Are you reading this with your afternoon coffee? How’s it smell? How’s your co-worker smell? Wait, I’m digressing.
In Rockland, Maine, the owners of the Rock City Coffee Roasters must deal with neighborhood complaints that it gives off an unpleasant aroma. One man said, “It’s not the same odor you get when you walk by the coffee grinder at a supermarket. That’s pleasant, but this was not.” But some others disagree, like the 1,200 folks who sign the “Save Our Smell” petition.
I took up drinking tea in college (strong and bitter)and that debauchery quickly led to coffee drinking. I did use a strainer or infuser, which is one up on a couple of my friends who just put the tea leaves into their mugs and tried to drink it up before it grew too bitter. Their last swallow was always the worst. Anyway, I’m sure my grades suffered for my vices, but I’m not ashamed of my past. I’m looking ahead.
It’s with a heavy heart that I notice tea-drinking is on the rise at the University of South Florida and apparently other college campuses as well. There are tea lounges with student artwork and occasional Halo competitions. But the worst of it is Bubble Tea.
Bubble tea comes in a variety of forms and flavors. Choices range from more familiar tastes such as green milk tea to more exotic ones such as taro – a tropical vegetable – milk tea. Essentially, it is tea with milk or creamer.
The drinks can be ordered with or without boba – sweet, chewy tapioca pearls that sink to the bottom of the cup. The pearls look like bubbles, giving the tea its name. Though the gummy-bear consistency is strange at first, the little pearls are oddly likeable.
“Almond vanilla milk tea is the most popular,” Nguye said. He said he also recommends mango and peach-flavored slushies.
Taro milk tea, eh? And I sold my soul to Earl Grey.
Though the link to Valentine’s relics was appealing (see last post), let me offer you a better Valentine’s Day post even though you will probably see it the day after. Here’s a fun, artsy video of Anderson & Roe playing their arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango.”
Author of Peace Like a River, Leif Enger, has another novel coming. Watch for So Brave, Young, and Handsome on shelves this May. Peace Like a River was an Amazon.com’s Best of 2001.
Random House is testing an idea of selling books in pieces, one chapter at a time. “Publishers are convinced that as it becomes easier to download books, and screen technology improves, an ever-larger number of readers will opt to receive digital content,” reports Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal. Also, HarperCollins is publishing some books for free online access, testing the waters for its ability to increase sales.
Sometimes the road goes ever ever on; sometimes it runs under a landslide. New Line Cinemas’ plans to produce “The Hobbit” and another “Lord of the Rings” prequel film could have a big road block. The Tolkien estate and HarperCollins are suing the production company for royalities never paid.
Ken Myers has interviewed J. Mark Bertrand on worldview, reading, and other fun topics. That should be a great interview. You can subscribe to the MP3 version of the MHA Journal for $30/year. It’s always very interesting.
In fact, you can listen to several recordings in their CD Bonus section. Note these two: “Vol. 66 – Leon Kass, on how new technologies have changed the assumptions many people have about their children” and “Vol. 53 – Dana Gioia talks about the life and work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and reads a poem inspired by the death of his wife, ‘The Cross of Snow.'”
Anecdotal Evidence is talking about Thoreau’s thoughts on writing. “A feeble writer,” Thoreau says, “and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of other, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.”
Now using Bloo, v. 1.00.
Joe Carter is doing a four parter on saving conservative political discourse and policies in today’s more-hostile-than-yesterday climate. First, stop the bleeding, he says. Next, let’s kill all the lawyers. No, we’ll do that later. Next, start the breathing.
I don’t know that Joe nails in on every point, but he’s close to the mark. It seems to me there are well-defined conservative ideas and there are well-established conservative people who may or may not hold the conservative position on a certain issue. Calling the person a liberal would be unfair, even if you could make a case for his position on the one issue being a liberal position. That is McCain’s problem, as I understand it. It doesn’t matter to may voters and commentators I suppose that the American Conservative Union gives him an 80+% lifetime conservative record. It matters that on the issues McCain has taken leadership, he has led in a liberal direction. You could easily believe he voted with conservatives on their issues out of party loyalty instead of principle, so as president he would be more likely to lead according to his less than conservative principles.
But I’ll vote for him anyway–at least at this point. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.