Vegg-etarians
March 23rd, 2008 at 16:22

Even though I’m 20 and a militant atheist, my parents have continued to do the honourable thing and buy their son a couple of Easter eggs. After all, how else am I supposed to celebrate Jesus’s death? The egg presumably representing his chocolatey exterior, and Toy Story 2 on the TV representing his love of Tom Hanks.

I had a bit of a crisis this morning though – one of my eggs was a Mars Celebrations egg. As you might expect, it looked horrendously nice – I think the curvature of Easter eggs must make the chocolate extra decent, or maybe the neurones in my brain were firing extra hard upon seeing a familiar brand, kicking a psychological process into action – the trouble was though there was a looming question: is it suitable for vegetarians?

You might remember that there was a load of hassle last year when Masterfoods, the company that make Mars, Malteasers, Celebrations and so on, switched to using murdered animals in their products, and I ended up writing perhaps the most passionate and emotional blog entry I’ve ever written (my blog entry on the Janjaweed Militia was more tempered). Eventually, they did a massive U-turn on their decision when they realised that it might create some bad PR for them.

This is all well and good, but if you read the small print, it turns out that Twix, Bounty and most importantly, Celebrations are still tainted with the foul stench of death. The question is… what about the actual physical egg? There doesn’t seem to be any documentation one way or the other on that. I couldn’t care less about the individual chocolates, as they’re not special – I need to know whether the egg contains any animals. I almost literally need to find out the answer to what came first… the chicken or the egg?

I’m tempted to risk it… as it does look really nice. Hopefully Masterfoods have an irony department, and have picked up on the fact that it would be hideously ironic if the symbol of new life was manufactured using the murdered corpses of several old lives.

What should I do, readers?

Update: The egg has been consumed. I hope nothing died for my enjoyment of it.

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Easter Meet
March 16th, 2008 at 17:54

I had an excellent day yesterday – I went down to London to meet my nerdy mates from my other website. Here are some exciting photos of me looking really popular in the company of other people:

Chris, Lottie, Barney, Kyron, Ant, Me, Sam, William, Shark, Kat and Dan. Not pictured: Katy.

Dan bothering a mime.

It being Easter, we thought we should respect the religious aspects, and celebrate Jesus’ death by recreating Leonardo’s Last Supper.

As luck would have it, Barney looks a bit like Jesus. And Sam looks a bit like Mary Magdeline. And I played the part of Judas. The other apostles were perhaps a little less enthusiastic.

Spending about eight hours with me is difficult enough for anyone, really. Unfortunately, William’s Jamesomalley tolerance was slightly less than eight hours, so he ended up punching me.

But it was fun. I may have another tale to tell about this in a few days.

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