Howard

“In Taiwan, where bubble tea was invented, people have been drinking Chinese tea styles with milk since Dutch colonization in the seventeenth century. But milk tea-- specifically, Indian black teas where milkiness is as important as the tea-- arrived late, some time around the Second World War. As the story goes, a former bartender, Chang Fan Shu, thought to serve it cold, and shake it like you would a cocktail. When he did this, the fats and proteins in the milk allowed it to form a foam, and he made what people started to call bubble tea. Some shops started serving iced versions, shaken like a cocktail. And then in the eighties, in a Taiwanese tea shop-- and nobody can agree which one-- someone had the idea of adding chewy pearls of tapioca starch to the bubble tea, making bubble tea-squared. New variants quickly appeared. Earl Grey boba tea. Milkless jasmine green tea or osmanthus versions. A lot of the time the tea was lost completely, most notably in the crystalline pop fruit flavors such as lychee or mulberry, although also in milkshake-like blends like lilac taro.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

“Attitude may not change the facts but it sure can bend them.”
― Howard Koor

“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Birthday Gospel (Sonnet 2479)

The day that you are born, is the day
the planet becomes a bit more human -
Mother Earth whispers, let there be dawn,
from the vacuum of time emerges hope in action;

learning to live a little more,
by the making of memories, not passing seasons;
animals may grow old, humans grow whole -
every scar a scripture, every joy a sermon.

My brother used to say,
you are the ocean in a drop;
I say to you today -
desert are you, deluge are you,
in a crowd of fakes, only truth is you.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop