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Welcome to the weekend.  An interesting collection this week but the article that I really enjoyed the most this week was the last one The History and Magic of the Japanese Teahouse,

Sit back with your favourite cup of tea and enjoy your reading, My choice this weekend is Oolong tea, a semi-fermented tea.  Enjoy!

Competitive Book Collecting Is a Thing

There are readers, and then there are book collectors. You know the ones: Their shelves groan beneath the weight of their printed treasures, and they always have a fascinating find to show off. But bibliophiles are made, not born—and an annual competition exists specifically to feed the book-accumulating habits of young collectors.  Read more...

Project Gutenberg Brings You the eBook Beauty of Bookplates

Project Gutenberg has just released one of its most attractive digitization projects for book lovers for a while – a 1902 edition of Book-plates of To-day, edited by Wilbur Macey Stone and originally published by Tonnelé and Company in New York. This showcases some fine examples of great bookplates from the era of Art Nouveau design, along with period essays on the purpose, aesthetics, and craft of bookplates. Read more...

Apple Is Getting Really Boring While Amazon, Samsung Turn Up The Heat

I remember looking forward to covering Apple events remotely, always interested in some new iPad, laptop, iPhone or software that Apple had up its sleeves. Now I’m just finding myself yawning. Night Shift? Probably the most exciting thing in iOS 9.3 and it’s not even a new idea. And the iPad Pro event was just an incredible dud. Apple basically took the technology it introduced late last year, stuffed it inside its iPad Air 2 and called it a day. Read more...

Is Mysterious 'Planet Nine' Tugging on NASA Saturn Probe? 

The hunt is on to find "Planet Nine" — a large undiscovered world, perhaps 10 times as massive as Earth and four times its size — that scientists think could be lurking in the outer solar system. After Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, presented evidence for its existence this January, other teams have searched for further proof by analyzing archived images and proposing new observations to find it with the world's largest telescopes  Read more...

The Bacon Cheeseburger Index, And 6 Other Odd Economic Indicators

What does the price of a bacon cheeseburger tell you about the state of the economy? Perhaps the Big Mac contains the “special sauce” to decoding the current consumer condition — or maybe it’s one of the many other oddball economic indicators that take into account everything from nail polish to men’s undies to corpses. Read more...

The History and Magic of the Japanese Teahouse

The tradition of chashitsu began with Rikyū, the 'Saint of Tea', 500 years ago. His innovative spirit lives on in the teahouses of today.  The first thing that often comes to mind when thinking of Japanese architecture is the teahouse or tearoom (chashitsu). Teahouses emerged with the development of the tea ceremony (chanoyu or sadō) – an art form that expresses Japanese sentimentality and aesthetics through the act of drinking tea.  Read more...

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