Review: Dog Birthday Cake

Now, this may seem rather odd as I can't actually canvass the opinion of the eater of the dog birthday cake because she's a dog.
It looks like an out-of-date hamburger patty that's been iced and re-sold in an attempt to fill a gap in the market.  It is very hard and looks a bit like a charcoal briquette. The box says it's made from meat and animal derivatives, by which I think they mean the recovered bits that aren't fit for human consumption.
     It obviously smells good to a dog because she took the box and wandered off into a corner so it wouldn't be taken off her.  I then had to take it off her in order to take it out of the box, so she wouldn't eat that as well. Despite it being rock hard and, seemingly, only cuttable with an angle grinder, the dog made very short order of it. However it did look afterwards as if someone had trodden dried mud into the carpet. 
     In fact, so much did the dog enjoy it that a few days later she pinched the remaining bit of another dog cake I had given to another dog that wasn't allowed to eat the whole thing in one go.
     Hence I would say that it must taste good to a dog and was clearly  a hit.

Summer Hits

     I have read that the formula for finding your 'summer hit' is to find what was top of the charts on midsummer's day when you were 17. In my case that would be June 21st 1981 and, thanks to the wonders of t'internet and search engines, that would be Being With You by Smokey Robinson (apologies if the Youtube link starts with an annoying ad).  The full top 40 for that week may be viewed here http://www.officialcharts.com/archive-chart/_/1/1981-06-20/ and those songs which I prefer from that chart I wouldn't really associate with summer in particular.
      In fact, I associate summer hits with pop trash (I think I've fared fairly well with Smokey Robinson - the example I saw was from someone born the year after me and one year after Mr Robinson was No 1 it was Charlene with I've Never Been To Me) and bland Europop that people have heard on holiday.  Added to that, I believe that music sales fall during summer so that big summer hits are rarely high up in the yearly charts, unless they stay at the top for many weeks.

Chocolate Review: Maltesers Teasers

From greatbritishfood.de

A big bar rather than a couple of small bars in the same packet, but rather odd bubble shapes for the individual pieces.  I have found in the past that the Maltesers in boxes of Celebrations more enjoyable than the ones you can buy in bags. I have no idea whether they actually taste different but it certainly seems that way.  I failed to make any notes on the bar while actually eating it, so I'm going to have to ad lib from memory.
      The taste was more like the Celebrations Maltesers than regular Maltesers, which was a bonus. Also, due to it being in bar form, there was a greater ration of chocolate to the 'malty' bits, again I see this as a plus, making it more susceptible to the savour test than spherical Maltesers, which are soon denuded of chocolate from sucking.
      In summary, an enjoyable bar, a sort of extended version of Celebrations' Maltesers.

Chocolate Review: Wispa Bits

From chocolatebuttons.co.uk

The premise of Wispa Bits is that they are, erm, bits of Wispa, the chocolate bar brought back 'by popular demand'.  I'm sure the packet I had was marked 'Wispa  Bits', but I can't find the photo and an internet search comes up with 'Wispa Bites' or 'Bitsa Wispa'.  I'm assuming as they're all perfectly shaped that this isn't a way of marketing misshapes and broken bits. They actually look a bit like children's building bricks, but with no way of connecting them, like Lego or Sticklebricks. However they taste like Cadbury's flake, despite the claim that "only the crumbliest flakiest chocolate..."  Whilst I hate the word 'moreish' - and I don't mean they're like Othello - but I found it very difficult to put the packet down.


Golden Years

Originally published in an edited form in Some Sunny Day Issue 2.

            This was originally planned as a sort of ‘misery memoir’, a form of literature that was recently popular, with the likes of Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, which, surprisingly, had nothing to do with cricket.  Almost any long term follower of any football team could produce something along the lines of Colin Shindler’s Manchester United Ruined My Life, which was a shortened title which should have continued ‘by being really successful whilst Manchester City were a bit shit’.  He subsequently wrote a follow up, Manchester City Ruined My Life, about how the club’s take over by rich owners brought the Premiership title but removed the club from its original fan base. There’s no pleasing some people.  But it’s that sort of masochism that seems to unite football supporters.  As I say, I was going to cheer younger readers up with tales of being one of only five fans in the away end at Doncaster as City lost 6-1, how one of my mates got locked in at Bolton because they forgot that there were any away fans, how 14 of us arrived at Darlington to be told that the club had told Darlo they didn’t expect anyone to travel and we still outsung the home fans.  Yes, these and other stories of strikers who were more barn door than ballon d’or, midfielders who’d struggle to pass water and defenders who couldn’t tackle a toddler all form part of my anecdotage. Then I read a review of Shindler’s second book by Nicholas Blincoe in The Daily Telegraph which contained the sentence “If you are English, male and thinking of writing an autobiography, The Diary of a Nobody hovers over you like a huge, taunting clown’s face”. However, that may not stop me in future issues.

So has it really been that bad that ‘misery memoir’ is where you’d file a Pooterish version of watching City for over 40 years ?  Is the current season any worse than average ? Am I asking too many questions ?  In an egocentric, solipsistic style, I decided to look at the statistics since I was born – during a promotion season – to see what City’s average League position is and what has been the win ratio down the years.  And for added spice I’ve done the same for Argyle and Torquay.  If you were thrilled by the technical drawing in the last issue, prepare to be dazzled by graphs, pie charts and histograms (well, one of each actually).  And may I add the accountant’s rider of errors & omissions excepted ? And I do know of the existence of the book How To Lie With Statistics.
 

See graph above for the relevant finishing positions per season, reproduced too small for anybody to re-interpret them particularly in glorious monochrome. City’s average League position (and ‘League’ includes the Conference years) over the last 50 seasons is 76.66^th, that’s 8^th and two-thirds in  tier 4 (currently known as League 2), with a win percentage of 33.9%, 28% draws and 38.1% defeats (see pie chart right).   Argyle’s average position is 52.54 – 8 and a half in tier 3 (League 1) with W, D and L percentages of 34.7%, 27.2% and 38.1% whilst Torquay averaged 78.36^th position - 10^th and a third in tier 4 – with WDL percentages of 34.8%, 27.5% and 37.7%.  So Plymouth have the highest average position but also the highest percentage of defeats (38.08% to City’s 38.06%), Torquay have the lowest average position but the highest percentage of wins and City have the highest percentage of draws; I blame Colin Appleton .
When I say ‘average’, I mean the mean. For City, Argyle and Torquay the median (the middle one when placed in order) League positions are 78^th, 51.5^th and 79^th respectively (or 10^th in tier 4, 7.5^th in tier 3 and 11^th in tier 4).  For the sheer sport of it, I also looked at the modal League position (the position the side has finished most often) for the three Devon sides, City have finished 63^rd, 82^nd and 89^th three times each (19^th in tier 3, 14^th and 21^st in tier 4) and Argyle have finished 38^th, 52^nd and 59^th four times each (18^th in tier 2, 8^th and 15^th in tier 3).  When choosing to quote the modal average, I was hoping to be able to write “on average over the last 50 years, Torquay United have been bottom of the League” as I know they’ve finished 92nd four times. However they’ve been 77^th (9^th in tier 4) a phenomenal six times.   

My next hypothesis was that of those 50 seasons, City’s worst spell was the Nineties after relegation from the third tier.  Therefore I broke down the statistics into ten year periods.

Years	Average Lge Posn
1964-73	77.6
1974-83	64.6
1984-93	75.1
1994-2003	84.2
2004-13	81.8

 And this is where the glorious histograms, normally known as bar charts, come in (see left).  City’s highest loss percentage and lowest win percentage – the draw percentage is surprisingly stable – is for the period 1994 -2003, which, surprisingly seeing as City’s lowest positions are in the 5 seasons following 2003, is also the period of the lowest average position, The highest win percentage, possibly due to those Conference years, is in the last ten seasons.  Similar percentages to the 94-03  period would just about glean 50 points, often seen as the total necessary for survival.  I would therefore argue that this season is roughly average at the time of writing, although the draw percentage is a little low.  It could also be argued that the last ten seasons have been the most successful, certainly in terms of games won.

So, does anybody know what the sequel to Angela’s Ashes was called ?

 

Sexton A Blake

Chocolate Review: Club Gold

Apparently this is a regular Club bar but with a 'caramel flavour coating'.  The 'caramel' tastes like white chocolate and it's not gold but yellow - as you can see from the picture it looks more like a lump of cheese.
Despite these misgivings I found this an enjoyable bar, but less so than a regular milk chocolate Club.