Tag: rant

WordPress kicked my ass

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So, my hosting provider, Dreamhost, recently announced that they’d be discontinuing support for WSGI. My blog had heretofore been a simple one that I wrote myself, in Python, that used WSGI as the server interface. It was fun and educating to write, and it ran reliably for years, but once they dropped support, I had to find another option. FastCGI was still supported, I believe, but no.

In a way, I don’t blame them. Python, as great as the language is in terms of utility, readability, and straightforwardness, isn’t exactly fast, and is relatively resource hungry. And deploying it is a hellish nightmare.

I decided to throw in the towel and just use WordPress. It’ll probably be the right decision in the long run, but holy cow was it a nightmare to transfer data. Basically ate up a whole weekend.

First, to get it out of the way, PHP is a rotting carcass heap of a language. It’s abysmally bad. I know about a dozen programming languages, and usually when I see code in any language I can follow what’s going on with mild effort. PHP is like reading code through a CAPTCHA challenge, you know there’s something discernible there, but it’s a mental challenge just to make it out. Thus, I had no desire to dive in and code my way out of problems, which in retrospect was my first mistake.

My second mistake was trying to use the XMLRPC interface to transfer data. Where shall I begin with this mess? The XMLPRC interface itself wasn’t a huge problem. The problem was that, because XMLRPC is not your normal accessing pages from a web browser, the whole error handling mechanism just isn’t really there. A good chunk of my time was spent trying to guess why errors were happening with little or no explanation other than a server 500 error. To make matters worse, I had no control of many things on the host machine, and eventually I realized that the XMLRPC requests were being intercepted by anti-malware and rate limiting filters.

(Then there was this weird issue that Googling for anything about WordPress XMLRPC yielded hundreds of pages about how to disable it. I assume the articles were computer generated as part of a smear campaign, probably by someone owning a competing technology. The articles had that uncanny “every article is the same” feeling, even though they were worded differently.)

In the end, I ended up hacking together the following solution. I set up an older version of WordPress on a side computer (getting that to run was its own nightmare), and used a Python script to import data from my old blog using XMLRPC. Because it was on my own machine, I was able to disable the filtering, which solved most of my XMLRPC issues. Then I migrated that older WordPress to the most recent version of WordPress. (The migration turned out to be unnecessary. I had thought that the script I wrote was conking out on the post formatting used by the most recent version, but it turns out that was due to a technicality.) Once I had my local WordPress running and posts showing correctly, (which took two hours longer than it needed to thanks to a dumb cut-and-paste error in an Apache config file), I did a database export, which I then imported to the database on my web host, with a little surgery to adapt it to the new location.

The database import went remarkably smoothly after the trial-and-error disaster of using XMLRPC , and makes me think I should have just written the original script to update the database directly.

Anyway, it’s now done, posts are transferred and look good, and the theme suffices for now.

Food Trucks Suck

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There. I said it.

Food trucks are as supposed to be as much a part of LA culture as hot dog stands are for New York. Well, New York wins this one. My experience with food trucks is that they: 1. are slow, 2. serve tiny portions, and 3. aren’t any better than a walk-in eatery. Also, lately, they 4. are expensive, and 5. have incredibly long lines because every hipster thinks they’re the greatest food in LA.

I suspect a lot of the older food trucks that serve the neighborhoods actually are very good. Certainly they filled an important niche, since they served food in places and at hours that people otherwise couldn’t get food. They were operated by people who were from the areas they served, had native knowledge of great ethnic foods, and rapport with their customers.

But now that food trunks have become trendy, the experience has become diluted with mediocrity. I’m not saying that trendiness, by itself, leads to medocrity. But in this case the thing that became trendy was a bad way to serve food. Food trucks have tiny inefficient kitchens. They aren’t designed to serve a lot of people quickly, and they aren’t designed to serve a wide variety, but that’s exactly what people are trying to use them for.

For now, people are impressed enough by the “experience” to not notice they’ve stood in line for twenty minutes to get a small portion of food that’s not very good at a high price. If the food was actually good or unique, as with the old neighborhood food trucks of yore, maybe it’d be worth it, but these days most aren’t. So how long will this trend really last?

This post will be missed

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File this one under the “Is this the kind of thing you spend your time thinking about?” files. I don’t care. It bothers me.

If someone close to you dies, do you miss them? If someone you like can’t make it to an event you’re attending, do you miss them? Of course you do.

So why, if you miss them, do you say, “You will be missed”, instead of “I will miss you”? What, are you afraid to commit to it or something? You miss this person, wish they were here, but you can’t even muster the never to say it in the active voice.

And don’t give be any bull like, “Well, I was just saying it’s generally true and is not specific to me.” Pshaw. You can say, “We’ll all miss you”, or, “Everyone will miss you”, and not have to be a generalizing non-commital pussy.

So the next time you miss someone, say it, and own it, and don’t just generalize.

Firefox Pinned Tabs Annoyance

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I wanted to write a note about one thing that annoys me in Firefox. I’ve found out that I like this feature called “Application Tabs” or “Pinned Tabs”, where you choose a tab and to be permanently displayed, but with only an icon and no close button.

The tabs have a few deal-breaker problems, though.

1. They sporadically disappear on restart

2. If I click on a link to an external site in an application tab, it will load the external site in the application tab, rather than a new tab. This makes it “not actually an application tab”.

I realize that it’s not always straightforward to know whether a new page is part of the same website or not, but web pages with a different hostname or top-level domain name are part of a different site the vast majority of the time. And a pattern match can be used for advanced users who want finer control.

3. If you are looking at a page in an application tab, and you use the browser’s URL bar or search bar to go to another site, it loads the new location in the app tab. This is unforgivable. With an embedded link there’s some question whether the link points a new site or not; if you go through the URL bar it’s obviously a new site and should load in a new tab.

This might be the thing that could push me over to Chrome, if if turns out its application tabs behave better than Firefox’s.

Stuff I Argued with Teachers About

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One of the great cynicisms in my life is the educational system, especially at the lower grades. One reason for the cynicism is my experiences when disagreeing with teachers. The educational system is supposed to be about learning the truth, but a lot of teachers can’t handle being corrected by a student.

Then again maybe it’s not the educational system but rather human nature that’s the problem. Not a single time, not once, did a fellow student ever take my side whenever I publicly disagreed with a teacher. Maybe some of them privately agreed with me. I expect most didn’t care one way or the other, and just wanted me to shut up so we could get on with it (which is understandable). But a few students were openly hostile to the fact that I would dare even question the teacher.

If, as a teacher, you are faced with a crowd who doesn’t care if you’re teaching the truth, and a few who are hostile to the truth, why bother even teaching the truth? You might as well go for forsake the truth for to keep things orderly, and it’s not the vast majority of students are going to care.

But I can’t help feeling that if the system encouraged students to speak up and have dialogue with teacher, rather than unilaterally accept whatever the teacher says, students would be more open and everyone would learn a lot more.

Anyway, here’s a list of disagreements I can think of off hand.

• In Kindergarten, the whole staff at my school insisted that my name was spelled “Karl”, with a K. I protested that it was spelled with a C, and every time I protested they rebuked me for it. This went on for weeks, as far as I can remember, until one day my Mom came in for some reason and I got her to confirm that my name was spelled with a C. My memory is vague, but I don’t remember being all that satisfied with their apology. They did correct the name tag on my desk though.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to believe every five-year old kid who gets an idea to try to trick a teacher. But if the kid keeps insisting on it for weeks, don’t you think it at least deserves a phone call to the parents? I guess not if you’re a teacher who believes that students should obey anything they say–even if told to spell their own name wrong.

• In third grade, I was taught that Mercury is the hottest planet. It’s not, though; Venus is [1]. I took a moment to show our teacher a citation I had on hand (a little astronomy book I bought at a book fair) that Venus was actually the hottest planet; she looked at it and flatly told me that I was to just ignore that and learn the untruth she was teaching.

I didn’t, of course. Even at age eight I had a conception that the truth was something worth fighting and maybe suffering for, and I defiantly wrote down the correct answer, Venus, on the test. Of course, the had the nerve to mark me down.

• Also in third grade, I was taught that snakes aren’t vertebrates (and, moreover, that it isn’t necessarily true that fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals were vertebrates–cladists in the room feel free to cringe).

Apparently, snakes don’t have a backbone, so they can’t be vertebrates. It was obvious to me that snakes had something that was like a backbone, whether you want to call it a “backbone” or not, and so they were vertebrates. But my dimwit teacher thought animal classifications really should hinge on accidents of terminology.

• This is a tricky one. In fifth grade I was taught that that to estimate a sum you round each term to the highest digit and add, even if one number had five digits and the other had three. This is not wrong, per se, but I did spend quite a bit of time arguing that it was silly to do that, since the amount you round the larger number could be much greater than the entire smaller number. (For instance, to estimate 22946+317, I was taught to add 20000+300=20300. What is the point of adding the 300 in, though, when you’re already off by 2946?)

My argument hit a brick wall. My teacher simply told me repeatedly that that what I was proposing wouldn’t be correct rounding, not even conceiving that my objection wasn’t about how to round numbers.

• In seventh grade, the One I Do Not Name viciously chastised me when I was absolutely correct, just for using different terminology than it used.

“How do you solve this equation for x, Carl?” “First subtract five from both sides.” “NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! You add negative five to both sides.”

“How do you convert kilometers to miles, Carl?” “Multiply by 5/8.” “NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! You multiply by 0.6.” [2]

“What is the chemical represented by SiO₂, Carl?” “Silicon dioxide.” “NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! It’s silicon oxide.” [3]

And my favorite: on a “fun” little quiz we had to fill in the names of countries with the consonants removed. One pattern looked like this: ⬜A⬜A⬜. I wrote down QATAR. (The intended answer was Japan.) “NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! There is no country called Qatar.” This time I took issue, and the One I Do Not Name relented and gave me the point, because you have to be really, really shameless to argue with a current world map.

And people wonder why I don’t utter this teacher’s name.

• In 11th grade I was taught that cardiac muscle was skeletal, skeletal muscle was smooth, and smooth muscle was cardiac. By this time I was jaded, so when I showed the teacher the correctly-labeled diagram from the textbook, I acted so utterly shocked (“Oh, how could you possibly be wrong?”) that the people in my lab group told me to quit acting immature. And they were right; it was immature and uncalled for.

But still, right after that little epiphany, the teacher went back up to the front of the class and told everyone the wrong answer again. Considering my behavior, I forgive it, but it broke my heart a bit because I kind of liked this teacher.

• In 12th grade I was kind of dozing off in class when I noticed the teacher was telling everyone to take the square root of each term in an equation to solve it. This was dead wrong.

The equation was of the form a²+b²=c². Our physics teacher told us to take the square root of each side, resulting in a+b=c, then we would be able to solve it for for the variable we were seeking. The problem is, a+b isn’t the square root of the left side. Remember from algebra, (a+b)²=a²+2ab+b², not a²+b².

A long argument ensued. Meanwhile the kid sitting in front of me just kept laughing at me like it was a big joke.

Interestingly, the teacher actually conceded that I was right a few days later, privately. I guess that’s a start.

[1] It’s worth noting that, although Venus has the highest average temperature, it can get hotter on Mercury when the sun is directly overhead than anywhere on Venus. The average temperature of Mercury is much lower, however, since the side facing away from the sun is cryogenically cold.

[2] The actual conversion factor is 0.62137119, much closer to 5/8=0.625 than to 0.6

[3] The official chemical name is silicon dioxide.

Christmas Presents

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I hate Christmas shopping. I hate the whole culture of gift-giving in general, especially when there’s an expectation of reciprocation, which is especially true on Christmas.

One year I proposed to a borther that we should agree not to buy each other presents (“My present to you is that you don’t have to buy a present for me”). My mom overheard this proposal and wailed, “But you can’t do that!”, with such urgency that I never again suggested it. I didn’t want to be seen as “that guy” and her outburst made it clear to me that I would be seen that way, so for twenty years I’ve been dutifully buying Christmas presents for the family, and, after my mom remarried a guy with five children of his own, for the step-family as well.

I made the best of a bad situation, and I admit that I did feel driven to buy good and thoughtful gifts, and took satisfaction from doing so. But, on the whole, I never liked it, always considered it a burden, and always hoped someday I’d get out of it.

My problem with gift-giving is that it’s so damn dramatic. People say the person who receives the gift should be grateful for even getting a gift; if it’s a bad gift you’re no worse off, right? Except that bull.

First of all, when gifts are given with the expectation of reciprocation, you very well might be worse off, because you spent time and money on their gift.

But more insidiously, gifts are not always borne out of generosity. Oftentimes gift-giving is done as a way to manipulate, test, embarrass, or otherwise exert power over the receiver. Gift-giving can be malicious.

Unfortunately, in my family, gifts of malice are quite common.

This year, for various reasons (including recession and starting a new business) my family called off the regular gift exchange and had a Secret Santa drawing instead. I’ve always hated the Secret Santas we used to have in the extended family (it’s bad enough shopping for someone I know well, now I have to get something for an obscure cousin-in-law), and didn’t want to participate in this one, but with some difficulty and luck I was able to swap draws with my sister, who drew me. And so, with no regular gift exchange and having effectively removed myself from the Secret Santa, I was now free of obligation to buy anyone a present.

And it was the best Christmas ever.

There is a much longer version of this post, including details of some of the malicious gifting, here. I probably will come off looking like a whiny loser if you read the whole thing. You probably would have to have grown up in my family to understand.

An Open Letter to all Job Recruiters

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Dear the five or so job recruiters per day who try to contact me:

First of all, I would like to thank you for your interest. It is comforting to know that I always have options. However, several aspects of you methodology have been a source of irritation to me, so I thought I’d write this letter to make you aware of this.

1. Please do not cold call me. I realize that calling the victim, er, prospective employee is the modus operandi of some of you, and that’s perfectly fine. But, there a little problem here. You see, the resume I have up on Monster.com has a contact preference set to “Email.” And when that didn’t work, I decided to put a line at the very top, right in the objective, that says “ATTN Recruiters: please contact me by email only, not telephone.” But that didn’t work either. I may have to remove my phone number altogether (which I don’t want to do, because I would like someone I’ve communicated with to be able to refer to it to get my number).

You see, it’s really annoying to get 2 or 3 calls a day while at work, oftentimes when I’m at a meeting. Which brings me to my next annoyance….

2. Ok, you’ve decided to cold call me. Why in God’s Holy Name would you call me during work hours? Isn’t that the worst time imaginable? “Hell-lo, Meester Bonks, my nay-yam is Hajib, er, Michael, I-ee om calleeng you on behoff of a large tech-no-loj-ee-cal firm. Do you have twoo meenutes to speek with me?” Um, yeah, sure Hajib, I’m sure my coworkers won’t suspect anything if I shout my preferred job locations into a phone for the benefit of a guy in India with a bad connection. Which brings me to my third annoyance….

3. Don’t use non-native English speakers to recruit. You’ve outsourced your call center, your software division, your manufacturing, your accounting department, and so on. Fine, you gotta roll with the times. But if there’s one thing you don’t want to outsource to non-native speakers, under any circumstances, it’s recruiting. Let’s take a look at my thought process to figure out why. “Hell-lo, Meester Bonks, my ney-yam is Okmed, er, Matt….” Hmm, some Indian guy is calling me about a job. I’m not too familiar with the firm he’s mentioning. I wonder if I should consider working for it? Well, let’s see, what do I know about this company so far? Number one: They outsource jobs to Asia. Yeah, great first impression there, what American wouldn’t want to work for a company that has a history of shipping jobs overseas?

To be honest, I don’t personally care about this so much; from a purely economic perspective it makes sense to outsource. And I am the sort that wouldn’t exactly be crushed by unemployment. In fact, I’d probably volunteer if there were upcoming layoffs. But, a recruiter does have to talk about more varied things than a customer service rep. I don’t mind talking to Hajib over a billing issue, but over a potential job is a little much.

4. If you’re not going to read my resume, please don’t act like you did. All too often I get emails like this: “Greetings Carl, I have personally reviewed your resume and I believe you would be an excellent fit for this job opportunity. If you have an MSEE and 7+ years experience working with PLC, please respond with an updated resume in Word format.” Um, dude? You just claimed in the very previous sentence that you reviewed my resume. I shouldn’t have to tell you that I don’t have an MSEE nor 7 years experience in anything.

If you’re going to send out mass emails based on keywords, fine, but don’t be a pretentious fool by claiming you read my resume.

5. Give me details about the job. My rule of thumb is that I don’t respond to any recruiter who’s failed to supply at least three things: a brief job description, a job location, and a description of the firm. This should be a common sense thing for a recruiter to provide. I get emails like this all the time: “We are looking for an experienced Python developer. Please call me if you are interested.” Um, how the hell would I know if I’m interested or not? All I have to go on is Python developer. That’s not a brief job decription. What kind of Python developer? What software domain? There’s nothing about a job location or firm.

Even a bit of information might pique my interest; for instance, I’d probably respond to this solicitation: “A medium-size aeronautical firm in Northern California that is looking for an experienced Python developer to write user-friendly interfaces for numerical simulations.” Conversely, the tiny bit of information might be enough to rule out the offer, saving everyone’s time. When recruiters don’t volunteer this information, I assume they have something to hide and ignore it.

6. Emailing me a tenth time isn’t going to get me to alter my decision to have ignored you the previous nine times. If I don’t respond, it’s because I wasn’t interested. Sometimes if a person is polite and emails me back for an answer, yes or no, I’ll write them back to say no. But mostly these repeated messages are just spam.

7. There’s a reason that, although I live in Cincinnati, Cincinnati isn’t listed among my preferred locations on my Monster resume. Hint: It’s because I don’t want to work in Cincinnati.

I think you for reading this, and I would encourage you to pass this on to any of your friends to that all may be enlightened.

Yours truly,

Carl Banks

Bad Classroom Experiences

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This is a rant about some bad classroom experiences I’ve had. This isn’t a list of personal grudges or gripes about teachers I hated (that would fill a small encyclopedia), but a rant about people I who think perverted their role as an educator, and would do the world a service if they never taught again.

Dom

I once had a total wuss-bag of a thermodynamics professor. This guy thought he was totally unique and cutting-edge because he was an oh-so sensitive guy who did things no one else did, like assign people to do homework in groups (no one except every single other professor on campus did that…). One day he decided he would indoctrinate the whole class with a video about sexual discrimination, which all men (except him) were perpetrators and all women victims of. The scenarios in the video were so ludicrous it was hilarious. I mean, even the women in the class agreed that the video was only marginally relevant… for 1940.

Naturally, the guy knew shit about engineering.

Ms. Fisher

In my last semester as an undergrad, I had Technical Writing with the amazing Ms. Fisher. This woman ran the class like a kindergarten. One day when I slept through class, she decided that I didn’t understand the importance of the subject (actually I was pretending to sleep, trying to avoid the kindergarten stuff), and gave my name to the composition office director. The composition office began calling me every day to offer me their “help” (read: beat me into submission); I resisted. Finally they threatened me with probation if I didn’t go to talk to them, so I went. They beat me into submission. I obediently participated in Ms. Fisher’s kindergarten fun for the rest of the semester. In fact, I behaved so well that it convinced Ms. Fisher that they had “gotten to me” and made me into a good automaton, so she reversed some of my disciplinary markdowns and I got an A in the class.

Oh boy, did I let her have it on the student evaluations. It was the foulest, most insulting thing I’d ever written. I mean, I said I’d do stuff like get her name tattooed into my anal sphincter. I made it very clear that they hadn’t “gotten to me”.

Payoff came sometime later, as a grad student. While walking around I saw her catch sight of me. She looked down and tried to pretend she didn’t see me.

Tim

I was a TA for this instructor. Until I met him, I didn’t really have a good sense of what, exactly, it meant to be a “prick”. But this guy was a first class one.

The defining moment came late in the semester. While checking a homework assignment, I noticed there was a lot of confusion on a certain problem. I notified Tim, and immediately regretted it. You see, I told him this so that he would know that it was a weak point and could then spend more time on it; perhaps by going over it again in the next class or something. However, he didn’t do that. The first thing he said after I told him was, “Oh my God, how could they not get it?” He actually seemed offended and disgusted that they didn’t understand it. I was totally taken aback. I told him they were really tired from the long semester, and he shouldn’t get too upset about it. (This, by the way, was “Hell Semester”: fall of the junior year of aerospace engineering. It was a long, grueling semester, with four relentless nitty-gritty classes, and everyone was totally fried at the end of it.) He said something like, “Ok, fine,” and I left him.

Now, if that was all that had happened, it would have been no big deal. I probably would have chalked it up to him being pretty fried himself. But it was followed up by something so cold I couldn’t believe it.

When checking the final exams, there was a problem on it that was ridiculously hard for undergrads. In fact, it was so hard I took the unusual step of emailing Tim urging him to drop it. His response? He was punishing them because no one had asked for any further help after I told him they were having trouble with it. The problem would be counted, and they deserved it.

WHAT THE FUCK: YOU’RE A TEACHER, NOT A FUCKING CORRECTIONS OFFICER. If they’re having problems, your job is to help them with it, not to dole out extra punishment for it.

A little later he had the nerve to criticize me for taking so long to check the tests (you know, maybe if you hadn’t put Ph.D. level problems on it, I wouldn’t be). I took my grand old time with them after that.

Looking back on all this, Timmy here is the one guy I always regretted not giving a piece of my mind to when I had the chance. I wouldn’t even have suffered (it was my last semester as a TA). At the time I thought it was best to keep your mouth shut in such situations. But if anyone ever deserved to get a tongue lashing from me, it was Timmy.

The One I Do Not Name

In order to put the sins of The One I Do Not Name into context, let me tell you a little hypothetical story. Say you have two third graders, Jack and Jill. Jack sleeps through class, doesn’t behave very well, and is inconsistent in doing his homework. Jill never misbehaves, always does what the teacher asks, and always does her homework. And Jack consistently outscores Jill on tests. Now who is Mrs. Jane Third-Grade-Teacher going to say is the better student?

Jill, of course.

But why? Jack evidently knows the material better. Jack is better educated. If education is the point of grade school, why is the better educated person considered a lesser student?

The reason, simply, is that education is not the point of grade school. The point is to teach obedience. Education is indeed a goal of school, and also the justification for it, but it’s not the point. The point is obedience. For this reason, I often facetiously refer to grades K-6 as “obedience school”.

Generally, teachers at least give lip service to the idea that education is the point and not merely a goal, which is better than nothing: it gives you something to hold them to and bargain with. However, I once had a teacher who didn’t even do that. Guess who that was.

Yes, The One I Do Not Name actually claimed right to my face that schooling was about obedience (in Its words, “developing self-discipline”, because in Its deluded mind we really wanted to do whatever the person claiming to be an authority told us to, we just didn’t have the discipline). This came out in a conference with my parents, while discussing the purpose of homework. I was questioning the value of them forcing me to do homework, seeing that The One I Do Not Name, my parents, and I all knew very well that, from an educational standpoint, doing it would be useless to me because I already knew the stuff. But in this case, The One I Do Not Name openly acknowledged that obedience was the whole point, which pretty much nullified my whole argument.

Note that, at the time, I wasn’t actually trying to weasel out of my responsibility. And in fact, I was more than willing to accept the bad grades that would result from doing homework inconsistently, and even the occasional scolding. But The One I Do Not Name believed that it was positively immoral to care so little about your homework (that it was utterly useless was irrelevant); It treated this as a behavioral problem in me, which meant involving my parents. That’s what I didn’t want. (Fortunately, my parents either saw through Its bullshit, or were too lazy to keep up with It on it.)

This was a poignant example of The One I Do Not Name’s total chauvinism for teaching “self-discipline”, but it permeated my whole experience with It.

I got the satisfaction of returning the favor once, and making It accept an issue on my terms. At my school we had to do those stupid Christmas pageants, and they made us practice like hell for them. I was able to learn the words and music after about a week or so of daily practice, with about two weeks of daily practices looming. So, being uselessly herded off every day to practice singing a bunch of songs I already knew, for a pageant I knew I wasn’t going to (my family managed to remember to go it maybe once), I naturally started goofing off and being generally silly (though not bothering anyone else) during the practices. I would have died of boredom otherwise. The One I Do Not Name evidently decided that It would punish my behavior by filming my silliness and showing it to the whole school.

After the practice ended, The One I Do Not Name and the music teacher stopped me and asked me why I was goofing off, and told me that It had filmed it and would show it to the whole school. After playing dumb for a bit, I told them I didn’t need the practice, because I had already learned the lyrics, and I was just acting silly because I was bored. Now, The One I Do Not Name was very familiar with my protests on educational grounds, and I think It thought It could catch me in a lie here, thus proving I didn’t really care about education and was just trying to weasel out of work. So It challenged me on the spot to recite the whole Christmas pageant right there. I did it. The music teacher was amazed; all The One I Do Not Name could do was apologize and send me off to lunch. Thenceforth no one talked to me about acting silly in practice.

I don’t want any freaking tartness in my bottled tea

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Note to stupid beverage makers: when I buy a bottle of unsweetened tea with no lemon, I don’t want any citric acid put in there for tartness. Ok? If I wanted tartness in my sweetened tea, I’d just get it with lemon.

Let me explain.

Like many people, I like the convenience of bottled drinks, especially for when I’m on the road. And like many people, I like iced tea. And, as it turns out, iced tea is a common bottled beverage. So, one would think that this would be an ideal situation for me: I get a conveniently bottled drink that I like (and has a lot of caffeine).

Unfortunately, the situation is far from ideal.

You see, I find that acidic flavors conflict very inauspiciously with the pleasant natural flavor of tea. In particular, lemon can really overbear the delicate tea flavor, so I very much dislike tea with lemon.

“Ok,” you say. “Fine. You don’t like lemon in your tea. So why don’t you just buy bottled tea with no lemon? I mean, there is bottled tea with no lemon on the shelves. Right?”

Yes. Unfortunately, every single freaking bottled tea manufacturer that I know of adds citric acid to their tea. Why? Get this: it’s for “tartness.”

Now, maybe I’m missing something, but wouldn’t people who want tartness in their tea just get tea with lemon? Isn’t the whole point of not putting lemon in the tea because you don’t want tartness? What purpose does omitting the lemon serve when you’re going tartness right back in?

What bugs me about this is every single manufacturer seems to think that “tartness” is a required element of tea, and that they are “helpfully” enhancing it by adding the citric acid. Well, they’re not. All they’re doing is making a half-assed lemon tea.

Fortunately, there is a reasonably palatable solution: Trade Winds. Trade Winds does add citric acid to its sweet tea; however, two things make the tartness rather mild. First, it appears to use somewhat less citric acid than other bottled teas. Second, the tea flavor is much bolder and less prone to being overpowered by the acidity (evidently this is due to its kettle brewing).

Still, I’d prefer a completely untart Trade Winds, or any bottled tea completely untart for that matter.

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