Friday, July 31, 2009

This Week in the Teasphere

What's new in the world of tea this week? Let's see...

News

The Fowler Museum at UCLA is excitedly announcing a new exhibit called Steeped in History: The Art of Tea. It will be on display from August 16th through November 29, 2009, and sounds absolutely spectacular, judging from the press release. The teapot to the left is one of the items that will be on display, a Bianchi teapot by Carlo Landi circa 1840.

The exhibition will combine art from three continents that spans centuries to explore the history and culture of tea. If you love tea, tea culture and history, a trip to see this exhibit would be a wonderful vacation. Sadly, I won't be able to make it down there, but if you're going, I'd love to hear all about it, and see pictures!

For more information, contact Beatrice Eyales, UCLA Fowler Museum, Marketing and Communications Dept.

In other news, I received a note from Tom McLaughlin this week about the new Wikiteadia community he's building. Here's the crux of what he envisions for the site, from his email:

"I'd like Wikiteadia to be a bit different - a not for profit, completely unbiased site with tea information, specific tea reviews, tea company reviews, and most of all an active community. "


I think this is a great idea. And since it's starting off fresh this week, we all have the chance to submit articles and reviews that will help make it a comprehensive resource and community for those of us who are passionate about tea. Consider submitting something to the site, and supporting this important project.

Blogs to Visit

Walker Tea Review: This blog gives tea lovers a completely new way to taste tea, with video guidance to walk you through the whole process. Order your teas, get the video on the scheduled day, and you're ready to go!

teatunes: Aside from my initial cringe at the lack of capitalization, I've found this blog to be not only informative and unbiased (blogs that post negative reviews as well as positive have my undying respect), but also extremely amusing. These two guys are excellent writers, and while I'm not much of a "tunes person", their tea posts should be marked "do not miss". Check 'em out - you won't be sorry.

Twitterers to Follow: Rather than listing them here, I'll go ahead and do the #FollowFriday thing on twitter. My followfriday reccomendations are general done by RT's (re-tweets) of my favorite posts throughout the week, so follow me, and watch for the #followfriday hash tag!

3 comments:

  1. I've already visited the Wikiteadia site. To date they don't have much online but a list of some tea companies. It's a good directory to list yourself in if you're a tea company. And about Twitter, you can follow me if you're interested in tea people @jasonwitt since I tweet about nothing more than tea most of the time. --Jason

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  2. Hey, thanks for mentioning teatunes! We deliberately try not to be too technical when we discuss tea because, frankly, we have no idea what we're on about most of the time.

    At least we're honest!

    The lack of capitalisation on teatunes is unnecessarily rooted in a 1999 graphic designer's handbook. We need to look into that.

    Thanks again!

    -ben

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  3. You're most welcome, Ben. Don't worry too much about the lack of caps - it's my own "writer's editor" showing through, not necessarily anything actually "wrong". ;-)

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