Covered with Dew and Otters

The next four pages of the masterpiece I linked to yesterday have been scanned.

Tea blends

I was poking back at Adagio Teas, to see what they'd come up with since the last time I'd been there.* They offer custom blends of teas now - you can blend like mad and not be obligated to buy - and while I knew about it, I hadn't paid much attention to it.

But now ... I feel inspired to create a Sanzo-themed tea, and have done so. It's currently marked private, until I feel it's right (and dare to buy it). At the moment it's 80% gunpowder and 20% lapsang souchong. Gunpowder is a green tea whose leaves are rolled into little 'bullets,' described as producing a full-bodied cup with a hint of smokiness. Lapsang souchong is a tea formed by smoking the tea leaves over a fire, and when it's brewed it smells like wood smoke.** You either love it or hate it, and I love it. You can toss some into another kind of tea when brewing to produce a nice hint of smoke.

Whether I like the blend or not...? The teas I like seem to be described as "smoky" (although not to the literal extent that Lapsang Souchong is), so there's a possibility, although I tend not to like green teas. Hm.


Anyway ... ideas for tea blends for the rest of them? I'd think that Golden Monkey might be a large component of Goku's tea, while Hakkai might sip demurely on an oolong. If you wanted to be literal, Gojyo might be a rooibos (a.k.a. red tea), but ... I really don't like rooibos. :)




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* chomiji, of the things off my wishlist you sent, I really love the Fujian Baroque. Yum!

** To the point where I don't brew it at work, because otherwise people from down the hall will be sticking their heads into the office, asking what's on fire. No joke.

Wordpress woes

a couple of weeks back, I posted asking if anyone knew of a Wordpress plugin that would sort posts by a custom field. There were a few suggestions, but unfortunately none of them do exactly what I need to do which, admittedly, I hadn't been clear about in the post.

What I need is a way to produce a list of post titles that have been sorted by a custom field, and to stick that list into a sidebar. This is being used to produce an alphabetized list of panelist names, hopefully to be sorted by last name. For example:
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"Asian fantasy doesn't sell"

See here for a better discussion - short version is that when Cindy Pon was marketing her book, Silver Phoenix: Beyond the Kingdom of Xia,* one publisher told her that Asian fantasy didn't sell.

Not like those manga readers read Asian fantasy or anything.






* Out at the very end of April. I read the description and slapped a pre-order on that sucker so fast...