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

[Contact Me]] | [FAQ]

[Some "Dougisms" Defined]

[About Dickens of a Blog]

Summary: I have the doldrums over black tea. I know, it bores you, so feel free to skip the first couple of paragraphs. Besides that, I respond to a few news stories. Being grumpy helps you to think? Kids are going over the top asking girls out to the prom? Maybe a couple of others from my backlog.

Monday, 16 November 2009

(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

Where did the comment box go?

Due to most of my friends using alternate means to contact me, and mostly SPAM bots using the comment box method, I have removed it. If you wish to contact me, please feel free to use any human-friendly contact method you wish. Thanks!


Written by Doug Bolden

For those wishing to get in touch, you can contact me in a number of ways

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The longer, fuller version of this text can be found on my FAQ: "Can I Use Something I Found on the Site?".

"The hidden is greater than the seen."