(23:21:19 CST)
Haven't been excited by a good black tea in a while; also Ignorance IS bliss, Would you go with ME to the prom, and other newsbits
I have not been really excited about a good black tea for a while. Two years, maybe. The last truly excellent black tea that I can think of would probably have been an Assam. Helmutty Gold. Fragrant, round floral notes with a cream-malt front-and-center. Deep red brown brew that adored honey, milk, or plain. It was so fragrant that it flattened relatively quickly, so I only had it in small doses and never a stockpile. Maybe some of Numi's Keemun Congou (I think it was Numi). That smoky tartness mixed with a gentle sweetness. I am a black tea drinker by design, and it seems like most of the choices, lately, are just not cutting mustard. No, um, food pun intended. I have Twining's Earl Grey, which is my go-to black tea right now, and I'm not sure what that means. I have some Panyang Congou, which is a nice younger cousin to the Keemun but misses some of the completeness of flavor. I have a mixed blend of about five others that I call "Douglish Breakfast" (black and golden Assams mixed with Keemun, Lapsang, and Ceylon). I have an Assam Majulighur that is tasty, but like most of the Assams, somehow is more about the smell than the taste. Ask me sometime and maybe, just maybe, I will have figured out what that means.
As I see it, I have two options and I'm going to do them both. First, I need more Twining's Irish Breakfast. I'm sure tea snobs have their noses three feet in the air, but Twining's has been doing it for a while and the flavors they do best (namely Earl Grey and Irish Breakfast) they do well. I like them, anyhow. Then I'm going to take a random chance on some golden tipped Yunnan from Numi (called something like Chinese Breakfast Tea). One is something I know I like. The other is something that I might like, and hopefully I will.
Now that I have bored you with "tea talk", let me respond to a few news-stories I have found scattered around the Internet.
Birmingham area teens follow national trend with creative prom invitations: how about this one? Bunch of teens are going to great lengths to ask the girls out to the prom. Billboards. Golf balls. Elaborate multi-party set-ups. Airplanes. Lord. I wouldn't have made it. My genes would be firmly enconsed in my single man's genitals if I had to do such a thing for a single date (I'll leave aside the whole "first time often happens after prom" aspect). Who knows? Maybe I would have been good at it, given a chance. "I BURNED DOWN A HOUSE FOR YOU!"
When heated, high-fructose corn syrup can be dangerous: when heated, HFCS releases a toxic chemical that kills bees and might be responsible for some of the collapse in bee population. Ok, pop-quiz...which is scarier? That a sweetener that is just about everywhere in food can break down and kill you? Or that we feed said sweetener to bees?
Feeling grumpy 'is good for you': rather than anti-social, grumpy people may actually just be focused people. Instead of attacking workers who want their their own time, maybe we should just let them do their job. Let's play with a little bit of logic. If P, then Q. Not P does not mean Not Q, but Not Q means Not P, right? If Grumpy, then Smart. Not smart = not grumpy. Ignorance is bliss. It's proof.
Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie: Not really a newsbit, but the funniest review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen you will ever read.
Si Vales