Turns out that coffee in the morning doesn’t make you any more alert than non-coffee drinkers.  However, if you are addicted to caffeine and you don’t get your coffee, you will be less alert than those non-coffee drinkers.  This University of Bristol study found:

all the drink does is counteract the mild caffeine withdrawal symptoms people are experiencing because they have gone without the stimulant overnight.

And those who drink a caffeinated drink first thing are no more alert than those who never consume one.

So, drink coffee if you like it, but if you are doing it just to help you stay awake or to be more alert in the morning … you’ll need to find something else.

Photo by ° d i °.

If you are like me, you hate being the one who has to taste the wine because you aren’t really sure what you are supposed to be doing.  I know you are only supposed to send it back if it’s bad, not if you don’t like it.  But what is bad?  Somebody finally wrote an article to help us out,  Wines: Bad Wine.

Americans associate food with health. Many other nations associate food with pleasure. And most of them are healthier. “The researchers found that Americans worry more about food and derive less pleasure from eating than people in any other nation they surveyed.”

Here’s an interesting article about what food was really like in the Middle Ages, Historical Fiction – How do medieval-themed restaurants get it wrong? By Mark Schatzker. For anyone who has suffered through one of the modern medieval-themed restaurants, you will be relieved to know that your ancestors did have better taste in food than that.

We’re having a “crawdad” boil! We have 70 pounds of crawdads! That’s good since we have at least 49 people coming and these are going to be good! I wish my grandmother could be here. She really enjoyed crayfish. She even posted about it in her blog.
Here’s one to give you a sense of scale.