Coffees of India
April 2, 2004
India produces two fine coffees, but even among coffee devotees √¢‚Ǩ‚Äú at least in America √¢‚Ǩ‚Äú they remain relatively unknown and un-drunk. That’s too bad. They deserve to be extolled for the romance attached to them, if nothing else; happily, they also taste pretty good as well.
According to legend, coffee was discovered in Ethiopia. The first big coffee craze, though, occurred in Arabia, where by the 13th century Muslims were brewing and drinking huge quantities of it. Travelers from Arabia took the beans with them wherever they went – beans deliberately made infertile, allegedly, by parching or boiling. Because of this strict export control policy, it is claimed that no coffee seed sprouted outside Africa or Arabia until the 17th century.
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Rooibos: Regular Rooibos tea vs. Green Rooibos tea
March 19, 2004
ROOIBOS TEA has taken the world by storm. Both fermented and unfermented Rooibos tea are primarily sold as a health drink however, it is also used as a raw material in the cosmetic industry. Green Rooibos Tea is the unfermented version of Rooibos Tea and it has a lighter, fruitier taste than regular Rooibos tea. Rooibos tea lacks the astringent taste of normal tea and green tea.
Auguries Of Innocence
June 9, 2003
a little poetry for the day…
Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell through all its regions.
A dog starved at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipped and armed for fight
Does the rising sun affright.
Every wolf’s and lion’s howl
Raises from hell a human soul.
The wild deer wandering here and there
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misused breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher’s knife.
The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won’t believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever’s fright.
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be beloved by men.
He who the ox to wrath has moved
Shall never be by woman loved.
The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider’s enmity.
He who torments the chafer’s sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.
The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.
He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar’s dog and widow’s cat,
Feed them, and thou wilt grow fat.
The gnat that sings his summer’s song
Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of Envy’s foot.
The poison of the honey-bee
Is the artist’s jealousy.
The prince’s robes and beggar’s rags
Are toadstools on the miser’s bags.
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so:
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
The babe is more than swaddling bands,
Throughout all these human lands;
Tools were made and born were hands,
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;
This is caught by females bright
And returned to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar
Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore.
The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes Revenge! in realms of death.
The beggar’s rags fluttering in air
Does to rags the heavens tear.
The soldier armed with sword and gun
Palsied strikes the summer’s sun.
The poor man’s farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric’s shore.
One mite wrung from the labourer’s hands
Shall buy and sell the miser’s lands,
Or if protected from on high
Does that whole nation sell and buy.
He who mocks the infant’s faith
Shall be mocked in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne’er get out.
He who respects the infant’s faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.
The questioner who sits so sly
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar’s laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour’s iron brace.
When gold and gems adorn the plough
To peaceful arts shall Envy bow.
A riddle or the cricket’s cry
Is to doubt a fit reply.
The emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.
The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation’s fate.
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding sheet.
The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse,
Dance before dead England’s hearse.
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not through the eye
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.
God appears, and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
Celery + Gravity = Art
May 30, 2003
Getting an early start on Friday, here’s “a study of the effects of celery on loose elastic”:http://www.lileks.com/institute/frahm/art1.html—an in-depth look at 50’s pinup artist “Art Frahm’s”:http://www.lileks.com/institute/frahm/indexmain.html propensity for drawing cuties with bags of celery whose panties just happened to lose their fight against gravity at a most inoportune time.
Reasonably safe for work; less than one could see on a network television commercial, but still a weirdly entertaining look at the product of a guy with a veggie fetish and a talent for sketching…
Gotta love the Internet…
(via “ErosBlog”:http://www.erosblog.com/ which typically _isn’t_ safe for work)
Tivo & Longevity
April 19, 2003
Luke Hutteman is concerned about Tivo staying around.
I was an early Tivo adopter, now own a second one (a DirecTivo), and am anxiously awaiting the HD version this year to buy a third… Although it’s of course quite subjective, I feel safe to say that the value I’ve gotten out of it (in convenience and pleasure) have already far outweighed the entry costs.
For several years, one of the best deals going has been the DirecTivo, which incorporates two DirecTV receivers. Since it’s partially subsidized by DirecTV (like purchasing any other receiver), and since it forgoes the expense of having an MPEG2 encoder (it just saves the encoded satellite data stream), it is usually sold very cheap—every so often it’s offered free for new subscribers, and for less then $100 for existing subscribers.
Since it records the raw datastream, the playback quality is indistinguishable from normal DirecTV playback. As it receives it’s guide updates from DirecTV (rather than the Tivo phonecall), I suspect it would be very likely to still be usable should Tivo eventually go down the tubes.
The downsides are that the DirecTV version still doesn’t offer the Home Media option, and of course, you’ve got to use it with DirecTV (which just changed ownership).
Leaving that aside, I’d still have to think the prospects for Tivo’s longevity are good; with their only real competitor (Replay) having an uncertain fate (it was just bought up in a bankruptcy auction), they essentially own their market for the time being.
The other thing to consider is the substantial Tivo hacking community. So many things on the Tivo have been hacked to be extended and enhanced, I’d be shocked if someone didn’t come out with a hack to allow guide updates from another source should Tivo shuffle off this commercial coil.
In any event, I’m sure most Tivo owners would say to forget all of that and just do it—using a TV without a Tivo is like using a microcomputer without an internet connection—sure, a lot of folks do it, but they’re missing out on a substantial amount of utility.
Yahoo RSS, not quite there yet.
April 10, 2003
Via Ben Hammersley, The RSS Validator folks have added a page to figure out the RSS feed for a Yahoo Group—enter in the group name, and it generates an URL to the RSS feed.
This would be VERY handy, as I’ve got 40-some Yahoo Groups I track; many of which I use in a manner that would be much faster if I could use them in my aggregator-of-the-moment.
Unfortunately, each and every one of them are groups that you must be a member of to view messages, and if that’s the case, then no RSS for you…
There needs to be some way that one could authenticate to Yahoo Groups so that it could cough up the RSS feeds for these groups.
This seems like a win-win situation; Yahoo eliminates spending bandwidth on sending me a lot of messages (and Yahoo sends me a LOT of messages), and I save time by ignoring the 90%+ that I don’t care about, and only paying attention to (and drawing bandwidth for) the 10% that I do.
Unfortunately, innovation and Yahoo (outside of finding a new place to stuff an ad every 5 minutes) seem to have parted company back around 2000, when the bottom fell out of everything.
There have been a few signs of motion lately, though; I see that they’re busy bringing up their Inktomi-based replacement for Google as their back-end search engine. While I like Google better than Inktomi (I tend to get better ranking in Google 
, I’m hopeful that this is a sign that maybe we’re heading back somewhere in the direction of the innovative Yahoo of yore…
you had my hope up 
