Recent Comments

1. 11 minutes ago on Garfield

   And yet one solitary 17th-century Sufi saint plaited seven beans in his beard and brought them to the hills of Karnataka, performing a fragrant act before Allah by carrying only seven, allowing him to break the Arab monopoly on coffee without fear of persecution. His name lives on in the hills where he is entombed today.

   (Of course, the Mopla-dominated merchant class in Kerala attempted to do the same by slipping raw cherries in with the roasted coffee beans they were allowed to sell. I don’t know whether any of those ever took, though…)

2. 1 day ago on Garfield

   Kaldi and the goats only chewed the cherries. It was the holy man Kaldi took them to who first began using the cherries in a brew. Whether the holy man was a “pir” (a mendicant, a wandering saint) or an “imam” (a formal priest in a mosque) is still up for debate.

3. 2 days ago on Garfield

   The saddest thing is that if anyone attempts to discuss the history of just who exactly gave coffee to the world and how it became what it is, the McCarthyists, Tories, Hindutvas, and other establishmentarians cry “fake” if anyone dares say the truth…

   …and if this space is a safe one to say so, ilah khair kare, I might just explain how one Indian saint and a whole battalion of conquistadores dared to break the Arab monopoly on this bean.

4. 9 days ago on F Minus

   I’d make a joke about “Un chien andalou”, but the search engine would take it completely in the wrong direction…

5. 21 days ago on Ink Pen

   The Shinkai romances are better.

   Even “A Silent Voice” trumps that.

6. about 1 month ago on Rudy Park

   @BE THIS GUY

   The Indians had done that already by the time the British invaded.

   The caste system evolved out of a severely misguided interpretation of the older ‘varna’ system – originally analogous to the Western world’s tradition of guilds.

   The caste system was not uniformly Indian. In the South, in places like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, caste restrictions were frequently flouted and there was plenty more intermarrying than in the North. “Duties” associated with “lower” castes would often grant those members temporary passes, and the Brahmin or priestly castes – which technically outranked the nobility, even if the brahmins were in penury – were not all the same.

7. about 2 months ago on Rudy Park

   And this is how the economy got so bad and how fascism rose anew.

8. 2 months ago on Ink Pen

   Something tells me Sendak would nevertheless approve…

9. 3 months ago on Working Daze

   Is the monk supposed to be a reference to something? He looks awfully familiar.

10. 3 months ago on The Meaning of Lila

    What, no “Then what are we waiting for” from Drew this time?