Notes from Under the Pile

Earlier this month, I acknowledged that during the academic year I never watch TV yet constantly fall behind. For the past nine months, my filing system has been made up of a set of interconnected piles of paper. Well, the dark days--and both semesters of the 2007-2008 academic year--are over. I had one appointment today, only one, and it lasted only fifteen minutes. I don't have a single deadline to meet for another two weeks. Since I leisurely crawled out of bed about twelve hours ago, I've idled the day away by watching television (or episodes of TV shows that I rented from Netflix and wouldn't ordinarily admit to watching) and moving papers off the floor and into the two new file cabinets that I bought.

Here's what I found in the chocolate pile (pictured):

• Volume 116, Number 21, of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, contains an editorial by doctors Norman K. Hollenberg and Naomi D. L. Fisher warning that "If the [chocolate] industry wants us to use chocolate as a health food, then they will have to change their behavior. Specifically, what the world needs is a label on each package that describes the flavanol content of the chocolate. It should be obvious that the percent of cocoa, like the color of chocolate, does not represent a measure of flavanols at all."
  
• The Grand Tier Restaurant at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center will serve the Viennese signature dessert, Sacher Torte, from June 30 to July 3 in honor of The American Ballet Theatre's staging of The Merry Widow.
  
• The April 19 issue of Britain's learned magazine The Economist reported on the latest San Francisco bean-to-bar company, Tcho, of which Wired magazine co-founder Louis Ressetto is co-founder.
  
• Home Miami magazine reported the opening of an Argentine restaurant called Chocolate.
  
• A spam-like website offered an earnest news item about the coming of a chocolate festival to the Portuguese town of Obidos in February of 2009.
  
• The website of South Pacific-based Islands Business International magazine ran a piece in April about cacao growers in Fiji hoping to jumpstart a chocolate factory in the country of origin--they also hope to win support for a movement to display the cacao pod more prominently (apparently it already is displayed in some manner) on the nation's coat of arms.
  

Now back to watching television.