Quadruple Earl Grey

Bergamot orange

When I'm not at work, I've been abstaining from coffee and filling the caffeine void with Earl Grey tea.  The coffee at the DFAC tastes burnt and too hot, the coffee at the 24 hour coffee shop is better but expensive and I know I have quality coffee at the office so I wait.  Ten years ago I was content to drink Lipton tea, thinking that was the height of tea drinking.  When I got to San Antonio, a fellow lieutenant's future wife was excited when I said I liked tea and then fell on the floor crying when I admitted to drinking Lipton.  After smelling salts brought her back to consciousness, she advised me to drink Earl Grey tea.  I've never looked back.

I revisited the 2002 film adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo starring Jim Caviezel.  For some reason I thought the sword fighting was a large part of the film, but it really only lasts a few minutes.  Richard Harris (of pre-Michael Gambon Dumbledore fame) steals the show as the imprisoned priest who educates, trains and mentors Edmond Dantes.  This sets the stage for the soon-to-be-escaping Dantes to claim the supposedly hidden treasure, destroy those who falsely imprisoned him and become his own man.

Even though it isn't necessarily classified as such, I see the film as a Bildungsroman or coming of age story.  Dantes was naive, uneducated and clumsy prior to his imprisonment.  Harris' character changed all that, using Dantes' revenge as fuel for the change.  However, this theme of "guy gets imprisoned-trains while in prison-seeks revenge" is used frequently and audiences buy it.  Films such as "Con Air" and "The Dark Knight Rises" show bare-chested, lean, bearded Nicolas Cage and Christian Bale preparing to return to greatness, while eating prison food and getting little sunlight.  How is your body going to build itself without proper nutrition and vitamin D?  Anyway, without taking too much thunder from Wikipedia's entry on the subject, the Dune, Harry Potter, Andrew Wiggin and The Dark is Rising novels are also treated as coming of age stories, but on a much more "messiah saving the world" scale.  They all give us regular folks the hope that, assuming you are the product of a millennial long breeding program, born into a wizarding family, third or seventh son (of a seventh son), you too, can save the world.

In addition to Earl Grey tea, I supped on breakfast that was an homage to Irish food and a dinner that was eggs on top of beef stew.  Oh, and I demolished a bag of macadamia nuts while watching Guy Pearce get trounced, as mentioned above.

That's cod liver oil on the right.

Butter

Till tomorrow, au revoir.