Date: 10 September 1981 1500-EDT (Thursday) From: Mike Kazar at CMU-10A (C410MK50) To: John.Jnestor at CMU-10A (N750JN23) cc: Connie Gormley at CMU-10A, jfj, info-cobol Re: Help! Date: 10 September 1981 0418-EDT (Thursday) From: John.Jnestor at CMU-10A (N750JN23) To: Mike.Kazar at CMU-10A Subject: Help! CC: connie gormley at CMU-10A Message-Id: <10Sep81 041838 JN23@CMU-10A> Origin: N750JN23 at CMU-10A; 10 Sep 1981 0420-EDT Mike, I hate to ask you this but I am desperately trying to finish writing my Master's thesis but can't stay awake. Do you really use tea intravenously? Does it work? John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Yes, all the time. I used to use Constant Comment loose tea, but it turns out that it is worth the expense to get the stuff in bags. The people at Mass General were starting to look at me funny when I would stop by every other day complaining about my leg (or sometimes even brain) getting numb. The first time they operated and removed a clump of tea, they gave me a look that would wilt a watermelon. Frankly, this is only a desperation manoeuver. Iced tea got me through topology and quantum mechanics at the same time, but my hands didn't stop shaking for about three months after I was done with that term. I also spent a lot of time in the emergency room of Mass General, and on the whole, I probably lost 20% of my "extra" time in the hospital. However, I did graduate. There are several tips about how much sugar to add to avoid glucose shock, and other random details that I don't have time to type in now. Check with me in person for the details. Even now, I can't watch those Lipton iced tea commercials without getting a case of the shivers. Cheers, Mike -------- Date: 8 May 1981 14:26 edt From: York.Multics at MIT-Multics (William M. York) To: sipb Re: Kazar's iced tea story long Here is Kazar's own version of the iced tea story. I received as mail a month or so ago, but never got around to disseminating it. Enjoy, and keep those legends alive! ------------------ Well, here goes the canonical ice tea story. Amazingly enough, it is even true. Furthermore Bill, I think that you are an unwitting participant in it. Anyway, here goes: First, the cast of characters: Michael Kazar ;the drug addict himself. Alanna Connors ;the addict's neighbor Carol Novitsky ;a neighbor from further down the hall. Charles Hoffman ;a naive frosh The SIPB ;a bunch of rumor mongers Well, at some point during the summer before my senior year, Carol stopped by to rave about some weird new tea that she had tried that was quite high in caffeine. I have the distinct impression it was more caffeine than anything else, as a matter of fact. She said that the stuff would wake her up faster than anything she had ever tried. It was called Morning Thunder Tea. I have seen it in the supermarket even here in Pittsburgh. I had at the time been using iced tea as my favorite source of caffeine, since it was also summertime and I have found that iced tea is also an excellent coolant. So when Carol mentioned that she found that Morning Thunder was excellent stuff, I decided to spin a tale. I said that no doubt Morning Thunder was excellent stuff and was virtually pure caffeine, but her problem was that she was taking it ORALLY. This was of course dilluting the stuff terribly. What I did, I told her, was to simply take this iced tea that I had, and shoot it up directly. Although it was quite hard on the system, it had the advantage that you could literally go for days after such a shot. It required a fair amount of sugar too, to get the right effect, since the sugar would of course help keep your blood sugar level high. Lastly, it is sometimes necessary to keep a continual flow of the stuff in, and so you would take the gallon jug of iced tea and mount it upside down above your head and keep the stuff flowing right into a vein. This could enable you to keep going for days on end without any problems, but when you finally cut off, you would crash like nobody's business. Well, I thought that this was a perfectly worthless story, but Carol was basically eating it up. One can basically tell if one is being believed or not, and although skeptical, what I mostly saw on her face was shock, since this was clearly a pretty crazy thing to do, even by our hall's standards. "Unfortunately" Alanna was also in the room and she thought this was quite funny. Quite funny indeed is an understatement, she actually fell on the floor laughing. This gave it away to Carol, who took one look at Alanna on the floor and decided this was ridiculous. I had, at this point stopped by the SIPB and related the above story. I do not know exactly to whom I did so, but that doesn't really matter. It included Dan Weinreb, I believ, or that is how I have come to know the rest of this, though the exact names of the people in the SIPB involved I only know from hearsay. The concept is that several months after the above story occurred, some folks on my hall (including Charles Hoffman) were eating at Colleen's. As usual, there were also several people from the SIPB there. I was not one of them. As I heard it later, Moon or someone was griping about the cold tea they had served, mumbling something about iced tea. Then Dan said that maybe they should "shoot it like Kazar". The folks at the nearby table from my hall heard this, and amazingly enough said "maybe it really happened". Later that evening, Hoffman came back to the hall and asked me about this story: did I really shoot iced tea? Alanna was around again, but she headed straight for her room to avoid cracking up again. I was on my own. Doing my best to keep a straight face, I explained how I had given it up now since it was so incredibly damaging to the body, but that it sure did work like a charm when things were really desperate. I recommended that they not use loose tea, since it could cause massive blood clots, and that there were certain things to do with the compositoin of the stuff that were just to complex to explain, so that they should check with me before trying it out. It is not clear that he believed me. He was with someone else at the time, and I seem to recall one of them was sure that I was full of shit and the other was not exactly sure, and seemed to be wondering if indeed "that could explain it". That's basically the story. It no doubt is somewhat twisted with time, but I still remember the looks on the people's faces, or at least I think I do. Hoffman is probably able to tell part of it, and Carol probably knows about half of it too (though the other half). Perhaps Wechsler does too, I am not sure. ACW@MIT-AI 05/08/81 21:21:25 Re: Kazar's iced tea story long To: SIPB at MIT-MC Wechsler only knows of this tale 1.5th hand. He was in his room (next door on the other side from Alanna) and heard Ms. Connors lose it completely (a sound not unlike a Bawden cackle played at double speed) and got the rest of the story later. ---Me