DaveWells.us

Mmm… tasty.

I’m a tea fiend. I drink quite a bit of hot tea, espe­cially dur­ing the win­ter months. Both hot and cold chai are favorites of mine, as well. But sum­mer in the south requires some­thing cool and refresh­ing, and not as heavy as dairy-laden chai. I’m speak­ing of course of iced tea.
Although I grew up in Ten­nessee, I still con­sider myself a Cal­i­forn­ian trans­plant. As such, I’ve never been able to get in to southern-style sweet tea. I’ve tried it with gran­u­lated sugar, raw sugar, Equal, Sweet’N Low, and Splenda — all too sweet for me. When order­ing iced tea in restau­rants, I’ll usu­ally go with the unsweet­ened vari­ety, which often gar­ners puz­zled or deri­sive glances from my native south­ern friends (you know who you are). My absolute favorite vari­ety of iced tea, how­ever, is fruit tea.
Fruit tea is, as far as I can tell, another south­ern cre­ation. I believe that my fam­ily was first intro­duced to it while eat­ing brunch at a local upscale tra­di­tional south­ern restau­rant. In its most basic form, fruit tea con­sists of unsweet­ened ice tea topped off with some sort of fruit juice — often orange. The juice soften the tart­ness of the tea with­out mak­ing the drink overly sweet. You must, of course, brew real tea for this to work — that hor­ri­ble instant dross will not do. The vari­ety of fruit tea that we make at home uses Lip­ton iced tea blend and Welch’s pre-mixed orange-pineapple-apple juice. The ratio of tea to juice is a mat­ter of per­sonal pref­er­ence — my dad likes almost a full glass of tea with a lit­tle juice on top, while I enjoy a two-thirds to one-third ratio.
This sub­lime mix­ture of Camel­lia sinen­sis broth and liq­uid citrus-bromeliad-rosacead extract is extremely refresh­ing. It really hits the spot after mow­ing the lawn or a long day at work. Since get­ting home a week and a half ago, I’ve con­sumed ridicu­lous quan­ti­ties of it. I espe­cially enjoy relax­ing in an old-fashioned way, as I’m doing right now: sit­ting out on the porch in the late after­noon, drink­ing a tall, cool glass of fruit tea while rock­ing in a rock­ing chair, lis­ten­ing to the birds sing, and using my Power­book and 802.11g WiFi con­nec­tion to post to my blog. Okay, so maybe “old-fashioned” is a bit of a stretch.
To sum­ma­rize, in a pop-culture-cliche-I-wanted-to-play-with-Photoshop kind of way:

One of the perks of being a col­lege pro­fes­sor is that you’re allowed a cer­tain amount of eccen­tric­ity. Sure, you can be eccen­tric in any pro­fes­sion, but it’s almost expected from the ivory tower literati. Off­beat out­fits are one out­let avail­able to the dis­cern­ing eccen­tric.
Some­times, this man­i­fests itself as a stead­fast devo­tion to a par­tic­u­lar out­fit. One pro­fes­sor I had seemed to choose between two out­fits: green pants with a white shirt, or blue pants with a white shirt. If it was cold out­side (for Phoenix), she’d add a grey sweater vest. The sweater vest was a favorite of another of my pro­fes­sors. Once he put it on, it was a fix­ture until he decided to leave it at home in the spring.
Other times, a par­tic­u­lar item of cloth­ing is the focus of an eccen­tric­ity. I had a con­duc­tor who owns a dif­fer­ent tie for every day of the year, and there­fore never wears the same tie twice dur­ing any 365 day period. I’m not sure if he has a leap tie or not. Sim­i­larly, one of the assis­tant deans at FSU only wears silk bow ties. I don’t think he has quite as many as that con­duc­tor, but he has quite a few.
I haven’t yet nailed down my pre­ferred career path, but being a bas­soon pro­fes­sor is cer­tainly an option. The Boy Scouts (and more prop­erly, my par­ents) have ingrained in me the need to always be pre­pared. As a result, I have taken the pre­cau­tion of select­ing an abnor­mal accou­trement, just in case I do end up at a uni­ver­sity. I will have a col­lec­tion of hats. Not the stan­dard hats of today: ball caps, bean­ies, golf hats, visors, cow­boy hats. I mean real men’s hats: fedo­ras, pana­mas, pork-pies, tril­bys, top hats. They will go with my suits, my tuxedo, and my casual clothes. A hat for every occa­sion.
There. Now that that’s taken care of, I can get to the easy part — fin­ish­ing my mas­ters, get­ting a doc­tor­ate, and becom­ing one of the ivory tower literati.

Why is Triv­ial Pur­suit DVD Pop Cul­ture Edi­tion so fun? Because it’s pos­si­ble to win by say­ing “Ol’ Dirty Bas­tard,” that’s why.

This morn­ing in the com­puter lab, I was help­ing a girl with the printer — a com­mon occur­rence, with our geri­atric Laser­Jet. Out of the blue, she asked for my advice about a present for a guy she’s been dat­ing. What’s more odd than the seem­ingly ran­dom ques­tion is that this isn’t the first time this has hap­pened. This marks at least the third time this semes­ter a girl has asked me for rela­tion­ship advice while I’m at work. In only one instance did I actu­ally know the ques­tioner. What qual­ity do I pos­sess that gives me instant cred­i­bil­ity in this area? More impor­tantly, what causes the jump from “he’s good with com­put­ers” to “he’s good with inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships?” Usu­ally peo­ple assume the first qual­ity to some­what exclude the sec­ond. Not that I mind any of this… I’m just puz­zled by it.

It’s hard to derive full enjoy­ment from your bowl of Moose Tracks after you dis­cover that you acci­den­tally bought — and have been eat­ing — the low-fat frozen yogurt variety.

One fun side effect of being sick: when I woke up this morn­ing, I could sing an A three octaves below mid­dle C. Now, if I can just find a Russ­ian Ortho­dox church…

For quite awhile now, I’ve been a Coke drinker. Not in the South­ern sense, in which ‘coke’ is a gen­eral term, much like ‘soda’ or ‘pop’ in other regions of the coun­try. I like Coca-Cola Clas­sic. Other colas, espe­cially Pepsi, just won’t cut it. Now, I’ll admit — I’ve never actu­ally taken “The Pepsi Chal­lenge.” If any­one wants to come admin­is­ter an FDA-approved double-blind cola taste test, I’ll gladly sumbit. Until then, I’m stick­ing with the taste of Coke.
But lately, I’ve faced a tougher deci­sion when going to Bill’s Book­store to get my morn­ing caf­feine fix. I could buy a Coke — which comes with a 1-in-12 chance of win­ning more Coke — or, I could buy a Pepsi, which comes with a 1-in-3 chance of win­ning a free song from the iTunes Music Store. Now, I’ve been sucked into the incen­tive wars.
On one hand, I could get the coke I really want, and have an ~8.333% chance of win­ning another Coke. What isn’t read­ily appar­ent is that the free Cokes being given away are 1-liter bot­tles — a size not present in any gro­cery stores, vend­ing machines, or gas sta­tions I’ve been to lately. So even if you win, you have to go hunt­ing for your prize. On the other hand, I could buy (in my opin­ion) an infe­rior cola bev­er­age, and using the well-publicized trick, have a 100% chance of win­ning a free song (nor­mally 99¢ ) from iTunes.
Is this another devi­ous tac­tic from Apple’s switcher play­book? Will get­ting a cou­ple of free songs from iTunes entice me to for­sake my cola of choice, just as my iPod slowly eroded my anti-Mac stance? I’m writ­ing this post from my Apple Power­book — per­haps not a good sign for The Real Thing.
P.S. — I’ve already used the code in the photo. Don’t waste your time.

I absolutely love the inter­net. For those who can resist the plethora of offers for c|-|3@p \/i@g@ra and P3n1s 3n1arg3men+, the sheer quan­tity of avail­able infor­ma­tion is astound­ing. For instance: I’m now sit­ting on my bed, hav­ing just fin­ished read­ing a jour­nal arti­cle for my Clas­si­cal Music His­tory class. I down­loaded the arti­cle in pdf for­mat from JSTOR. The arti­cle, which is enti­tled “The Cre­ation of the Buffo Finale in Ital­ian Opera” makes ref­er­ence to La Buona Figli­ola by Nic­colo Pic­cinni with a libretto by Carlo Goldoni. I know from our course Black­board site that we’ll be dis­cussing this opera, its libretto, and the libretto’s source in class tomor­row. So, I hunt for more infor­ma­tion. A cou­ple of Google searches bring me to three dif­fer­ent copies of the libretto. Sweet. Another Google search reveals that the libretto is an adap­ta­tion of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. A quick search at the Project Guten­berg site nets me a copy of the novel. One more stop at New Grove Online gets me nice bios of Nic­colo Pic­cinni and Carlo Goldoni. And I haven’t left my bed.