The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf has a drink they call a Moroccan Mint Latte. It’s a tea latte with chocolate. You can get a fairly good approximation by making hot chocolate using mint tea instead of hot water. Katie suggested Bigelow Plantation Mint (after I mentioned that I’d tried it with Stash Moroccan Mint), which seems to work well.
Update: I forgot to mention the key difference between the two varieties of tea that I tried. Black tea works better with chocolate than green tea.
I saw the planet Venus four times on my walk to and from lunch today! Yes, in broad daylight!
Someone on Slashdot mentioned it was possible last week. I took it seriously because back in high school, I used to watch Venus fade into the brightening sky on winter mornings. Often I could still find it once I arrived at school, since I knew exactly where to look.
I tried unsuccessfully a couple of times over the past week, but today I had a ~20-minute walk mostly facing southward, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
I used the Moon as a guide, trying to guess the distance based on how far apart they were last night. As I passed through a building’s shadow, I spotted a stationary white dot in the right area, a bit more than a hand span away from the crescent Moon in the direction of the sun, barely visible next to some wispy clouds. I couldn’t find any sign of a con trail, and it didn’t move, so it clearly wasn’t an airplane, but I was able to look away and back and still see it. Continue reading
I spotted workers trimming the palm trees at lunch today. In Irvine, that involves a bucket crane and a chainsaw, with a couple of guys on the ground to pick up the fallen fronds and pile them off to the side.
This contrasted heavily in my mind with the tree trimmers I saw in Hawaii, where a guy would shimmy up a palm tree with a rope and a machete, then hack away.
I saw them rotating the crane to move the guy to a new tree, so I’m sure the mainland style trimming gets done faster than the island style… but then, we’re always in such a hurry here. Too bad we can’t do our landscaping on island time.
Salon has a great piece on how there is no left-wing war on Christmas. This “OMG the blue staters want to ban Christmas” tripe was idiotic last year, and it’s back with a vengeance this year.
Honestly, all this fuss over things like “Happy Holidays,” an expression designed to avoid offending people? Remember, in most cases a store clerk has no way of knowing your religion ahead of time. If you happen to be buying a wreath, a stand-up Santa, a pair of decorated red-and-green stockings and a nativity set, then it’s probably a fair guess that you’re celebrating Christmas, but if you’re buying an Xbox, how are they supposed to know?
(I’m also rather partial to the descriptions of the ACLU defending Christians’ religious freedoms! That ought to make some people question their assumptions.)
Get a grip, people! Christmas is not in any danger, and hysterical whining and knee-jerk boycotts aren’t going to accomplish anything except making you look like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist.
Here’s the WTF?!?!?!!!! moment of the day. Actual spam received over the weekend:
Sell Your Organs Online!
Reply to this message if your interested in selling your organs!
Seriously, what the hell?
Forget the fact that selling organs is illegal in the US. And I’m sure mailing them across state lines would be a felony. And you sure as heck can’t list them on eBay. Or Amazon—can you imagine? “15 new and used livers available.” “Customers who purchased kidneys also bought…”
I stopped in a Starbucks after lunch last Wednesday. I confused the barista by ordering a frappucino—he said something about how I was going to freeze my kidneys or something, and when I remarked that I was going to be in the office, he said he was joking with everyone who ordered anything cold. (Local readers may recall that last week was not particularly warm by SoCal standards.)
I also noticed a stack of boxes by the wall, all of them like this:
(For the record, this was November 9.) I assumed they were full of Starbucks’ Christmas and holiday-themed merchandise, but it was the phrasing that got me. The holidays start November 10? That’s kind of early, isn’t it?
I suppose it depends on which holidays we’re talking about. Usually, “The Holidays” refers to the Thanksgiving–Christmas period that also manages to encompass Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Boxing Day. (Wait, no one actually observes Boxing Day? Well, never mind, then.) They could be including Veterans’ Day, but there’s not much in the way of decorations, and the merchandising possibilities don’t tend to overlap much with coffee paraphernalia.
Hmm, here’s an odd thought. In America, we always associate snow with Christmas. Hence the snowflakes printed on the box. But in the southern hemisphere, December is the beginning of summer. I suspect Christmas songs like “Winter Wonderland” don’t get much play in Australia.
