It is Tuesday! Rains falls. Like tea. Cold, unbrewed Tea.
And I have ill tidings of bad joy from all over the world:
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FIRST, the prices of tea are shooting up. Up! Not heroin, they are becoming more expensive.
Partially it’s the weather. And macroeconomic indicators. Heck, I don’t know, read this report from the Business Standard:
Despite a higher crop output of 87 million kg in major tea producing countries — Kenya, Sri Lanka and India — prices are constant, as the cumulative deficit stands at 125 million kg.
Oh no! I have no idea what this means, except that you should probably purchase huge tinsful of black tea and hoard them for the coming winter. It will be cold, and you will want tea.
Is that plug shameless? Sure. I am not one for shame.
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SECOND, Chocolate is worthless! As worthless as an old pizza pie
Okay, that is untrue if one values chocolate for its pleasure-inducing qualities. Yet others value it for aught save its “anti-oxidant” properties. Who cares? I am shoveling chocolate into my mouth beak with no care for life & limb.
Yet for the more health-conspicuous among us, dark chocolates have held out fitful hope of a magical Elixir, one that confers Youth & Beauty on its eaters, or at least keeps you from croaking from heart disease. No true, say the well-named Bridie Smith of Australia’s newspapers:
YOU are not going to want to read this: chocolate cannot be relied upon as a source of antioxidants to boost cardiovascular health. But it gets worse: drinking coffee and red wine in the hope it will prevent heart disease doesn’t work either.
Fans of Turkish or Greek coffee have now been warned that their boiled coffee contains more bad cholesterol-bearing oil than filtered Italian coffee varieties.
The brutal news was delivered yesterday by the Heart Foundation following a review of more than 100 international studies on antioxidants from the past decade.
(I don’t want to quote the whole lede, but it’s pretty tight! Couldn’t figure out what to cut.)
Now, I like some dark chocolate and some high LDL coffee every now and then. I may have even experimented with putting a little bacon fat in my coffee, who knows.
But those are occasional treats, like raw salmon belly or sprinting nekkid through the woods. For an everday beverage, it is tea and tea alone. I have heard something of its health benefits. But I am no Big Pharmer, I am just take pleasure in the drink.
So the next time a jittering, sackeyed office drone quotes some bogus study while hoisting a cup of black death to his quivering lips in his rattletrap, shaking hands, kick back with a cup of tea and feel a little smug. Especially if you have purchased several cubic meters of tea to avoid the coming price hikes. Which may or may not happen, because I am no Big Economist, I just jam econo.
