The BBC recently produced a short video along the lines of “you’ve been making tea wrong all your life, learn how to do it right”, with viewers then trying to figure out in the comments if it was intended as a parody, or just plain bad.
By my recollection, the key tips were:
Stop making your tea in a polystyrene cup
Wait for the tea to brew before drinking it
There was something intriguing along the way, suggesting that red mugs make our brains decide that the tea tastes sweeter, but most of the video seemed fairly bizarre in its assumptions.
It reminded me of the style of infomercial where they’re selling a tin opener, and they start with “don’t you hate it when you gouge massive chunks out of your hands and face when you try to open a tin?” accompanied by dramatic recreations of people who have apparently just encountered tins and tin openers for the first time in their lives, and have chosen violence.
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With marrying into a Taiwanese family, I’ve been exposed to tea theory. In it’s lower form, it is an exact timing of the steep. The more advanced form relies on a master monitoring the tea and watching it for subtle signs of the exact moment it is at its best.
For me, I rarely detect anything that doesn’t stem from water or leaf quality. But those who follow the “signs” are generally using very good leaves so it’s all good
My first real job, I wrangled stuff for a small isp, one of our clients was the cremation casket industry trade association. As far as I could tell, their purpose was to work to make sure you had to have an expensive casket to be burnt in. A cheap casket, or heaven forbid, a bag, was just not acceptable. The reasons why you needed an expensive casket were because if you didn’t, the cremation casket manufacturers would not be able to fund the cremation casket industry trade association, which would cause great disappointment to your survivors. Or something like that, the details have gone fuzzy with the passage of time.
One of the most amusing US income tax things I learned in school is that funeral homes are subject to 263(a) for inventory overhead allocation because looking at their revenue drivers a court determined their principal business wasn’t services (holding funerals) but retail (coffin vendors).
I’ve only been involved with arranging one funeral, for my father. The whole family, (Mum, brother and me) felt that cremating a timber coffin was wasteful as well as expensive, and opted for chipboard and veneer. The undertakers were disappointed, but could not argue with the reasoning.
