If you're here reading about tea things, then you've read the incredulous "hot drinks cool you down!" story a thousand times. An NPR blogger marveled anew at the thought this week, posting information from a neuroscientist about how hot drinks make you sweat, which is the body's cooling mechanism, so in fact hot drinks facilitate cooling off, etc.
Perspiration, though, only cools you down if there's air around your body (moving, ideally) to cause the temperature-regulating evaporation. In other words, sitting in a plush chair and drinking hot tea on a hot day is only going to make your back and posterior a warm, wet mess.
My favorite response, however, to the question "Does hot tea make you cooler?" was posted on a message board ages ago: "No. Taking heroin and going to be-bop clubs in a beret makes you cooler. Drinking tea makes you a quaint old English lady."
13 years ago
Hmm, well, Charlie Parker certainly played some good be-bop while going through heroin withdrawal. The Dial Sessions contain a rather tortured-sounding recording of the classic song "Be-bop", track 16 on the first album of the Hollywood Sessions, which was recorded while he was going through withdrawal. And it is a pretty cool sounding track.
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