May days

Today happens to be the fifth day of the fifth month
I'll wear the straw sandals with blue-eyed cords I was given as they allude to ayame-gusa.
— Basho

Hey, you, get offa my cloud

Heaven, n'est-ce pas?

(via design-dautore)

Goin' underground

A man sets up a blog to write about one of his personal passions, he hopes nights like these come along every so often. They do. The photo above is that of a cluster of fellow Chicago tea junkies, in the basement stock room of a fine Chicago tea shop, cupping teas some had been wanting to share or show off. If the first rule of Underground Tea Club is not to blog about Underground Tea Club, I'm in trouble.

I myself am a bit underground these days. Teasquared is not dead, but it is cooling for a while. I'm deep into data collection for my master's thesis — I've really taken to a lemony rooibos to keep me going at night without the caffeine — and as soon as all this work blows over in the next few weeks, I'll have something of a life again and will heat this blog back to boiling. Till then, please bear with me. Posts will be sporadic. But this fall I'll have news and a whole new outlook, literally.

Share some weak tea with Morrissey

I've written about Morrissey recently — I interviewed him last fall, at the end of which he answered a nagging tea question — and here's another bit, a fun one.

The second half of "Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea," a recent two-part special on the BBC, the British comic shares a cup with Morrissey in Manhattan, talking tea (he travels with an Italian pot, drinks weak Ceylon daily) and, in this clip, suffering through easily the most awkward gift exchange ever ...