It turns out we’re not the only ones puzzled by the maddening paradox that is the deep fried Mars bar. According to BBC news, the respected medical journal The Lancet is publishing an article that goes in search of the truth. As Dr David Morrison, one of the investigators, says, “We live in Scotland but we’d never actually seen deep-fried Mars bars for sale. We thought they might be fictitious. But the Scottish diet is a major health issue and it’s important to know what the facts are. We can now confirm that there is no doubt, the deep-fried Mars bar is not just an urban myth.”
In fact, Dr. Morrison discovered that 22% of Scottish chippies sold the product. An additional 17% used to do so but no longer do–because, I am guessing, their original clientelle has all died off.
By the way: the BBC’s summary of the Lancet article was headlined Deep Fried Mars Bar Myth Dispelled. Yahoo reported on exactly the same Lancet article with the headline Deep Fried Mars Bar Taking Scotland By Storm. Apparently, the deep fried Mars bar is so powerful that it creates a quantum uncertainty field in which the same Lancet report can simultaneously perpetuate and dispel the myth of a fried-Mars-bar-mad Scotland.
Also, alert reader Dan Simon has corrected some embarrassing errors in my original Mars bar essay, as well as providing some interesting additional information. You can find his comments here if you scroll down to the bottom of the page.

I am disappointed to report that the Amerika Taxi sticker I saw in the taxicab window in Budapest turned out to be just a promotion for movie that has just been released in Hungary as “Amerika Taxi.” It is better known in the US as either Taxi or “The movie that Queen Latifah actually thought would be a good move for somebody who has just gotten an Oscar nomination.”

Today in Budapest, I took a taxicab with a little sticker in its window saying “AmeriKab”. Just to prove that this was an authentic American-style taxi, the sticker featured a photograph of a cab surrounded by mini-skirt-wearing beauties toting machine guns.
And, er, that’s this week’s something interesting in its entirity, since I’m writing this from an obscenely expensive pay terminal in Budapest. If you need an additional fix of my writing, you can head over to www.devincible.com, where you’ll find an article on “9 Ways To Kill 173 Minutes That Will Be More Pleasurable Than Watching Oliver Stone’s ‘Alexander.'”

From Adam Smith to John Logie Baird, Scotland has made innumerable contributions to world culture. But there is one Scotch invention so brilliant–so vital to the world’s well-being–that it trumps even modern economics and the television. I refer, of course, to the deep-fried Mars bar.

I’m sorry to report that the remainder of the run of “The Hat” has been canceled. My thanks to the cast and crew for all their hard work.

The Edinburgh Festival is the largest arts festival in the world. Actually, it’s a collection of festivals, including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh Film Festival, and (as of last year) the Edinburgh Erotica Festival. Not surprisingly, the catalog of all the shows is the size of a phone book from a small city. You can’t possibly see everything, so while I’m here, I’m trying to see a little bit of all kinds of things.
A few snapshots from the Fringe:
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There’s a show here called “Psychotherapy Live,” in which a comedian psycho-analyzes volunteers from the audience. According to Fest magazine, the volunteers on a recent night included “a chap who’s apparently famous for appearing in a US TV advert (‘Dude, you’re getting a Dell’), revealing his desire to become a magician.

My wife Lauren and I have arrived in Bruges, Belgium, with a simple plan. We will take a leisurely walking tour, see some sights, and stop occasionally for chocolate.
Seeing the sights proves easy. Bruge had the minor good fortune of being an international trading center until the 16th century, and the major good fortune of being utterly unimportant for centuries thereafter. The ornate stone buildings thrown up at the height of its power ended up being too unimportant to tear down in the following centuries; narrow streets that had been cobblestoned for endless caravans of horses were only sporadically worth paving over, and never worth widening, for a later trickle of carriages and autos. It’s as if the whole town were tossed by Renaissance artisans right into the hands of 20th century preservationists, sailing over the heads of 400 years of developers and civic improvers.
But as we consider how best to implement the all-important candy-eating phase of our plan, we gradually begin to panic. Chocolate shops can be found two doors down from other chocolate shops, which are across the street from chocolate shops that face out onto alleys crammed with chocolate shops. There are more chocolate shops here in Bruges than there are Starbucks in less civilized outposts like New York or Los Angeles. You cannot throw a rock without hitting a chocolate shop and having it returned to you as a delicious truffle with an unusually crunchy interior.