How to really, really enjoy chocolate

1) Close your eyes. Scientific studies have proven that the sense of taste is heightened in a dark room, so make it really dark and close your eyes once you’ve placed some heaven-sent chocolate in your mouth.
2) Don’t just chew and swallow. Chocolate only comes into its full flavor when it melts a little, so eat small bites and let it melt in your mouth before you swallow it. Some chocolate connoisseurs even keep a special warming pad to heat their chocolate to just the tasting right temperature, without being sticky. I’m not so hi-tech, though I do love it so.
3) Start with a clean palate. If you’ve eaten something sweet just before tasting your chocolate, your taste buds will be overloaded with the sweet taste and the chocolate will taste bitter. Coffee with chocolate may seem like a great choice, but you won’t get the full richness of your chocolate if you take strongly flavored coffee with it.

(The sweet confections above are from Claude's Chocolate's in St. Augustine)

Resolution Solution

My solution to the whole resolution thing is to make resolutions I can keep. For instance, I make a resolution like “I will wake up every day in the next year.” This is a terrific resolution because each day I can wake up with an immense sense of satisfaction, feeling slightly superior to everyone else. Sure, nearly everyone else woke up today (barring coma victims and those who have watched that “depression hurts” ad one too many times) but I am keeping a promise I made to myself.
Also, I don’t just make one super-simple resolution. I make as many as I possibly can, like: I will eat chocolate once a week, I will put music I love in my car CD player, I will make my cat happy and I will get a haircut this year. I write down as many as I can and spend the rest of the year being pretty happy. There’s another one: I will spend the rest of the year being pretty happy. Let me know if I backslide.
5 Suggested Resolutions for Celebs
I’ve noticed that more than one celebrity has interesting habits that could be combated by simple resolutions. With that in mind, here are my five suggested resolutions for the paparazzi hounded celebrity…
1. Wear Underwear. Unless you’re in the shower.
2. Gain weight. America is counting on you.
3. Refrain from racial outbursts, especially when you might be on camera.
4. Don’t get married. It won’t last.
5. Take care of a dog for a year before having kids
Your Resolution! We Want to Know!
The majority of resolutions aren’t made between December 28th- New Year’s Day. Most are made sometime in the month on January or as late as May. What’s your resolution? EU wants to know! Send a postcard with news of your resolution to c/o EU Jacksonville, Resolutions 5121 Bowden Rd, Suite 311, Jacksonville, FL 32216. Just drop us a creative line to announce your resolution or the success and/or tribulations of your resolution.

Why MySpace Is the New Christmas Card

“I don’t understand why these people send me cards, I mean they never call, and I haven’t talked with them in years.”
I heard this from a middle aged man decrying the cost of postage, mystified because people he barely knew or hadn’t spoken to in years saw fit to send him a yearly Christmas card.
I instantly understood why mere acquaintances send Christmas cards, because I’m on myspace. In the world of myspace, people maintain a myspace page for many of the same reasons that people used to send Christmas cards. Most of the “friends” on a given myspace page are made up of people who haven’t seen the poster since high school, just like most of the people who exchanged cards when it was more in vogue.
The main reason people send out those cards to near-strangers, is that you can keep in touch with people without the effort of actual day-to-day friendship. You can measure your life against theirs, based on a Christmas card stock, a family Christmas letter and family picture. Likewise, on myspace, people can measure themselves against others based on friend count, the picture galleries and how pimped out the page is.
Christmas card fanatics, who send out hordes of cards, know that people feel the need to respond in kind. That means card fanatics will have plenty of cards to display around their house, proving to visitors that they have lots of “friends.” In the same way, a myspace extremist can have two thousand “friends” that they display every time someone comes to visit.
Sending out Christmas cards is also a way of displaying yourself in a way you can control. In day-to-day life, people can’t control how they are perceived, but on a card things are different. You can pose a family worthy of Jerry Springer in matching button-downs on a windswept beach. On your myspace page, you can also project whatever image you would like, choosing a background color or picture as a way to present yourself to the world. If you’ve gotten fat, just put up a picture of your cat or a picture of yourself ten pounds lighter. Most of your “friends” will never know.
Everyone talks about how computers have caused us to retreat from the world, substituting superficial interaction for real human interaction. In the past we were forced to use things like the mail system to maintain this superficial interaction, doing things like actually licking stamps and addressing envelopes to keep in touch. These days we’ve just amped it up, because humans tend to develop systems that make whatever it is they already do more effortless. So it isn’t that we only just discovered superficial interaction: we just do it faster and better than we used to.