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

“Maybe that is the greatest cruelty. Maybe the hardest part is not the pain itself, but the hope that refuses to die. Because the heart doesn’t just want to survive—it wants something more. And so, it keeps going, even when everything feels hopeless.”
― Zaishah, Heart Beating Among The Thorns: Courage To Begin Again

“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

“But here’s the silver lining: There’s another way!”
― Anastasia Pash, Travel With Style: Master the Art of Stylish and Functional Travel Capsules