-rent animal husbandry operation! It’s disgusting! They shed and they pee on the floor and they sniff my crotch in the elevator and they FIGHT each other in the lobby! Am I the only one seeing this crap happen? We are ADULTS working at a BUSINESS, right?

That’s it. From now on I am taking a few moments each morning to smear bacon grease on my leg. If no one else is willing to stand up for the rights of people who thought getting a college degree meant NOT working in an office full of savage beasts, then I will. And when the first idiot stares off into space as their little furry angel chomps on my calf, I’ll scream the words no company wants to hear. I’ll bring the whole thing crashing down with the words guaranteed to ruin forever even the most heavily-supported company policy.

“I’m suing!”

Photos: Dogs in chairs by Flickr user Wyscan, and She's learned to sit by Flickr user quoo, both used under a Creative Commons License.