Best Christmas stocking chocolates ever!

Like many - most? - people my age who grew up in the UK (and Ireland, I think), Christmas stockings are synonymous with Cadbury’s chocolate coins. However, this year was destined to be a Christmas without them, for two good reasons:

First, there was the report earlier this year that Cadbury are no longer making them. This had a considerable public backlash, as captured on Buzzfeed. (The author made one error in his post, ending: “However, all hope is not entirely lost, you can still buy different chocolate coins at supermarkets and pound stores around the country.” Sorry, but other chocolate coins suck in comparison.)

Second, Australian Cadbury’s chocolate is rubbish. (Sorry, Aussies, but it is. We’ve done blind taste tests and everything.)

Fortunately, Santa came up with a much better idea this year: spiced chocolate almonds from Haigh’s Chocolates.

These sound pretty amazing but are even better than they sound: an almond, encased in milk chocolate, encased in white chocolate and dusted with spiced dark chocolate powder (cinnamon, cloves, cardamon and star anise.) One to look out for next year!

My favourite kind of Christmas superstition

Christmas is a time full of superstitions and traditions from a variety of sources. Whilst I enjoy the odd tradition, I’m not generally a fan of superstition; we adopted a black cat, for example, I have been known to deliberately walk under ladders - after checking that it was safe to do so - and I have nothing against the number 13. One superstition I can get behind, however, is Jura Superstition, which I was fortunate enough to receive as a Christmas present from my lovely wife.

Superstition is Jura's "Lightly peated" whisky and is a bit less peaty than some of my favourites but very tasty and ever so drinkable.

They say:

Jura Superstition is crafted from a selection of the finest aged Jura single malt whiskies. This mysterious spirit has a unique style and character, with tastes of tangy cinnamon, ginger spice and honey with whispers of salty sea spray, rich coffee and roasted chestnuts.

At first, this description confused me as I thought that mixing a bunch of single malts would make it a blend rather than a single malt. I was (of course) wrong. According to Wikipedia:

To be called a single malt whisky in Scotland, a bottle may only contain whisky distilled from malted barley and produced at a single distillery. … If the bottle is the product of malt whiskies produced at more than one distillery, the whisky is called a blended malt or vatted malt, or pure malt. If a single malt is mixed with grain whisky, the result is a blended whisky. Single malts can be bottled by the distillery that produced them or by an independent bottler.

So, there you go.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I hope you all have a great festive season (whatever your particular celebration) and get things you like, even if it is only a plastic drinking straw… (Best cat toy ever!)

And if the weather outside turns frightful, then find somewhere warm and snug to see things out.

(Another Google auto-awesome effort!)

It's a(n auto-awesome) twinkly Christmas Tree!

This year, we made a little photo collage of our Christmas tree for our relatives back home. After uploading it to Google+ for sharing, something rather unexpected happened: a twinkly version appeared!

Apparently, Google+ features “Auto-awesome photos & films”

Auto-awesome creates fun new versions of your photos and videos. Your photos will be combined into short animations, wide panoramas or merged into group shots where everyone looks good. You’ll know when an Auto-awesome photo or film has been created by the [auto-awesome] icon.

It’s not just adding twinkles to lights either:

Auto-awesome photo effects

Eraser - If you take a sequence of 3 or more photos in front of a structure or landmark with movement in the background, Eraser will give you a photo with all of the moving objects removed. It’s helpful for those situations when you’re trying to get a great shot of a landmark or other crowded place, but want to avoid including all of the people in the background of your photo.

Action - Take a series of photos of someone moving (dancing, running, jumping) and Auto-awesome will merge them together into one action shot where you can see the full range of movements in a single image, capturing the movement in one captivating still.

Pano - If you’ve taken a series of photos with overlapping landscape views, Auto-awesome will stitch these photos together into a panoramic image.

HDR - High Dynamic Range is the process of taking multiple exposures of the same image. By merging these images together, your photos will achieve a greater range of shadows and light. Uploading three similar images at different exposures – low, medium and high exposure – will create an HDR image for you.

Motion - If you’ve taken a series of photos in succession (at least 5), Auto-awesome will stitch these photos together into a short animation.

Smile - If you’ve taken a few group photos, Auto-awesome will choose the best shots of each person in your image and merge them into one great-looking photo.

Mix - If you’ve taken a series of portraits sharing similar background elements, Auto-awesome will compile these photos together into a photobooth-style grid. Mix is meant to showcase portrait photos taken with similar backgrounds in time, so it works best with close-ups of faces.

My iPhone already has Pano and HDR covered but I am intrigued by some of the others. The twinkly lights is particularly good for this time of year, though, so stick up those festive shots on Google+ and see what happens!

Christmas cracker jokes are bad and don't always work in the wrong continent

Dodgy Christmas cracker jokes are a Christmas tradition. Apparently, the jokes are deliberately bad. The alleged psychology behind this is that everyone groans and gangs up on the joke, thus are unified by their common disdain for the poor pun. If, on the other hand, the joke showed true wit and humour then it is highly likely that some people would not understand it and/or simply find it unfunny, thus creating a schism between those who get the joke and those who don’t.

It’s an interesting theory and I am not sure who first told me of it nor from whence it originated. What I am sure of, however, is that even the bad jokes need to be told in the right culture to stand a chance of doing their job. We had our departmental Christmas party yesterday (on a boat in the harbour and very nice too) but the crackers had clearly been imported from the UK and did not work Down Under.

The first one is not so bad. Presumably, Australian birds would migrate north for the winter but I think the meaning is still clear even if the geography is confused. The latter, however, completely fails on the basis that the penguins referred to do not exist here. There is a similar biscuit - the Tim Tam - but it is superior to the humble penguin and possibly why the latter has never taken off.

Even without the carbon footprint considerations, importing your crackers from halfway round the world is not a good move.

Merry Christmas (Eve)!

Today, I awoke to the smell of cinnamon buns and fresh coffee. A fine way to start the day! The weather outside is frightful but, sadly, not in a white Christmas way, just in a wet Christmas way. It's cozy inside, though, and listening to Christmas tunes is helping maintain the Christmas spirit.

If you need a boost to your own Christmas spirit, my recommendations are White Wine in the Sun by Tim Minchin for music (proceeds to the National Autistic Society) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947 version) for movies. I watched the latter for the first time over the weekend and really enjoyed it, which surprised me somewhat, I must admit! (It manages to avoid be over-schmaltzy.)

And if that doesn't work, here's one of our cats (Arthur) wearing a Santa hat:

Santa's reached Germany!

Thanks to Google and NORAD teaming up, I have been tracking Santa's progress this year. He's reached Germany now, so time for bed soon, I think!

Update...



Of course, the actual NORAD Santa Tracker website was even better. You can even watch videos of Santa visiting various major cities and landmarks. Good to see some of the US defence budget being spent on stuff for the good of mankind.

Festive feline folly

It's almost December, so it's time to get the Christmas decorations ready. Arthur has kicked things off for us this year. (Not by choice, obviously!)

In the background, you can just see Mia lurking. She really wasn't sure what to make of Arthur's new attire. I'm not sure if it was the look or all the jingly bells. (Later, thanks to my wife's persistence in these matters, she got to try it out for herself.)

Winterval

Apparently, there is are one or more UK councils trying to rebrand Christmas as "Winterval". At first, this seems ridiculous but is it really? Let's face it, modern Christmas - as Christians nationwide berate every year - has less and less to do with Christ each year. Why not just dump the pretence and separate the capitalist money machine that starts earlier each year from the religious festival behind the name? Who knows, maybe re-branding Christmas itself would let people reassociate what "Christmas" is really supposed to be about, rather than simply what the Christmas holidays have come to represent?

Then, of course, one must not forget that Christmas itself (the festival, not the "event",) is simply a rebranding of the old pagan winter solstice festival. When Christianity swept the land and did away or assimilated all the old traditions, it was perfectly happy with such behaviour. Now, that it appears to be suffering the same at the hands of (albeit probably misguided) intentions to make the main public holiday of the year equally open to everyone irrespective of religion, it kicks up a fuss. Of course times, and therefore standards, have rightly changed since the Dark Ages but I cannot help but detect a whiff of hypocrisy.

Furthermore, many of the religious aspects of Christmas, namely the nativity, actually have very little to do with the actual biblical account of Christ's birth. (Assuming that even this is historically accurate, which is contentious to say the least. e.g. Luke timeline of famous figures does not appear to agree with contempories; Joseph is the son of Jacob in Matthew and the son of Heli in Luke etc.) If one moans that "Winterval" has nothing to do with the "true Christmas" then one should also do away with a lot of religious twaddle along with the commercial tat.