While in Milan I had the fortune of staying at an exquisite hotel that presented myself with a great deal of choices in how I might enjoy a coffee or tea in the privacy of my own room. Of the various implements available, I chose among the teaspoons this pared-down object that sits in the foreground. If I were more cultured, I would know its name. I’m sure someone out there can help me out with this, but its name matters little right now for me to continue.

When mixing a big sugar cube into a hot coffee, the teaspoon isn’t the best device to coerce the cube into melting. Do you scoop the cube in the curve of the spoon, then drop it back into the coffee? And just continue to do so? Seems a bit tacky to me.

Thus I enjoyed the “un-spoon” made available to me here, as it had real heft. The process of piercing the sugar cube was quite simple. Furthermore when swirling the coffee, the side blades did a great job at quickly rendering the sugar into the liquid. I wondered to myself, “Is this a teaspoon?” No. It seems specifically designed to attack the sugar cube. I felt it was something like a reduce-ed teaspoon, if such an object could exist.

Then again, I may have made a mistake and this little “sugar axe” as I call it was perhaps supposed to be used to turn on my TV instead, and really didn’t belong in the coffee server. I am known to have made such mistakes in the past. In this case, maybe it was not an error. Oh, what is this thing called?

While traveling in Asia my tummy and eyes may have eaten too well.

In a small shop in Nishi-Nippori, Tokyo I was treated with the most delicious soba noodles I have ever tasted. As we were leaving, I noted the solid wooden tabletop with cracks that had been mended with large reinforcing pieces of a completely different kind of wood. Perhaps due to the deliciousness of the soba I hadn’t noticed the striking differences as visually posed, but as I departed it was what screamed out.

Defects are normally stamped out in a six-sigma world. If it ain’t perfect, throw it out. Perhaps as you get older, you are more tolerant of how the world presents its failure-s around you. And maybe it is then you can begin to see the beauty of that which could be dismissed as invalid or otherwise handicapped, to emerge as entirely more relevant than if it were 100.000% perfect.