Just by way of a warm-up, let’s open with a Stupid Headline of the Day:

"Bear gave off no reasons for concern before trainer's death"
(Associated Press, April 23)

People -- it's a BEAR! Don't look for "reasons" for concern. There is only one: It's a BEAR!

Glad to be of help.

Oh, and yes (you probably won't be surprised to learn), the story deals with people who are every bit as stupid as that headline might suggest:

"In a February interview, Randy Miller called Rocky 'the best working bear in the business,' the San Bernardino Sun reported on its website Wednesday. But, the paper quoted him as saying, 'If one of these animals gets a hold of your throat, you're finished.'"

- -

A friend of Baby Duck recently sent me a work-related e-mail entitled “Words you do not want to hear on a conference call”. He then itemized several that indicated a high likelihood he was about to become involved in planning for an emergency flood-related evacuation of an entire community as this winter’s incredible snowfalls metamorphose into this spring’s torrential meltwater flows along several of our rivers. (I pictured a cartoon of a snuggly bed with wings on it – meaning all hope of sleep may be flying out the window for the next few of his work days. Not a situation I would wish on anyone but, if ever a job could be labeled “satisfying”, I expect one that involves saving lives would fall completely under that heading.)

It’s only the most tenuous of segués, but it suggested to me a title for this next little note, “Things you don’t want to experience when you’re picking up your offspring from piano lessons.”

Offspring takes piano lessons in a pleasant part of Ottawa – right beside the National Museum of Science and Technology. It's a patch that, besides the building, includes several acres of open lawns, trees and picnic tables. Plus a lighthouse, an Atlas rocket, a radar station and a massive locomotive. (It is a most eclectic patch of national capital land.) As the number of daylight hours increases, on music lesson evenings I quite deliberately give myself up to 45 minutes of waiting while I simply sit and listen to music or podcasts on the iPod or work a cryptic crossword… to name just a few of the pleasant time whilers that engage me on these ever more summery evenings.


On the evening of her most recent lesson, offpsring had just emerged and, darkness having fully fallen, I was getting ready ro drive us away when I noticed a car, or rather its headlights, approaching from the left. Noting that it would cross directly in front of me, I paused to let it go by, and then observed (a) that it was in fact a City of Ottawa police car, and (b) it stopped, blocking me in. Then we watched in growing perplexity as the driver, a uniformed officer, got out and came around to my door.

“Uh… hi?” I ventured.

“Good evening sir; you seem to have been here for quite a while.”

“Um… yes, I was waiting for my daughter here (pointing to the occupant of the passenger seat) until she was finished her music lesson there." (pointing to the storefront over which the enormous “Amulet Studios” sign was fully aglow.

He paused. I wondered why. Then I realized that moments before, I had been listening to the iPod and had been quietly (I thought) singing along with… uh oh… “Fat Bottomed Girls” by the late great Freddie Mercury and Queen. Gah, don’t tell me someone was offended – and by what? The fact of my certainly off-key efforts or the lyrical content of the air in question? Must be the song itself, I concluded... Can’t imagine why:

“I've been singing with my band
Across the water, across the land,
I seen ev'ry blue eyed floozy on the way, hey
But their beauty and their style
Wear kind of smooth after a while.
Take me to them lardy ladies every time!

(C'mon)
Oh won't you take me home tonight?
Oh down beside your red firelight,
Oh and you give it all you got
Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin' world go round
Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin' world go round.”

“I… uh… well, I just sit and listen to my iPod…”

“No problem, sir… it’s just that we have a police operation about to go down quite close to here… obviously I can’t get too particular… but we need you to leave… now.”

“Umm… OK, as soon as you move your cruiser, I’ll do just that.”

“Thank you very much sir; have a good evening.”

He turned and was moving around the front of his own car, when he stopped, returned and asked, “Oh, one more thing sir (great; I’ve got Columbo here)… are you the owner of this car?”

“Yes I am.”

“Thank you sir.” And off he went.

And off we went, only just a tad more quickly than we typically exit the Amulet Studios parking lot.

All of which left me with two questions, both unanswered at this writing: What was the nature of the “operation”? Because so far it has piqued no local media follow-up. And second, why in heaven’s name did it matter that I am the owner of the car? (And almost as an aside... add those to the fact that his opening sentence suggested I had already been under observation for some time.)

I'm not paranoid... really. BUT I SURE WISH PEOPLE WOULD STOP SAYING THAT ABOUT ME!!

The lines are open for rumour, speculation, insinuation and innuendo. Ready, set, go.

- -

Back to New York…

Occasionally on a trip I will experience a spit of bad luck. Many years ago, accompanied by Leslie’s “Wait until you see it…” exhortations, I was making my way from a hotel in London, England to what I expected would be my first-ever view of Big Ben, sitting atop its tower in the flesh (figuratively speaking, that is… “in stoneclad brick” would be the more literal description). I still recall stepping from a tube station into bright sunlight and, precisely where the Mother of Parliaments’ tower and its magnificent clock were supposed to fall into view, there was a foundation-to-pinnacle sheath of blue construction tarpaulin. The stone cladding was in the process of being sandblasted for the first time in decades and it just happened to coincide with our visit. The best I could say is that it was definitely shaped like the clock tower I’d seen only in photos to that point in my life.

Fast-Forward to NYC, April 2008.

Before we left Ottawa, the Guggenheim Museum was described to me by a friend as a pretty, indeed a beautiful package with so-so contents. A frequent feature of movies and TV shows set in NYC, the Guggenheim is a – to some, “the” – signature work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the subject of often rapturous reviews. And yes, some of them suggest – as did my friend – that the architecture downright overpowers all but the most magnificent of exhibits housed within its iconic walls.

So given the “Big Ben” introduction to this item, it should now come as no surprise to anyone that this is what greeted us when the cab in which we were riding swung around the corner to where Wright’s stunning inverted beehive was supposed to heave into view:


(Photo: Guggenhenheim.org / restoration)

As for the contents, well, the day we were there they lived precisely down to our forewarned low expectations.

Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese artist who, if Guggenheim website bumpf is to be believed, is “internationally acclaimed as an artist whose creative transgressions and cultural provocations have literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time”.

Contrary to the frequent misuse these days of “literally” to mean “really, REALLY”, in using it here to qualify “exploded” the Guggenheim people are being perfectly correct. Among the many media this artist employs (in an exhibit that, astonishingly, ran the entire Guggenheim spiral gallery from ground floor to roof) is gunpowder. In this case, part of his massive multi-media installation was a series of gigantic canvasses upon which he had ignited varying quantities of the explosive, after which he persuaded the Guggenheim people that the scorched remains should be mounted on its venerable display surfaces.

In another installation, the artist had placed the excavated remains of an ancient Chinese boat in whose hull he heaped tons of shards from shattered plates, cups and saucers. (The artist, you see, is a Chinese emigrant and also has a few political points he wants to make. This one showed us “broken China” – get it, get it?) Other parts of this massive installation pretty well revealed me to be, I’m afraid, a Philistine because I was much more amused than awestruck by, for example, a dozen life-sized stuffed tigers festooned with arrows. I was similarly unmoved by a long, leaping stream of 99 life-sized stuffed wolves who circled fully half a single level before coming to grief smack against a large glass barrier.
(Photo: www.iconeye.com)

I confess, however, that I was mightily impressed – not so much by the piece but rather by the legend behind it – of another part of the exhibit: a full sized boat hull suspended from the ceiling that was riddled with so many arrows it resembled an inverted hedgehog. The legend tells of a Chinese general who awoke one morning to find his own army perilously close to an opposing force. Having just come from another battle, the general and his troops were almost out of arrows. So on one misty morning, he floated a boat across the river towards his enemy’s camp. He had stocked the boat with straw figures resembling warriors. Meanwhile, his own army stayed safely behind, yelling and generally making an attack-like barrage of yells and other sundry noises. His decoy promptly attracted a torrent of volleys from defending archers. When the general’s boat returned to his camp, some 3,000 arrows were stuck to it and subsequently were put to good use defeating his opponent’s force.

According to a brief review of this particular installation that appears on the Museum of Modern Art’s website, “Surreptitiously gathering strength from one's opponent is also a strategic principle in martial arts. Turning to a militaristic episode and a cultural practice, Cai not only suggests a defensive strategy in the face of foreign intervention, but also creates a poetic metaphor in the image of a wounded body transcending pain and floating in a cloud of feathered arrows.”

Uh huh. Well, what do you expect? These artsy types have to stick together.

But with all due respect to Mr Guo-Qiang – the entire friggin’ Guggenheim????

- -

Here’s a piece of advice for would-be NYC visitors who believe what is written in the online activity guides. Doublecheck your information, with a phone call if necessary. I say this merely because again we found ourselves mildly disappointed when, after a cab ride to one of the city’s many famous piers, found that the one boat tour we wanted to take only ran in the summer – a critical piece of background that did not appear on the floating tour company’s website. (That cab ride, incidentally, did indeed realize the tales I had heard of the white-knuckle experience a Manhattan cab ride can be. NYC cab drivers are not to be trifled with and from my position in the front passenger seat, I found myself rising slightly from my seat in one tense moment after another as we whirled down narrow downtown streets, often barreling no more than a very few scant millimetres past the huge side mirrors of parked delivery trucks.)

Although we were flummoxed by what had been planned as a water tour around the Statue of Liberty, it was a gorgeous sunny day and we turned the occasion into a most pleasant walking ramble along the waterfront, turning into the city once more when we reached the street where the Empire State Building is sited.

- -

I doubt I can say much about the Empire State Building that other people haven’t said as well, or better, when it comes to describing the impression of actually being at its base, looking up, and then entering that stunning art deco foyer that appeared in a photo in my previous entry here. What the brochures typically will not tell you, however, is how even here Disneyfication -- with not a small dose of PT Barnumery -- rears its ugly head. After passing through the awe-inducing foyer, we immediately were steered to something called the “Sky Ride”, a quasi-IMAX experience where Kevin Bacon narrates a filmed aerial tour of the downtown. You and about 40 other people are strapped into this giant box with rows of seats and as your movie screen presents the illusion of diving, soaring, banking, plunging and even cracking through the streets into a storm drain, the (all too literal) box seats bump and tilt and generally don’t do it nearly so well as does Disney.

Barnum – well, his famous maxim about suckers and the sixty-second intervals at which they enter the world, anyway – shows up after you get closer to the summit when you are zig-zagged along with a long line of visitors to hear what is surely one of the more bizarre sales pitches ever made.

At the Empire State Building, the guides at this level make an almost psychotically repetitive point of telling you with, apparently, no small measure of pride, how utterly unhelpful the situation is on the observation deck. No guides are there, they shout. Neither are there any printed posters showing the key points of interest to be seen as you stare off any one of the four sides of the deck. In fact, they wax evangelically about how desperate will be the need you feel to have in your possession one of the two or three different versions of the guide to the New York view from the Empire State Building, which they are only too happy to sell you NOW, because IT WILL BE TOO LATE when you get up to the observation deck.

(My Barnum allusion is not far off the mark. The last time I was subjected to a sales push this vigorous, it was while attending a Big Top Shrine Circus with offspring and being forced to hear a pitch about every three minutes to buy a cheesy Star-Wars-glow-in-the-dark lightsaber because the whole tent population’s waving of their limply glowing lights will be the ONLY WAY the performers will know you are appreciating their performance. Applause, it seems, and cheering, were prohibited because it upset the animals. So buy and wave a lightsaber, EVERYBODY – “Children of all ages!!” – so as to show our stars how much you enjoyed their show.)

So just to take you out this time, here's another shot from the family album:

In my last post, I alluded to the view from the Top of the Rock as being especially delightful because it included the Empire Street Building. Well, I certainly don’t want anyone to think that the view from the Empire State is any slouch, either and at the centre of this image is yet another NYC skyline icon, the Chrysler Building.

Up next... that danged city'll make an art lover out of me yet!

No order / no rhyme / no reason

Some New York snapshots – textual and photographic (Unless otherwise noted, photos are family-taken.)

So when last I reported as one of a trio of intrepid New York City travellers, we had just avoided a LaGuardia airport ground collision between our landing aircraft and heaven only knows what and heaven only knows by how much (or worse, by how little). So, the pointlessness of dwelling on the “What if?” acknowledged, on we go.

Contrary to what I’d heard about New York livery operators, the cab ride into Manhattan was a pretty straightforward exercise that engendered no fearsome maneuvers whatsoever. Our hotel, called the Kimberley Suites, was located right downtown. (And downtown New York City is just about as DOWNTOWN as one can possibly be. Even the shorter buildings in Manhattan are still towering structures.)
But as we completed the drive in, I realized just what a musical medleyed property is New York – beginning with the city itself:

(“Start spreadin’ the news…”)

In short order, we traversed 42nd Street…

(“Come and meet those dancing feet,
On the avenue I'm taking you to,
Forty-Second Street.
Hear the beat of dancing feet,
It's the song I love the melody of,
Forty-Second Street.”)

and Fifth Avenue…

(“On the avenue…
5th Avenue…
The photographers will snap us;
and you’ll find that you’re
in the roto-gravure”)

and even came (on this drive anyway) within spitting distance of Broadway…

(“Come on along and listen to
The lullaby of Broadway.
The hip hooray and bally hoo,
The lullaby of Broadway.
The rumble of the subway train,
The rattle of the taxis.
The daffy-dills who entertain
Until the dawn:
Good night, baby,
Good night, milkman's on his way.”)

The nice thing about viewing the NYC skyline from the Top of the Rock (the NBC building) instead of from the Empire State Building is that you see the Empire State Building.

Having arrived fairly late in the day and looking for “food” in much the same way a sputtering Volkswagen is looking for “fuel”, we swiftly made friends with a newly minted concierge named Lindsay (I know “newly minted”, because her training supervisor was hovering directly over her shoulder while we talked to her) and set out where to find a moderately priced family restaurant close by. She suggested a Mexican restaurant just a half block away called Dos Caminos (Spanish, apparently, for “two ways”).

Now in Ottawa, “Mexican” is an occasional family Friday night choice and it means Las Palmas or Mexicali Rosa’s… the kinds of places that are owned by professional football players after they retire. (That’s not a snark. One of Ottawa’s most popular and most successful of the whole “Tex-Mex” phenomenon, The Lone Star, was founded by two ex-Ottawa Rough Riders. The entire team itself being an occupant of the “ex” column. But I digress.) Big, noisy, hardwood floors, chips ‘n’ salsa, ice-cold Corona served in a bottle with a wedge of lime stuffed into the neck… that’s what “family Mexican” means in our town.

So with that thinking in mind, off we went – blue-jeaned, t-shirted, sneaker-footed, to discover that, in Manhattan, apparently “family” is synonymous with “trendy” and “lots of money”. I guess I should have clicked when we were sent off from the hotel with a gold-embossed reservation card issued to us by Lindsay that she told us to be sure to present to the maitre d’ when we arrived.


Despite having left towers of snow a mere 90 minutes' flying away, we found Manhattan bathed in Spring, much to the delight of this sleepy behemoth, a resident of the Central Park Zoo. (And for the record, we were indeed this close. But I've carefully angled the camera to miss any reflections off the strong-as-steel window separating us from him.)

(The foregoing casual dress description applies to me and offspring. Leslie had been to New York before and had pre-determined that restaurant minimal-dressiness wear was to be tilted no closer to casual than a pair of black pants. Offspring, on the other hand, was festooned in a Charlottetown “Cows” t-shirt over which she decided to retain her windbreaker throughout the entire meal. As for me, I wore jeans and a black sweater that, shortly after we arrived, I decided was going to say, “I’m rich enough to be able to afford to look ‘cheap’.” Take that, Big Apple!)

But it turned out that our little-black-cocktail-dress-clad maitresse-d’ notwithstanding, a great many other patrons were indeed quite casually dressed – at least to the point of being tieless – and eventually we even spotted someone else in a t-shirt.

But “Mexican” in New York – or at least Manhattan – sure ain’t limited to tacos, enchiladas, burritos and quesadillas. Our waiter, Eli, was quick to recommend the reason most people came to Dos Caminos – their guacamole. Now I’m not a big fan of avocados or this particular product of that fruit, but when in Rome, etc, etc. So we ordered it.

To make a long story short, I’m still not necessarily a fan of avocados, but what they do to them in Dos Caminos to produce what they call guacamole is the sort of thing that makes you wonder just why in heck you’ve been settling for anything less somewhere else. It arrived in a huge stone bowl that weighed about three pounds if it weighed an ounce, and was of the type you normally associate with the bowl half of the “mortar and pestle” team. It was a good thing Eli planted it table centre, within equal distance of all three of us, because once it was set in place, it was not going anywhere.

After one taste, I could happily have sat there all night long with a couple more bowls of their guacamole and something with which to scoop it.

Oh… and here’s why:

Dos Caminos Guacamole
(Chef Scott Linquist, Dos Caminos) -- Makes 4 servings
Ingredients
2 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro leaves
2 teaspoons finely chopped white onion
2 teaspoons minced jalapeño or Serrano chilies, seeds and membranes removed, if desired
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt
2 large ripe Hass avocados from Mexico, peeled and seeded
2 tablespoons cored, seeded, and finely chopped plum tomatoes (1 small tomato)
2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lime juice
Instructions
In a medium size bowl, use the back of a spoon to mash 1 tablespoon of the cilantro, 1 teaspoon onion, 1 teaspoon of minced chile, and 1/2 teaspoon salt together against the bottom of the bowl.

Add the avocados and gently mash them with a fork until chunky-smooth. Fold the remaining cilantro, onion, and chile into the mixture. Stir in tomatoes and lime juice, taste to adjust the seasonings, and serve with a basket of warm corn tortilla chips.

Here are some add-ons to dress up your guacamole:

Lobster Guacamole
1 lb whole lobster or 4 oz lobster meat
(steam, cool and pick meat from lobster and rough chop)
Japanese pickled ginger works well for a garnish.

Chipotle-goat cheese guacamole
4 ounces crumbled goat cheese
2 tablespoons chopped canned chipotle chilies

Mango Guacamole
1 large ripe mango peeled seeded and diced
(any fruit will work, fresh berries, seedless grapes, papaya for example)

Artichoke guacamole with toasted pinenuts
1 cup marinated artichoke hearts chopped
1/4 cup toasted pine nuts

(Must be the “Hass” avocado that makes the difference.)

One of the most magnificent building lobbies on earth: the Empire State's georgeous temple to the god of Art Deco

While in la Grande Pomme we saw two Broadway shows, both of them musicals. And both of them just flat out outstanding entertainment.

“Wicked” takes its name from the book of the same name by Gregory Maguire, a man who has recently made a literary career out of recasting fairy tales and kids’ stories into completely different, much more adult context.


In the case of “Wicked”, the Maguire story is a biography of The Wicked Witch of the West, the green-skinned villainess from L Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz” stories. (photo: www.jiggerbug.com) In “Wicked”, she is christened Elphaba (Catch that connection? L Frank Baum / El-pha-ba) and made an infinitely more sympathetic character who has to struggle all her life to overcome the curse of having been born with green skin. Then one day this damned kid from Kansas turns up and steals her sister’s red shoes after flattening her with a house…

In the literary “Wicked”, Maguire creates a whole new mythology that proved to be so popular it required a sequel, “Son of a Witch”. Now incarnated as a hugely successful Broadway musical, “Wicked” – I won’t be surprised to hear one day soon – is almost certainly due for a full-blown big-budget movie treatment as well some day. Both offspring and I came away with “Wicked” t-shirts, festooned with winged monkeys. And all of us came away with some thoroughly happy memories of a great evening’s entertainment.

And the second show? Well, here’s a hint. From the gift shop of the second show we went to, offspring brought home a bag containing two half coconut shells and an instruction sheet for banging them together. And I came away with a special custom-labelled can of SPAM.

“SPAM-a-lot” is officially a Broadway musical. Unofficially, it’s pretty much a combination of “Monty Python and Holy Grail” revisited with music, and a concept best rendered as No Joke Too Low. For fans of the former, all the best bits are there: the taunting French castle guards (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberry!”); The Knights Who Say “Ni”; “Watery tarts freely distributing swords is no basis for a system of government”; “Bring out your dead”; The Killer Rabbit; the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch; et al, et al…
And there are a few other ”greatest hits” from other places in the Python oeuvre added to the mix, such as “Always look at the bright side of life” that was a high spot in “The Life of Brian”. (Heaven help me if you’re not a Python fan as you read through this paragraph… I can hear it: “What the hell are you talking about?”) (photo: www.fresnobeehive.com)


To a baby boomer, this is a must-stop in NYC -- Strawberry Fields, a small patch of Central Park purchased by Yoko Ono. Surrounded by souvenir vendors, the site is directly across the street from the Dakota, the residence where John Lennon was shot and killed in December, 1980. Strawberry Fields' perimeter is festooned with signs asking you to be quiet and contemplate. As Leslie noted in a separate family album of photos, one can only wonder what John Lennon would have made of that.

= = =

OK CBC… so let’s look at just where my sympathy vanished.

Canada’s national consumer of many tax dollars – the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – recently announced that it was shutting down what is the last surviving radio network in-house classical orchestra in North America. The morning after the announcement, CBC radio ran several interviews with some of the affected musicians. And it was quite poignant to hear some of them. One – former violinist Nancy DiNova, who has both a son and husband playing in the orchestra now – was audibly upset and in her brief comment, she ran her emotions from sorrow to anger. Unfortunately, she lost me at anger, because any sympathy I might have been mustering vanished when she whined into the microphone, “The CBC is now going to spend more money on banjo players.”

Pardon?

My suspicion is that Nancy might soon regret her heat-of-the-moment comment and find herself the butt of a backlash from musicians and fans who, like me, have long ago found many, many musical junctions where “quality” and “banjo playing” intersect, often in wonderful ways.

As just one such example (and with apologies to those BDers who don’t have a video play capability on your computers), I offer these three minutes and 54 seconds.

Oh… and one more note to Ms DiNova. A maker of violins resident here in Ottawa once explained to me that the name of the instrument is simply a function of its playing environment. In a classical orchestra or chamber music string ensemble, it’s a violin. In a Celtic kitchen or on a Cajun porch, it’s a fiddle and it sounds damned great in the company of a banjo!

= = =

If anyone’s keeping track – because I know in the past I’ve had both good and bad things to say about the video-by-mail service, Zip.ca – my mood of the moment is to hell with them.

We’ve been searching around for what seems a reasonable quest – a service for movies at home, when we want them. We had been renting from Blockbuster – which is not a bad service if your priority is to be able to select one of 400 copies of a movie that was in the theatres the previous week. But once your search becomes more than a few months old, finding any title is a crap shoot at best. So we tried – for several months – Zip.ca. And what Zip has that is head and shoulders above Blockbuster is selection. They have pretty much any title you can think of, including a vast library of award-winning foreign and film-festival presentations that are frequently what we seek.

What they also have – and what drove us away – is a not-insignificant monthly subscription fee structure that makes you a “member”. And after several months, we decided we just weren’t using the service to the extent required to justify paying the subscription.

The other thing about their service we found aggravating is the disconnect between what they appear to promise – and what they actually deliver. Zip has a ranking hierarchy that lets you list as many movies as you want to see, and to rank them in numerical priority. But what we found is that it’s a priority they seem to ignore completely when it comes to determining what movie they’re going to send you next. For example, we had a movie sitting in our #1 position for many weeks, but we often received selections we had placed at number 10, 15 or even farther along our priority line. The only way to be sure of getting a particular film was to pay a usurious special fee to guarantee delivery immediately. Which to my mind flies in the face of what their damned membership fee is supposed to mean!

Next stop was Rogers-on-Demand, a service option that comes with the cable service we use. But in very short order we discovered that RoD suffers from a truly awful selection. Very few foreign films; very few “classics”; and, like Blockbuster, possessed of a heavy emphasis on recent box office.

So back we went to Zip.ca. And in the few short months we had been away, we found that they had augmented their total ignoring of their own priority system by sending out completely unplayable versions of the disks they did send. In our most recent month (the one that resulted in our coming to “To hell with you”), of the first four movies we got, two disks were cracked through from centre hole to outer rim, and the third simply stopped working at the halfway point of the movie. (In the latter case, we did try moving the disk to a second player in the house but it also ran into the e-breakdown at the same place.)

Hence, to hell with Zip. And I have nothing to say to recommend them this time. Maybe I’ll take a look at NetFlix next. Or maybe not.

= =

And while I’m in a discommending mood, recently I started to read what seemed a most hopeful and interesting book – “Bitter Chocolate” by Canadian journalist Carol Off. As its title might suggest, it’s a look at the history and grossly exploitive present-day harvesting processes that take the hugely popular confection from its beginnings as a pod-enshrouded cacao bean through the manufacturing and marketing process to a frequently overpriced decadent nibble.

The book sustains one's interest when it builds its compelling and depressing description of the often horrific conditions under which the beans are grown and harvested. It in fact is no exaggeration to label a good many of its field workers slaves. Often children from hopelessly destitute third world families, they are sold to farmers by human traffickers who recall the worst of Simon Legree and his kind. The farmer then informs the kids that they will start to receive pay when he recovers what he paid for them – a break point that, of course, never comes.

And no one escapes Ms Off’s arrows – from the giant Hershey’s, Cadbury’s and Mars confectioners to the powerful legislators from US states where those companies maintain factories and provide jobs.

Unfortunately, for some reason, about two-thirds of the way through, she decides to take on in relentless detail what is little more than a trip down Nancy Drew lane as she sets out to try to discover – over many dozens of pages – what happened to a crusading journalist in the cacao bean exporting nation of Cote d’Ivoire, a man who made a career out of exposing corrupt government actions in that country.

(Well let’s see. You have a country where corruption is rife and practised in very large measure by just about everyone in the nation with a uniform and gun. And along comes a passionate rights advocate whose widely published articles begin to threaten a lot of those cash pipelines. Add in vast tracts of jungle and rainforest geography that probably haven’t seen a human footprint in centuries and, even though no one will ever find a trace of what happened, one is left with no doubt at all that it happened, "it" clearly being an execution and disposal of the body.)

I don’t mean to detract from the essential goodness of the crusading journalist and the worth of his cause; nor to soften the cruelty, corruptability and essential evil of the Ivoirian authorities in question, but this sidebar story, coming where it does in an otherwise fascinating book, really pulls the work off its rails. Points for tenacity, Ms Off, but big deductions from me for losing sight of your bigger-picture main purpose here.

Next time – more New York; more whining. It’s what I do.

Until la prochaine.