Category: General

Bollocks to this, I’m off to Mount Myohyang.

Bollocks to this, I’m off to Pyongyang.

Bollocks to this, I’m off to Shenyang.

Bollocks to this, I’m off to Beijing.

Before we start, here’s a disclaimer: I will gladly prostitute my own morals and this blog’s hard-won integrity in exchange for free food.

This week, I received an easter egg in the post, the results of a secretive deal struck with the PR company behind Hotel Chocolat, an unruly brigade of artisan chocolatiers who describe themselves as a “British-owned phenomenon brazenly committed to real, authentic chocolate.” Now I like the idea of being “brazenly committed”, as if they’re making champagne truffles and knocking up marzipan fancies without any regard for their own personal safety. It’s the kind of no-nonsense, testosterone-filled approach to sweet-making I appreciate.

So I agreed to review one of the company’s products, their Signature Egg, 20 quid’s worth of hand-made chocolate stuffed full of further hand-made chocolate.

As you can see, it comes in a nice black and gold box. This choice of colours is supposed to represent luxury and mystery, I imagine, as if to convince the perspective purchaser that they’re buying into a lifestyle of heady elegance and unrivaled opulence, like Monte Carlo with added cocoa.

The egg hatches to reveal its chocolate cargo, a dozen hand-decorated ovums containing all sorts of mildly alcoholic fillings. I sample a few.

Tiramisu

Pink Marc De Champagne

To be honest, it’s a mixed bag. The bellini truffle, named after the famous cocktail invented at Harry’s Bar in Venice in 1934, is quite possibly the nicest chocolate I’ve ever had, containing a suburb, velvety ganache of peach and champagne. On the other hand, the one marked quite clearly on the guide photo as containing advocaat quite clearly doesn’t. It’s whisky flavoured, leading me to wonder whether Hotel Chocolat have a whole batch of mis-labelled sweets they’re farming out on the sly to Britain’s greediest, most obese bloggers.

In fact, some of the flavours are a little odd: if you surveyed 100 people and asked what booze they’d like to find inside a truffle, I’m sure that calvados wouldn’t be a popular choice, and yet it’s here. On the other hand, Kir Royale is a great selection, because the blackcurrant creme de cassis base goes beautifully well with chocolate. It’s a natural fit.

Minor quibbles aside, it’s easily the best Easter egg I’ve ever had. Proper quality. The shell is thick, rich and creamy, while the truffles are exquisitely presented and, for the most part, quite exceptional. Finally, and most importantly, I imagine that if you gave one to a pretty lady, she’d want to have sex with you almost immediately.

Most of the time, I think Amazon are really clever. If I have a look at the top 15 items they’re currently recommending I buy, they list five items I already own, six I’d really like, and just four I have little or no interest in. This is a pretty good strike-rate.

Sometimes, however, I think Amazon are really, really stupid.

Dear Amazon.co.uk Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have expressed interest in “Sensuous [Australian Import]” by Cornelius have also ordered “Cornelius” by Sensuous. For this reason, you might like to know that “Cornelius” will be released on 2 April 2007. You can pre-order your copy for just £11.99 by following the link below.

Cornelius
Sensuous

Price: £11.99
Release Date: 2 April 2007

To learn more about Cornelius, please visit the following page at
Amazon.co.uk:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000IY06I4/

Best wishes,

Amazon.co.uk

Morons.

I have decided: my new ambition is to put on as much weight as I possibly can, to the point where fat suffocates my limping heart and I can no longer raise myself from the sheets without bedsores tearing flesh from my swollen, useless torso. They’ll need a crane to cart me off to hospital, I tell you. And so, to start, I made some yummy turamisu.

Tomorrow, if you’re really lucky, I’ll post a picture of my 70s-stylee black forest gateaux. It contains approximately 9000 calories.

“Put down that rawhide bone, drop that ball of yarn”, it’s the Petcast, recorded every weekend in Las Vegas and broadcast to a theoretical audience of millions world-wide. This week’s guest was, you guessed it, me.

I was interviewed for the show via the magic of Skype, and talk about Cats In Sinks, Kittenwar, The Daily Kitten and the Random Kitten Generator. Oh, and North Korea. I’m not comfortable doing this kind of thing and hate the sound of my own voice, but I figure I had better get used to it as the massive publicity machine surrounding the launch of the Kittenwar range of products ramps up. Or something.

Anyway, it wasn’t too bad. The hosts referred to me as Frasier rather than Fraser throughout the show, but nearly all Americans do that, so they’re forgiven, and I don’t come across as being as cat-mental as I thought I might. Well, maybe a little.

Direct link to audio – I come on at the ten minute mark.

An open letter to the Football Association:

To whom it may concern,

Having spent the last hour attempting to buy a pair of tickets for the forthcoming England Under-21 game, it is gratifying to learn that the rank incompetence which has characterised much of the stadium’s construction has been extended to the ticketing process.

Initially I was placed in a queue to buy tickets on the website. Shortly afterwards, the page refreshed to reveal that I was 200 places lower in the queue. The next refresh threw me out of the this process altogether. Since then, I’ve been greeted by a series of different error messages. Meanwhile, attempting to book tickets by phone has resulted in a similar number of variables: a recorded box office message, a recorded message from BT, and a simple engaged tone.

I expect this story will be spun to reflect your surprise at the huge number of eager fans ready to show their enthusiasm for England’s return to their traditional home, as if this technological failure actually represents some kind of triumph.

In reality, of course, it merely confirms the disdain you display for those willing to put money in your pockets, your continued refusal to come to grips with 21st century technology (it’s a website: you can prepare for these spikes in traffic. You can simulate your server being hit by tens of thousands of simultaneous connections. It *really* isn’t rocket science), and the rampant ineptitude you’ve publicly demonstrated again and again and again ever since the Wembley project was first mooted.

Yours sincerely,

Fraser Lewry
Registered England fan # 55355280

Update: Three hours later, through some minor URL hackery (making note of my session id and refreshing the page with the correct variable each time the errors appeared), I made it to the front of the queue, entered my fan number and password, clicked submit, and… after being greeted by another series of runtime errors, was finally told that my ticketing session had expired. Back to the start of the queue.

Lovely.

I went to a peculiar thing on Friday night, a ‘blogger’s screening’ of the new Danny Boyle film Sunshine. Why peculiar? Well, before the movie started, a representative of 20th Centrury Fox stood up and told us that while we were a) encouraged to write about the film, we were b) under no circumstances to actually review it.

So it’s with this ambiguity ringing in my ears that I write this post. And instead of bringing you prose pertaining to plot-line and performance, I’ve decided to exclusively reveal the top five things I learnt during the film.

1. It’s actually possible to get much closer to the sun than scientists have previously thought. In fact, it’s possible to get really close without suffering from much more than a extreme case of eczema and a desperate need for anger management therapy.
2. Seats at the preview theatre in Soho Square are much more comfortable than those at normal, proletariat cinemas.
3. The guy who plays Searle is the spitting image of Kirendip, who works in my office. FACT.
4. The movie credits reveal the presence of a so-called ‘Science Advisor’. I suspect that this role isn’t a serious position, but more of an attempt to lend some credibility to one of the most wildly ludicrous plots ever committed to celluloid. I’m not saying that wildly ludicrous is necessarily bad – and Sunshine is a decent, beautiful-looking film – but there’s really no need to dress it up in some crazy cloak of plausibility. It just doesn’t fit; the key part of the phrase ‘science fiction’ is the second, not the first.
5. If you’re flying through space, and a member of your crew is the subject of a suicide watch, it’s probably best not to leave them unattended in a room full of scalpels.

In summary, I quite like being invited to sample free stuff I’m not required to write about. So if anyone wants to book me gratis flights to Spain and a table at el Bulli, I’m all ears.