I love tea!
Sadly, I don’t get any tea leaves as I have excellent filters so I don’t spend a lot of time staring into the bottom of a cup for answers. Instead, I prefer to filter the mind-numbing amount of information available to us these days and try to separate the wheat from the chaff – which is another thing people simply don’t have to do anymore. Without tea leaves or entrails or bones to cast – how else will modern man forecast the futures? Help us Magic 8 Ball!
Anyway, so we’re wondering whether the markets will finish 2012 in the red or in the green or somewhere in between and those just happen to be the colors of tea leaves, which are as reliable as anything when predicting future events. My favorite iced tea maker is the very simple Takeya 11100 (for $17, they don’t name them!) but for hot tea I love my cast-iron Japanese tea pot with the high-tech filter (hidden inside) and the cool golden dragons etched into the metal.
Now, I can predict, with a great deal of certainty, that next January, I will still be using my cast-iron tea pot. For one thing, the design is thousands of years old and hasn’t been improved upon. Also, it was freakin’ expensive, so I’d need a damned good reason to change it. We’ve been through a lot together so I have an emotional attachment to it and my oldest daughter loves dragons and drinks tea with me out of the matching iron cups – all things that are not likely to be replaced over the next 12 months.
My Takeya, on the other hand, is relatively new and replaced my more expensive Mr. Coffee Iced Tea machine that I had been using for over a decade. Not the same one but, when the last one crapped out I didn’t like the design of the new one so I began experimenting with alternatives and ended up loving the Takeya, which is cheaper, easier to clean and makes much better iced tea. Could I have predicted last year that Takeya would be the winner? Not at all – I’d never heard of them. That means, although I LOVE it, I don’t feel as sure that it will remain my favorite next year. In fact, like a quantum event, the act of my…
