Some people spell it donut and some people spell it doughnut. However you spell it, today is the day to eat them.

Krispy Kreme is going to celebrate the day by giving away one free donut (it's only in participating stores so you'll have to ask if the store in your area is, you know, participating). Are you flying on Southwest Airlines today, out of Dallas' Love Field or airports in Tulsa, San Antonio, or Kansas City? They're giving away free donuts at those locations too. You are now free to move around the country if you can with donuts in your stomach.

I don't think Dunkin' Donuts is doing anything for the day, which is too bad. Unless Krispy Kremes are hot and fresh, they're not as good as Dunkin's.

(I've always wanted to try Stan's Doughnuts in L.A. Luckily they have a web site.)

Dunkin' Donuts TV ads featuring goonishly smiley Food Network personality Rachel Ray have been pulled after a right wing commenter claimed Ray's scarf looks like Palestinian garment. Seriously?

Noted Fox News wingnut Michelle Malkin proclaimed that the black and white scarf resembled the checkered kiffiyah traditionally worn by Palestinians. And therefore must somehow be associated with terrorism. And Dunkin' Donuts, as you know, is into supporting Islamic terrorism. Not just, you know, making Boston Cremes.

The scarf, as you can see, is a tasseled number probably purchased at Saks. Dunkin' Donuts: I love your chocolate glazed, but you should be ashamed of yourself for capitulating to such nonsense.

Whether the motive is to get word out to consumers about how a new product tastes or to lure customers into a restaurant with free food in the hopes that they'll buy other stuff, too, the practice of "sampling" is becoming more and more popular. Sampling used to be restricted to smaller companies that couldn't afford million-dollar advertising campaigns, but now even huge corporations like Starbucks and McDonald's are doing it.

How this affects social psychology, business, and marketing, we'll leave to other blogs, but here, we're just concerned about the free food! The last few months, especially in April when consumers' wallets were hit with taxes, companies gave out everything from free burritos to frozen yogurt.

Coming up, both McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts will be giving away free samples on May 15.

A couple weekends ago, while on a road trip, a friend mentioned she'd heard you could tell a person's personality by their donut choice. We all immediately began discussing our favorite donuts - classic glazed, chocolate frosted, buttermilk. I favor Dunkin' Donuts - chocolate glazed or coconut - despite having grown up half an hour away from a drive-through Krispy Kreme store where you could get hot , melt-in-your-mouth glazed donuts right off the conveyor belt. Not that those aren't good - I just like the greater heft of a Dunkin Donuts cake donut. You can eat two and actually feel full. Or eat, say, five and feel really, really full.

So I Googled "donuts" and "personality" and came up with several quizzes and guides to donuts and human nature. The What Donuts Are You? quiz tells me I'm a Boston creme, tough on the outside but a gushy traditionalist within. Fry My Bacon's guide to donut personality tells me that my choice, coconut, makes me a mostly serene creature with a yearning for tropical places, yet prone to sudden fits of rage. Interesting. And woe on the double chocolate lovers - greedy, decadent, but never truly satisfied!

Is tax day bringing you down? Dunkin' Donuts wants to help raise your spirits. All day today, if you buy a cup of coffee at DD, they'll throw in a free donut. Because while there's no such thing in life as a free lunch, on April 15th, at least you can get yourself a free donut. I recommend the chocolate glazed.

The company that introduced (and hooked) us all on the $4 cup of coffee is starting to feel the burn -- of the economy turning south, and of competitor's cheaper cuppas.

In its annual meeting today, Starbucks' newly-returned founder and CEO Howard Schultz laid out plans for staunching the chains' loss of sales. Among other ideas, the ubiquitous coffee house might introduce loyalty cards...and do away with using flavor-locked bags of pre-ground coffee in its stores.

Seems nobody likes that burned-coffee smell anymore. Instead, stores will once again start using only freshly-ground coffee, and will more carefully tailor its hot food selections to those that don't get in the way of that all-important fresh coffee aroma.

In answer to growing competition from the likes of Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's (both of which serve a fine cup of coffee, in my humble opinion), Starbucks began testing $1 cup of house coffee in its Seattle stores earlier this year.

When it comes to coffee, while I can say that I have to drink a steaming hot cup of it at least once a day, I have to admit that I'm not very - how do you say? -- discriminating. Basically, I'm your street variety caffeine addict who only cares that it gives me a high, even if only for 15 minutes.

So is it fair for me to "review" the tiny sample of Dunkin Donuts coffee that the company sent me to try? Absolutely!

I brewed the entire sample pack with the intention of giving it a full test run -- one cup fresh after brewing taken black, one cup maybe a few minutes later with my usual splash of soy milk. Was it acidic? Balanced? Deep? How the hell do I know? This is basically what I will say about Dunkin Donuts coffee.

It tastes nothing like doughnuts.

But I understand that the real appeal of Dunkin Donuts coffee comes from knowing that you are getting coffee that is the same coffee they serve in the pink and orange temple to fried dough. With that understanding, Dunkin Donuts coffee is pretty darn good.

Looks like super mega ultra ginormous Starbucks isn't feeling so big and powerful these days.

They are testing the sales of $1 cups of coffee that also include free refills in some stores in Seattle. Though Starbucks just recently raised coffee prices across the board, it seems that this testing is a response to stiffer competition from lower-priced coffee at fast food chains. McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts, and other companies sell their coffee for just over a dollar.

That's nice of Starbucks to price-match, but even if the $1 test passes and is expanded across the entire business, I doubt I would go into Starbucks. I actually prefer McDonald's coffee.

Get your passports updated, Slashfoodies.

Dunkin Donuts is opening its first store in Shanghai, China this Spring, with plans to open 100 stores over the next 10 years.

Yeah, so an American retail chain is expanding overseas. So, why would you need a passport?

Because the Dunkin Donuts in China, along with the regular menu items like, oh, coffee and doughnuts, will serve special fare that is tailored to the local Chinese tastes, which we won't get here. That means Chinese customers can get things like honeydew melon doughnuts and mochi rings.

And they probably won't have Rachael Ray as their spokesmodelperson.

Now this is actually one of those food/drink holidays that could actually become a national holiday, considering how many people drink coffee and are pretty much obsessed by it and can't function without it..

National Coffee Day can be celebrated in many different ways. You could just go to Starbucks or Peets or Dunkin Donuts, but if you want to make your own coffee drinks, check out the Cookin With Coffee Directory. How about a Coffee Float or Mexican Coffee or this page that has recipes for Coffee Brownies, Coffee Smoothies, and coffee that's perfect for a crisp fall day, which has ingredients that include whole cloves, cinnamon, and cardamom.

You can also check out CoffeeUniverse.com for lots of info on that most sacred of beans.

Have you ever had this happen to you? You love a certain food or flavor for years, and then one day, for some reason, you're completely turned off by it and don't want to have it again? That's what is happening with me right now with mocha.

More specifically, mocha drinks. As I've mentioned here many times, I don't really like coffee, but I like drinks that have a mocha flavor in them. I bought Nestle's Ice Java chocolate mocha flavored syrup for a couple of years. I really liked it, and bought it again this summer. About two weeks ago it suddenly started to taste...um, really bad to me. It didn't taste right at all. I don't know if they changed the formula or if my bottle had gone bad (the date was fine), but it suddenly tasted really sharp and bitter and disgusting. They don't make the other flavors anymore (at least they don't sell them in my area).

But the mocha problems don't end there.

That's coffee milkshake. So, by law, you cannot have any other flavor of milkshake until midnight tonight, OK? The food police will be watching.

If you don't want to go the Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts route, how about making one of these Coffee House Milk Shakes from Kraft or maybe one of these basic Coffee Milk Shakes For Two. Making-Coffee.com has a Coffee Milk Shake recipe that includes two eggs and ginger biscuits.

And if you're wondering what a milk shake is exactly, check out Wikipedia. I just wish we could settle on whether it's one word or two.

Coffee is hip (actually, it's been that way for several years now), and everyone is drinking it, including kids and teens. When I was a kid, we never drank coffee. It was seen as a "grown-up" thing to do, right up there with having sex, smoking cigarettes, and mortgages. But now you see kids and teens with a Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts cup in their hands, and coffee shoppes are the new malt shoppes.

The Boston Globe's Beth Teitell has an interesting piece on the trend, noting how we try to cut high sugar sodas and fat-filled candy from schools but we're not really thinking about high calorie/high fat/high sugar coffee drinks. Funny how coffee was always seen as an adult thing when soda has caffeine and sugar in it too.

Well, maybe once in a great while, but don't make it a daily thing, OK?

HungryGirl.com has the list of the five summer drinks that will destroy your diet. Sometimes we don't think of the massive amount of calories and/or sugar and/or fat that are in those seductive cold drinks. For example, Krispy Kreme's Mocha Dream Chiller has 670 calories, 28 grams of fat, and 58 grams of sugar (that's for the 12 oz). Dunkin Donuts' Vanilla Bean Coolatta has 440 calories, 17 grams of fat, and 69 grams of sugar.

The other drinks on the list are from Starbucks, Fatburger, and Dairy Queen.

This may be an odd, naive question, but here goes.

For the past few years, I've been enjoying the Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino drinks that you can buy at the supermarket. They come in little bottles, in a four pack. I know that you can buy a Mocha Frappuccino at Starbucks locations, but when I order it it's a thicker, ice-based drink, and not the thin, iced-coffee drink that you get in the four pack from the supermarket. My question: can you actually order this drink at Starbucks, or can you only get the frozen one? Is this store Frappuccino a thin liquid because they can't market it as a frozen drink?

OK, sorry, I guess that was two questions, not one.