I can has yummy tea!

I got myself a nice toy which was delivered a few days ago: an electric kettle. My stovetop kettle takes half an hour to boil water, and doesn't whistle reliably. That makes it a bit of an ordeal to make tea or hot cocoa. The new electric is awesome. Flip down the little switch, and in five minutes I've got water at a rolling boil. Or I can turn it down if I'm making green or white tea. I can actually have tea in the morning before work now. It's a happy thing.

It also let me test a theory that certain people are stupid assholes. Y'all know the McDonald's Coffee case. As a quick reminder of my opinion on it, 3rd degree burns, skin grafts, debibement, an 8-day hospital stay, 700 previous injuries and a refusal to fix the problem due to corporate insistence that the coffee is used in a way that their own market research showed it was not: I do not call this a frivilous lawsuit. Now, the issue here is that homemade coffee is served at 140F (60C), restaurant coffee is often 150-ish F (a little over 66C), and McD's was 190F (88C).

Well, I have seen certain people insist that 140F number is BS and a normal person would consider that cold coffee, that 190F is a perfectly reasonable temperature, and tea is about that temperature when it's served because it's made with boiling water.

Now, I don't know about you, but I let my teabag sit in the water for a few minutes. You know, kind of steep? And while my cup is sitting there steeping, it does this little thing called 'cooling'. So, I decided to make an experiment. I made echinacea tea this morning, which has a 6-minute steep time. The water I poured in the cup was at a rolling boil, which means that it was 212F (100C). Now, when I took the tea bag out, it was hotter than I care to drink it, but I measured it right then, before I even put in my honey.
154.4F (68C)

I didn't measure it when it got to drinking temperature, but it was undoubtably somewhere in the 140s. So nyah. :P

If it pisses off the bigots, it's gotta be good!

1) The "Conservative Knitters" group on Ravelry might as well be renamed "Bigots R Us." (Stumbled into it by accident via another member's profile.)
2) Although not directly related to that, they made me laugh quite heartily with their hypocrisy, too. Direct quote: "No surprise that she is a nasty lefty (but that’s redundant). She isn’t satisfied with talking about her book, she has to go insult conservatives." Look me in the eye and tell me you didn't snert.
3) This is the book that has them all a fluster. You can see just how horrible and insulting it is. (Hell yes I want a copy.)