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Probably the best hot chocolate in the world
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Other
- Hits: 2037
Now I'd bought myself some hot chocolate discs - premium, at a correspondingly high price, while doing my Xmas shopping, and never gotten around to trying them. So today I brought one in and frothed some milk and stirred it up - chipotle chile & chocolate, a curious combination, but I'm a curious guy.
It was amazing. Not sweet, simply rich, pure chocolate. The best hot chocolate in the world. Now I'm curious to try their other flavours....
Pure Leadership
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1883
Walking with the boy through Kensington we pass a shop, or ground level office space, the window decorated with a logo of a naked man surrounded by rays of what presumably are light, or enlightenment, above is text advertising "Pure Leadership", beneath it the word "Homoluminous".
"Use that in conversation 5 times today" I tell the boy. It's the challenge.
We peer through the window, I've walked past this shop before. It's an office space, computers, desks, the floor covered in file folders and stray papers, on the desk beside the apple-branded computers are large rock crystals, geodes, there's a magic carpet carelessly knotted underneath the castors of the desk chair, a globe upon another desk, and I find myself wondering who on earth buys this bollocks. Really. I mean, what are they teaching leadership skills for? Getting people to drink the kool-aid? Who in their right mind walks into their office and looks at the mess of new age paraphernalia scattered across the desks and floor and decides that these people have something to teach them?
"Without seeming prejudiced" I tell him "It's pure bullshit".
Improving your online reviews
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 2181
At the restaurant we're besieged with sales calls.
The latest a scam to "improve" your online reviews - reputation management, as it were, the theory being that if you pay this company money they'll improve your restaurants/business reviews by posting loads of bogus reviews that rave about the service, or - as has been done in the US, simply by logging in and deleting negative reviews, because coincidentally they happen to own the reviewing websites.
Now this completely undermines the "fairness" inherit in the process of reviewing restaurants, and destroys whatever use the internet might have had in helping customers decide where they would like to dine. Never mind that, in this instance it's not about the customers, it's about the reviews (and one has to wonder then if these companies don't perhaps stoop to posting negative reviews themselves, just so that they can remove them later for a fee....).
In short, it's a fucking scam of the worst order.
Picasso at the Lapin Agile
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Theatre
- Hits: 1876
The Sunday entertainment with the boy. Now I like Steve Martin, appreciate his brilliance, and I like the idea of Einstein meeting Picasso at a cafe in Paris, what conversations would ensue? How much potential is there in that?
Exactly.
There is, by the way, but we had rush tickets, as we seat ourselves I can't help but notice the audience much resembles another audience for a recent Noel Coward production we both saw. A bad omen.
The first 50 minutes of the play go fine, OK, some moments even good, but as the end appears to be drawing nearer and I'm stretching my legs Steve Martin begins introducing more and more characters, and more and more preposterous comedic events, he's not letting it end naturally. It's as if he's feeling obliged to give us a full 90 minutes of play for our money, regardless of how he does it, and the comedy grows increasingly strained.
And it goes from being not bad to not good in a hurry.
Enter Elvis.
Now it seems this is a plot device used by quite a few other playwrights as of late (think Jubilation's) the reasoning I can only imagine must go like this: "No play starring Elvis has ever lost money", or some other like-minded thespian superstition, because his presence, well, it lent nothing. In fact the boy and I have a shared joke that whenever Elvis enters the theatre it's probably time to get up and go, we couldn't as we were too tightly wedged in with the wheelchairs and seniors, but to leave would have been the kindest thing.
Elvis, Picasso and Einstein all have their moment. Load of bollocks. End play. Amusing in that sort of dark-joke's on you sort of way, we laughed a fair bit after the play, but seldom inside it. No bananas.
Kinder reviews here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasso_at_the_Lapin_Agile, YouTube version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep1WKTAfa0k&feature=related. If you like the YouTube clip you might enjoy it, it's all a matter of taste after all.
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