The Great Chocolate Ripoff

Hoo Boy! From DallasFood.org, here's an amazing expose of Noka Chocolates, a super-dooper expensive chocolate company. This gripping ten-part (!) series details how the fancy-pants company buys bulk chocolate from French chocolate-maker Bonnat, forms it into undistinguished truffles, and sells it at a markup ranging from 2500-7000%. Worst of all, they have a pattern of deliberate obfuscation on the issue of where their chocolate comes from, suggesting strongly in all their promotional materials and personal appearances that they make it themselves.

The article is currently bouncing all over the Web, including good discussions on Metafilter and BoingBoing. This is the kind of superb online investigative journalism that can kill off a slimy company in one fell swoop.

Amazing Coldplay Cover

Check out 81-year-old Fred Knittle's quietly devastating live cover of Coldplay's I Will Fix You.

The clip is from a documentary about Knittle and New England's octogenarian Young at Heart Chorus that aired on the BBC. Apparently, Kittle was supposed to sing with another man named Bob Salvini -- but Salvini died of a heart attack the week earlier.

YouTube creates another phenom. Knittle must be tickled...

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Here's the original Coldplay video, by the way. It's a good song, but I think Coldplay kind of peaked with A Rush of Blood to the Head. Everything I've heard off their latest album seems a bit like Coldplay lite, including this song. I much prefer Knittle's version.

And while you're at YouTube, you definitely want to join the 6.5 million others who have watched this now-famous laughing baby.