@BigBaboo: Well, I emailed him and let him know. He's going to see if he has any grounds to get them to stop selling his design. These things rarely work out for the artist, though. :(

Buh, they stole this from Diesel Sweeties:

@kingcrim84: I get it from a place in town which has a website: Vital Tea Leaf. The particular variety I like is called Blue People. I think they have a few other ginseng varieties, too.

@St.Jimmy: Not douchey at all, but I didn't mean "tea" literally, I thought it was understood I was referring to herbal tea. I used to sell coffee and tea for a living, so I know a thing or two about it. Thanks for the vocab lesson, though. ;)

@kingcrim84: I think it's probably psychosomatic as much as anything else. In the afternoon at work I like to drink this ginseng-coated Taiwanese oolong that has no shortage of zing, but for some reason in the AM it's just coffeecoffeecoffee.

@mat: Dude, this isn't something really consequential, like pie vs cake. No need to take sides, you can enjoy both equally!

@tomsomething: I love an espresso after a really good meal, but unfortunately it totally keeps me from sleeping. Sometimes the tradeoff is worth it, but usually it's not. :/

@hmmcolor: You can have tea without caffeine. You can also have decaf coffee, but who would want to?

I can't really function in the morning without coffee, but in the afternoon I usually switch to tea. Nothing better than a sunday afternoon with a pot of tea and a really good book.

A couple years ago I went out to dinner with my parents to a BYOB restaurant. We stopped at my neighborhood liquor store to pick up some beer and the guy at the counter said "you've got a new man, eh?," referring to my father. It was mildly embarrassing.

@Dialogue_Dub: I was also shocked — shocked! — that he referred to Terry as his "husband" on the podcast intro, something he almost never does in his column or on the podcast. I thought it was really sweet, all of it.

@mesmerelda: Aw, that's sweet. Thanks. :)

@phoblog: Or turn your attention to the state of food production today, where our eggs and our spinach and our baby formula is being made so poorly it causes illness. Breast vs bottle isn't even the point, consumer safety vs the bottom line is the problem.

@LadyCoCo: The gap is only acceptable when a preppy, blonde white woman has it, duh.

I would never dream of skipping the duck fat for my duck confit, especially since it's so good for other frying tasks in the kitchen. Duck fat latkes are one of my most favorite things in the universe.

@Felix Diaz-Maroto: Ah, well that's got an actual name, it's known as a wine spritzer 'round these parts. I think it's ever-so-slightly different than what they're talking about here. The spritzer is intended to lighten up a wine, while the water above is intended to enhance the flavor.

@2 replies: When people say "grow sugar," they mean it as a shorthand for "grow a crop whose only purpose is the production of sucrose," AKA sugarcane.

@gunluva plays the hopscotch on the pro circuit: Most areas with a significant Mexican population carry Mexican soda. I live in Seattle and you can buy several varieties of Mexican soda at my local convenience store. In Chicago there is generally a huge selection of Mexican bottles every place that sells pop.

Ikea is the only company I can think of that works very, very hard to show diverse families in their ads and catalogs. They used to run a TV ad with a family with two dads and several multi-ethnic children. Add to that these examples of equal parenting and it just seems like I find a reason to love the Swedes more and…

@2 replies: Uh, you do grow sugar. Sugarcane. That's where your table sugar comes from, and it's where the sugar that used to sweeten American soft drinks came from (and still sweetens Mexican soft drinks).