ooooooohhhh Alice!

There's this beautiful song in the last (horrible) movie version of Alice in Wonderland.  Danny Elfman has been mailing in some of his more recent compositions (see all of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...or, better yet, don't see it!) - but this one song is incredible.  And it inspired this ridiculously cutesy illustration:

Here is the song below:

Happy Pantry: Novel Tea

Oh wordplay.  Novel Tea.  Enjoy.

Hot tea is one of the best things you can imbibe.  We prefer black tea.  We're so very snobby about our tea, but, and I'm speaking for myself, I can only drink it with milk/cream and sugar.  If you're giving it to me straight, I'd prefer not to.

Without milk and sugar, tea is just dirty water.  It tastes like leaves.  You might as well be drinking out of the toilet.  Only tea without milk and sugar is not as tasty…and slightly less sanitary.

Okay - none of that is scientifically proven.  I think most people can, empirically, believe that tea all by itself will taste better than most things coming out of the toilet.

But I just wanted to state the case for black tea with milk and sugar.  Because it's the best.

Most green teas are too earthy and don't always mix well with milk.  White teas don't taste like much…it's so weak and doesn't feel like it stands up for itself - and nobody likes a loser.  And don't get me started with herbal teas and weirdo not tea teas that they call tea.  Those are terrible and taste like medicine and people only drink that because they don't love their tongues or themselves.

Black tea.  Drink it.

Oh yeah - and read something fun with your tea.  That way you'll enjoy drinking and reading that much more.  What a novel idea.

Tea for three

Tea is one of the best things you can ever have the fortune of drinking.  Most people waste it by slogging a tea bag into a cup of water.

The real way to drink tea is getting loose leaf tea.  The cruddy bits in the bags are what's left over from the good stuff.

I did a series of drawings for Happy Pantry based on a little bit of word play.  Only the first one is used...the other two were deemed not Happy Pantry worthy.

Tea He easily led to Tea She.  But then as I was going for the third...trying to think of how to make a tea an it - I remembered Cousin Itt from the Addams Family.  He always wore sunglasses and a bowler hat.  So, if Cousin Itt happened to be a tea cup, it would be a weird little hairy tea cup with a hat.

Squaremania - Tea and Pandas

If you're going to have some tea....feel free to stir in some panda.  It's probably not sanitary, but it sure tastes terrible.  But disregard the taste, because you're drinkin' high priced panda tea.  Only winners drink panda tea.

Nothing tastes better than endangered animals!  Also, if this actually were to happen, I'd suggest green tea, it just seems like the right direction...

Squaremania - Stinky Tea

This is the color version.

If you find a skunk as you're stirring your tea, I'd consider getting a new cup...

Squaremania - Skunk in a tea cup

I've been meaning to do a series of Squaremania animals in tea cups - And this christmas break is just the right time to start!

If time allows, I'd like to do these as watercolors...but we'll see if I can fit it in before it's time to go back to work...

Ever since my wife and I came back from Europe (three years ago) we've been obsessed with tea.  In Paris there were these two nice restaurants that started it off...and once we got back we looked up all the tea houses in southern california.  We've even been known to look up tea houses when we go on a trip (we visited a tea house in Chicago when we were there for a wedding last summer)...