S. Worthen | Weblog

As someone who once played a singing, dancing sewer rat on the London stage, I was delighted to see the following news... especially if the movie turns out to be any good. It's from Aardman, so the odds are in its favor.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3605904.stm

Lord of the Rings stars Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis are to join the cast of an animated film about a sewer rat.

The movie Flushed Away features a pampered pet rat who accidentally gets swept into London's sewers.

Sir Ian and Serkis, who worked together as Gandalf and Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, will voice a villainous frog and his sidekick.

The film is the latest project from Aardman Animation, the UK firm behind Chicken Run and Wallace And Gromit.

Thanks to a gift from my parents, C. and I have been drinking Japanese green tea all weekend. Green tea leaves are highly reusable. Other kind of tea would be too if the brewing time was only 30 seconds. My first introduction to the high-speed brewing of green tea came when our group slid down Mount Fuji and collapsed after the whole trek. We went through cup after cup of the stuff, the water flowing through the tea pot almost as fast as we could drink it.

All weekend, off and on, we've come up with other questions about green tea, things we don't know about it. How many different kinds of green tea are there? How does green tea differ from black tea? Are there really any health benefits to either? How should it be prepared? (Don't use boiling water. Wait a few minutes for it to cool.) The internet gave us varied answers all around, but the wikipedia provided the clearest and quickest answers to most of them. If it weren't for all this superficial reading on the subject, I would never have noticed that the kind of green tea we bought from Kensington Market yesterday was houjicha.

C.'s thinking green tea will make a good caffeine source for me, to help in my work. It's not as good as fruit juice, but it's good enough that I'll drink it in large quantities. Of course, thanks to the short brewing time, it doesn't have the same caffeine density of black tea or coffee, but I don't drink those, so it's not competing. And, of course, there's always chocolate. (After all, all true writers have caffeine habits.)