A Great Cuppa

A month or so ago, I emailed several tea-drinking friends asking if they could suggest a good brand of everyday, British black tea. A certain Mad One said he thought I might like Yorkshire Gold and I was finally able to give it a try yesterday (found that they carry it at the local Whole Foods Market).

Regardless of the title of his blog, he was perfectly right. This is a practically ideal, "drink it everyday" tea. Great taste and brews up stout enough to take milk & sugar without being too rough and acidic. And if you don't have a Whole Foods Market close by, I've seen it offered via mail order on sites like The British Shoppe (and you can stock up on some Branston Pickle, H.P. Sauce, Liquorice Allsorts, and McVities Digestives while you're there :)

Recommended.

Photoshopping Old Posters

There's a great set of photoshopped versions of old propaganda and advertising posters up over at Worth100. Some are on the verge of NSFW (I almost picked the pole dancer to show y'all ;) but you'll find several gems there.

Just the sort of thing that's right up a certain Mad One's alley...

[via boingboing]

Bad Armadillo...Bad

I've just approved about 30+ comments for my blog which have been hanging fire since Aug. Sorry for the wait, but I plead time-crunched insanity as we both moved and went on vacation that month.

My email inbox is so clogged I may never catch up :/

But I promise to try & keep up with it better now... Mea culpa, mea maxima nissan stanza. (shamelessly nicked from the Rev. Eliz. Kaeton)

Cory Doctorow on Free E-Books

There was quite a dust-up recently in the SF writers community when a VP of the SFWA sent a take-down notice to an e-text website and, in a rather bogus manner, invoked the DMCA. If you need background on the situation, author John Scalzi has a good summary.

However, one of the authors the SFWA VP claimed to represent is Cory Doctorow, who open sources all his fiction and lets anyone distribute and share it on a non-commercial basis. Doctorow has also "expressly forbidden SFWA from representing him in matters of copyright." (Scalzi article). This was not a smart move on the SFWA's part. Cory Doctorow has, in the hugely popular website/blog boingboing, one of the largest bully pulpits on the Internet and he's not afraid to use it.

Now Doctorow has published the thoughtful essay Free(konomic) E-books on the topic of giving away free, electronic copies of his works that is well worth reading:

Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don't have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them.

Update: SF author Jerry Pournelle offers his take on this in his Sept. 4 column at Chaos Manor Reviews. He disagrees with Doctorow on a number of points, but you gotta give Pournelle props - he's been at this game a long time.

Mommy, this water burns!

Johnny was a chemist's son,

But Johnny is no more.

What Johnny thought was H₂0

was H₂SO₄.

It's also available as a t-shirt. And yes, I am a geek - thank you very much ;)

What Kind of Liberal are You ?

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

[thanks to Dennis, who's the same sort of Liberal I am :) ]

QotD for 14 Aug., 2007

A belief that man was made for the creeds and not the creeds for man is idolatry. I think a belief that one has access to the 'plain' meaning of scripture is arrogant, and not as much making a God of the Bible but of one's own interpretive abilities.

--- commenter "Harry" on Fr. Jake's blog