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Archive: chocolate

2010 Formula 1 predictions

1 February 2010 22:31

Categories: Formula 1, Media, Television

This article marks the return of Formula 1 to this website, as I have decided to (partially) close down vee8. For those of you who would rather not read the F1-related articles, you may like to subscribe to the F1-free RSS feed.

To break this process in gently, I have decided to make the first post a light-hearted look at what might happen in the 2010 Formula 1 season.

The season will be the most exciting ever, but the title of the DVD will make it sound like a wet Wednesday

In 2006, Fernando Alonso took his second World Championship in scintillating style that went down to the wire. The title of the official Formula 1 season review DVD was “Once Again”, making it sound like your drunk uncle has just wet himself for the umpteenth time.

In 2007, after a tense season-long battle between McLaren team-mates Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, Kimi Räikkönen amazed the world by snatching the title from both of them in the final race of the season, overcoming a 17 point deficit with two races to go. The DVD was called “Kimi made it at last”, as though he had just come home late from a heavy night.

In 2008 Lewis Hamilton took the Championship in heart attack-inducing style on the last corner of the last lap of the last race. The DVD was called “Luck does not come into it”, which I still haven’t worked out the meaning of.

And the DVD really sold the 2009 season well by calling it “Not in a hurry…”, as if Jenson Button did not have a record-breaking winning streak at the start of the season.

Even if the Championship showdown is host to the first ever alien visit to this planet and is settled with a massive 200mph laser gun fight involving seventeen drivers from the planet Q’txxp’he, it wouldn’t surprise me if the DVD was given some madly dull title like, “I’d rather be watching paint dry”, “Isn’t Corrie on the other side?”, or “I’d stick with watching lawn bowls if I were you”.

Confectionery diffuser face-off

2009 was the year of the Double Decker diffusers. The 2010 pre-season testing period has seen a similar curiosity surrounding the rear end of F1 cars, with teams being notably coy about showing off their behinds.

The concept has now moved way beyond Double Decker diffusers. Among the new types of diffuser will be Red Bull’s Drifter diffuser, McLaren’s Mars Bar diffuser, Toro Rosso’s Curly Wurly diffuser and USF1′s Snickers diffuser. However, once again, Ross Brawn will find the upper hand when he reveals Mercedes’s Boost diffuser.

FOM will fail to improve television coverage

Although Bernie Ecclestone’s FOM is supposedly covering the world’s most technologically advanced sport, the television pictures will still resemble a smudgy YouTube video. Bernie Ecclestone will insist that there is no need for HD coverage because, “my IT guy told me he swears by his old CRT television”.

Despite the decision to give HD the cold shoulder, FOM will stick with their existing on-screen graphics, which are so small that they are actually bloody impossible to read on any 4:3 display. They may be declaring the start of World War III on those captions for all I know.

Intense McLaren Championship rivalry

The title will come down to the wire in Abu Dhabi, with the main protagonists being McLaren team mates Hamilton and Button.

Towards the end of the race, John Button will think he has the upper hand by unleashing his killer move – undoing the last button on his shirt. Little will he anticipate that Anthony Hamilton will win the Championship by staring even more intensely.

Michael Schumacher will be the world’s most superstitious man

Following on from the revelation that Michael Schumacher has a mad superstition for odd numbers, the German will reveal a litany of hitherto unknown superstitions. Among these will be an insistence that his team mate runs with an inferior set-up because “it makes me feel a bit better about my car”.

He will also reveal that he has a special form of OCD that means he just has to brake-test any drivers that are behind him, and cannot stop himself from driving straight into anyone who has just overtaken him. He also has a strong superstition for getting to choose his own parking space, and will park his Mercedes car in Race Control, where he can literally control the race by tampering with the timing system.

No-one will think to point any of this out, because nothing is allowed to get in the way of Princess Michelle’s Fairy Tale Comeback.

Cosmopolitan Valencia will continue grid boy tradition

Valencia’s tradition of having grid boys in addition to grid girls at the European Grand Prix will continue. Coincidentally, Flavio Briatore will make his F1 comeback at the very same race.

New teams to struggle

New teams will be unable to shake off speculation surrounding their ability to see out the season. While the early focus will be on USF1 and Campos, the spotlight will soon switch to Virgin Racing.

Suspicions will be raised mid-season when the Virgin team mysteriously re-brands with a green livery and makes a formal application to change its name to ‘Zavvi’. A few months later, the team will run out of money and close down, but not before a special fixtures and fittings sale where fans will have the opportunity to buy the screws that once held the car together.

The bearded beggar who appears at races is not homeless

Having made a tactical error by trying to get a drive at Mercedes only for some seven time World Champion or other to get in the way, Nick Heidfeld will begin the 2010 season without a job. He will resort to sleeping on the floor in the paddock and begging.

If you see a suspicious-looking bearded man in the paddock, it is probably Mr Heidfeld, the world’s greatest ever second place finisher. Although he might speak as though he is slightly drunk, he is not homeless and is perfectly harmless.

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Milk saves and kills

14 July 2007 02:24

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Food and drink, Internet, Technology

One of the strangest things on the entire internet (and that really is saying something) is the BBC News feature, Most Popular Now. It can be found in the sidebar of most pages on the BBC News website. I often have a glance at it because often you do find some interesting stories there.

But it is really weird. Sometimes you see stories in there that are literally four or five years old. And it is not as if they are particularly interesting stories either. Okay, so that story about the bloke who was forced to marry a goat (and the goat’s subsequent suffocation on a plastic bag) was quite funny.

But the other day a rather unenlightening (and distinctly not very newsy) article about how to write a CV was right up there in the top five “most emailed”. Why would you email that to someone? To “gently hint” that you think they might be bad at writing CVs?

Today, for seemingly no good reason, this three-year-old story about a link between milk and ovarian cancer is the second most emailed story at the moment.

I realise that it is quite banal to point out the often contradictory nature of scientific studies on the various health effects of food. Red wine makes your heart happy but your liver sad. We all know it, and we are bombarded with so much contradictory information that we really might as well not bother.

You remember that advert that showed a girl guzzling down five litres of cooking oil because that is just what eating crisps is like (if you eat your annual consumption of crisps all in one go)? Almost put me off eating crisps. The next day I visited the dentist. He told me to eat more crisps and less chocolate. Not that I eat much chocolate anyway. I eat about three packets of crisps per day, so it’s a wonder I don’t constantly pee cooking oil.

Evidence of the fact that milk saves and kills Anyway, to veer back from that self-indulgent tangent, the point I am trying to make is this. It is slightly funny that the story about milk maybe possibly perhaps causing ovarian cancer was gazumped by a story saying that milk could cut the risk of getting diabetes and heart disease.

Helpfully, the related stories are: Milk in tea ‘blocks health gains’, Drinking milk ‘no risk to heart’ and Milk linked to Parkinson’s risk. So now you know.

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Congratulations to Nestlé

6 April 2007 22:26

Categories: Entertainment, Food and drink, General

For the Smarties egg. This is brilliant.

You get loads of different spin-off mini chocolate eggs these days. Most of them can’t hold a candle to the original Creme Eggs. But the Smarties egg is just brilliant. It’s got a really nice inside that’s a bit like how a Milky Way used to be before they were white on the inside. And then, inside that creamy mush, sits a cluster of little Smarties.

Much better than the normal ‘let’s stick some gunk in a chocolate egg and see how many suckers buy it’ nonsense.

6 comments

Crap Kit Kats

11 August 2006 20:04

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Food and drink, General, Nostalgia, Personal

You might (not) remember this article about fancy Kit Kats. I posted it on my linklog saying, “I’ve been tempted by the peanut one…”

I do like peanutty things a lot. It’s a little bit odd, because I’m not overly mad on peanuts or peanut butter. Sure, they’re nice, but they’re nothing special. But Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are awesome, if rather too salty. And Peanut Lion bars were my favourite chocolate bar ever.

I also have a soft spot for Kit Kats. They are ridiculously simple: wafer and chocolate — no frills. And while it’s all very well having fancy-pants confectionary once in a while, we always revert to the basics in the long term: milk chocolate, ready salted crisps. Winner. Kit Kats fall into this basic-but-faithful category.

Like kj at newvibes.com, I can remember taking Kit Kats to school, where the foil would rip itself open in my bag. I distinctly remember Kit Kats getting mixed in with all the grime at the bottom of my bag, leading to them tasting of pencil sharpenings. But I still ate them. Kit Kats are just part of your life like that.

It’s not that Kit Kats wouldn’t work as exotic limited editions. An old favourite can be twisted inside out and it can still work: take the many different versions of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bars you can get, or the many limited edition Walkers Crisp flavours. Indeed, Wikipedia shows that there have been far more exotic versions of Kit Kats than you might suspect.

So why have the current crop of Kit Kat ‘Editions’ failed? I have now seen two people — Neil McIntosh aswell as kj — suggest that it is all down to the fact that the old foil wrapping has gone:

[Nestlé] callously disposed of that delicious ritual about eating one – removing the paper wrapper and running your thumb down the foil to snap off the four legs of biscuit. When they got rid of the paper and foil wrappers in favour of a plastic all-in-one wrap the ritual was ruined for all – even if the new packaging did have little perforations.

The ritual lent a humble KitKat great value – it simply lasted much longer than other biscuits – but it also allowed you to regard eating one as something a little more than simply scoffing “product”. The marketing people obviously didn’t get it.

I don’t know about that. Opening a Kit Kat like that always seemed like a bit of a pain. I never open a Kit Kat that way. Perhaps this is out of habit. The Kit Kats I took to school always seemed to have their wrappers on the wrong way around, which rendered sliding your finger down the middle pointless, because the wrapper was already open there anyway.

My own suspicion is that the flavours of the ‘Editions’ were just poor. Perhaps they were rushed out too quickly without being properly trialled. But I’ve heard bad stories about them. For example, from the Post-Gazette.com article:

…by early 2005, some shopkeepers say they noticed that their regular customers were complaining the candy tasted strange or too sweet…

Colin Snead, a 24-year-old Londoner, has been a fan of KitKats since he was a kid, often stocking up on them so he can eat one with his afternoon tea. Curious about the new flavors, he tried the new strawberries-and-cream variant last year. “It was a bit sickly and sweet,” he says. “It wasn’t what I wanted from a KitKat. That was it for me. I noticed the red berry flavor, but after that strawberry one, I stuck with the normal KitKat.”

And kj:

…the syrup made my teeth hurt which made me suspiscious of the sugar content.

I’ve only ever tried the peanut one. As I said, I love peanut-flavoured confectionary, but the Kit Kat Peanut was distinctly underwhelming. You shouldn’t be able to go wrong with it, but it felt like I was just eating a Kit Kat Chunky with an unevenly spread layer of cheap peanut butter on the top. It wasn’t a bad idea at all. But the execution was awful.

9 comments