Some music for you:


This praxis was actually like several movies in one--or like one of those strange movies which appears at first glance to be one type of genre, but later reveals itself to be completely different. It started off as a perfectly normal comedy....it all began with Haiku's Reverse Shoplifting completion. Absolutely amazing. Brilliantly executed. And Spidere thought, "Perhaps I could use this..."

CG0 was inviting me to a tea party on top of a bridge, and KristinaWithaK had been planning a tea party. How awesome would it be, I thought, to show up with the famous Haiku Soylent Green Tea? Answer: completely awesome.

So, since I was going to be back in DC, and had friends in Boston coming down, I put out the word: get the box. Within hours, two teams had been dispatched, and the box acquired. It made its way safely down the East Coast to DC, and into my waiting hands.



After keeping it safe for a week, the time came to return to San Francisco. I decided that it would be a shame for the box to get ruined while it was so close, so instead of packing it into my luggage to be crushed, I decided to hand-carry it. I even put it in a plastic bag to protect it from rain or other wet disaster. Sadly, the plane stopped for a layover on the way to SF, and they made an announcement: anyone who was continuing on could step out, leave their things here, and reboard when they opened the doors again. i thought I could stand to stretch my legs, so i stepped out...and I left it inside on my seat. This, in hindsight, was a terrible, terrible mistake. When I returned, I noticed something missing...the tea! I questioned the flight attendants-they said yes, one of them had thrown it out as trash. I did all that I could to try to recover it, even to the point of delaying the flight and convincing a ground crew member to go to the dumpster and look for it...but to no avail. And so for several days, I was carrying the terrible feeling that one gets when one has done something easily avoided, such a small action which has completely and irrevocably destroyed something which would otherwise have been great.

Since no one knew of the surprise, nothing was, perhaps, truly lost. Still, I had a thought that it might yet be possible to recover from my error. For, if nothing else, I felt ashamed that I had effectively taken the experience away from the person who might otherwise have come upon the tea in the store, and then squandered that opportunity.

The lesson? I couldn't do this alone.

And at this point, it turned into a heist movie. I needed a technical wizard. Clearly, that was Haiku.
To make up for my carelessness and almost-but-not-quite awesomeness, I asked Haiku: would you be willing to share the digital plans for your box, so that I might reconstruct one? With his assistance, the plans for the box were transferred, and I scanned and produced three replicas of the box.



And then the conspiracy started. I checked and made sure Haiku would be all right with putting it up on ebay as a part of this task:

I would like to put the third box of tea up on Ebay, as part of this task. I plan to imply that this is the same box of tea which you created (though it is, sadly, not, it is entirely plausible that it could have been). Proceeds will be donated to SF0 (minus any shipping costs). What do you think?

But I also needed a fence. That was piratey. She's just naturally devious. So she posted it up on ebay:



A forgery of Haiku's box, which was itself a forgery of an actual green tea box, sold by someone with a forged identity. Perfect. Notice that the photographs are set to try not to show the pricetag too closely, as my replica ended up being a little bit bigger than the original.

The flavor text piratey came up with was great, too:

why settle for soy
when you can have soylent tea
bean curd is for wimps

one hundred percent
Haiku Brand Soylent Green Tea
will cure what ails you

The one, the only
original packaging
haiku brand is best

best tea ever, yum!
guaranteed free range soylent
or your money back!
note: not made of people (probably)

In the end, despite attempts to publicize it, it went for just $6.05. But it was sold. You got a bargain, peter5eller5. :) Enjoy the tea.