The Top Eight Snacks to eat during Superbowl 2017

In just a few hours, Superbowl 51 is going to kick off, New England Patriots versus the Atlanta Falcons.  Now, despite my long-term insistence that soccer is better, this post is all about the Superbowl.

So, I'm going to take a guess that Tom Brady and the Patriots are going to bring the thunder today for the win, but that is pretty much where my American Football knowledge ends, and instead I'm going to focus on the snacks!

So, what snacks should you have?  The key is having a variety of snacks, and I'd recommend ones that are sweet or salty, and not too sticky.  Anything that requires the use of cutlery is out.

Here's my top eight snacks, in reverse order:

8th : Chocolate - chocolate is great, but be warned, if you delay eating it, it melts in your hands and is not nice.  And too much will just give you a sugar rush.  Ration your chocolate if you're in for the long haul.

7th : Carrot sticks - bit of a bizarre one, but if you're on a health kick, carrot sticks are probably one of the best snacks you can get.  Quick to make, reasonably tasty (maybe with a dip) and healthier than anything else on this list!

6th : Pizza - now, I love pizza, but it's just a little bit stickier than other snacks, earning it a lowly sixth place.  Nevertheless, pizza is still good, and might even be slightly healthy if you load it up with veggies.

5th : Biscuits aka cookies - not as sugary as chocolate, you can plough through biscuits for longer before sugar rush becomes a problem.

4th : Chips/fries - American fries are a great idea, with some salt.  British chips are great too, thicker and make sure they're liberally doused with vinegar as well as salt.  Or get some chip spice!

3rd : Pretzels - slightly controversial, I'm not a huge fan of pretzels, but I don't know why, and for the Superbowl they tick all the boxes.  Dry, crunchy, salty, tasty!

2nd : Popcorn - popcorn, especially when still warm, and ideally a mix of sweet and savory popcorn is just awesome.

And finally...

1st: Crisps aka chips - Crisps are the winner for me, simply because they come in so many different flavours. Salted, cheese, meaty, prawn cocktail... the list goes on, and the types too, puffed corn, potato chips with ridges in, baked crisps.... you can get a huge variety of crisps, in a massive bowl, and just plough away at them!

Enjoy your snacks and go sports!

Not really sure what this picture has to do with Sunday, but I searched for Sunday in my favourite picture website and this came up...

Melted chocolate

So, I was going to a meeting last week, and decided, being a team player, to pick up a pack of biscuits en route to take for everyone to enjoy.

I decided to purchase a pack of KitKats (as an aside did you know that in the Dubai airport duty-free, 1 tonne of Kit Kats are sold every day?) put them on the passenger seat in my car and immediately forgot all about them, going to my meeting without them.

It was a hot day, and when I returned to my car several hours later, the packet of KitKats was decidedly warm to the touch.

I took them home, and put them in the freezer for a day with the hope of salvaging them.

When I took one out, it looked like this:

Not too bad, you might surmise, the silver foil looks a little crumpled, but otherwise not too shabby.

However, inside they had essentially moulded into a single lump of chocolate, with two biscuits hidden somewhere within, plus they had taken the opportunity to absorb as much of the foil wrapping as possible.

How long does it normally take you to eat a Kit Kat? A minute? Two? If I'm in a hurry I could eat a two fingered KitKat in one bite, pop it sideways into my mouth, use my tongue to snap it in half and crunch the sucker into a chocolatey biscuit goodness.

These babies took a good ten minutes to eat, simply because you had to carefully extract tiny bits of foil from the confectionery, bits of foil which cheerfully ripped into even tinier bits of foil whenever you touched them.

You'll be pleased to know that the saga of the KitKats is now well and truly over, each one has ultimately done its duty and been eaten, and I feel that the world is a better place for it.

I tried to defect!

I've had enough.

I've tried for so long to work with Google Chrome.  But I can't put up with it any more.

I love Google Chrome.  I find it more responsive than Internet Explorer, I prefer the user interface, it's by far my preferred browser.  But it has a bug in it.

You see, Chrome comes with a copy of Adobe Flash Player built into it.  If you don't know what Flash is, basically it's a type of code used all over the Internet, best known in the area of animations, sounds and videos, but has spread to do other stuff too.  If you don't have a Flash Player in your internet browser, you'll have problems.

But the problem with Chrome is that it, as well as having a copy of Flash built in, it installs another copy, and the two conflict.

A lot.

As a result, generally what happens is Chrome freezes, and then goes on to freeze my PC, requiring a reboot.  And I've just had enough of it.

And yes, I know the "fix" is to go into chrome://plugins and disable one of the Flash plugins.  I can't get it to work, regardless of whichever one I disable.

So I went to good old Internet Explorer, and put the thoughts of Chrome behind me.

For about two days.

Back on Chrome.

In other less geeky news, my son hasn't been too well this week - he's had a bad cold so we've been dosing him up with a variety of medicines, from an inhaler to antibiotics to ibuprofen and paracetamol.  But of course when he's feeling really sick the last thing he wants is to take medicines.  On Monday we tried to bribe him with chocolate so he would have his ibuprofen.  He actually gave the chocolate back, and I'm sure if he'd had the vocabulary he would have accompanied it with "I might like chocolate, but I'm not going to pay that price!"

What else? Well, I have an insane amount of books to sell, so if anyone wants a huge pile of books, mainly in fairly decent condition, let me know.  Lots of sci-fi, warhammer 40k, quite a few vampiry ones (those are my other halfs let me assure you), some funny books... I've made the decision to sell off my books and make the move to e-books.  There isn't a logical reason to keep the books when I can get the ones I'm actually going to read online, and then access it from whatever phone or tablet I have with me.  I've tried using a variety of online book selling systems, but they all seem to give me rubbish prices for them - I realise that I'm not going to get full price for second hand books, but 50p for a virtually new book (eg read once) that sells for £10 seems too low.  If it was a £1 I'd go for it, but 50p is just too slow.

And keeping on the topic of books, my mum has just written a new one all about Halloween - it's got Halloween games in it, stories, all kinds of stuff about the Samhain festival.  If you want to find out more head over to their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/RavenMagical) - if you send them a message on Facebook with your postal address they'll send you a catalogue (they operate in a mail order format) and you even get a free gift with your first order!

A Story In Pictures. And Words. And Auto-Awesome.

We had a lot of milk in our fridge.

My partners mum had gone away for a few days, and being helpful, we raided her refrigeration unit to use up anything that was going to go off while she was away.  One of the items was a litre of milk.

Because the milk shelves in our fridge were full of milk, we laid the additional litre down in our fridge, but unfortunately it leaked - not a great deal, but enough that we couldn't keep it laid down.

So I, the (slightly) lactose intolerant person, had the great idea of making a chocolate milkshake (don't fear readers - this didn't have any awkward after effects).

We didn't have any chocolate milkshake powder, so I used hot chocolate powder.

A lot of it.

So much, that the milkshake was very chocolatey indeed.

So chocolatey, that when I drank half of it, I poured another half pint of milk in, stirred it up, and it was still very chocolatey.

The stained chocolate milkshake receptacle.

My attempt to colour in the grey bits of my beard with milkshake failed.  But at least I managed to make an attractive "stain" fashion pattern on my white t-shirt.

At least I'm not the only one who spills stuff on himself in our house.  Yes - that is a chair sat on a wooden box underneath the TV.

While I'm blogging I wanted to write about Google's "Auto-Awesome" feature.  This is ace.  Basically, when photos are uploaded into Google+, Google looks at the photos, and if you've taken the right ones, makes them better.  If you take multiple photos, it combines them to make the best one.  If you've got a few close together, it'll animate them.  And it'll maybe make collages of similar photos.  Apparently it'll even create panoramic shots but I've not tried that yet.

It totally blew my mind, because on my new phone (Samsung Galaxy SIII) it automatically backups photos onto my Google+ account, which I was vaguely aware that it did, but then when I actually went into the account, it had made the below picture for me:

Auto-awesome in action!

It's pretty neat.

Mike and Joel - Chocolate vs Chores

My new video is live!!

I've been doing chores all day - what's Joel been doing? Not doing chores, I'll tell you that for free.

Watch below!

And while you're at it, if you have a YouTube or Google account, why not check out my channel - perhaps even subscribe to it!  That'd be great, wouldn't it? :)

Best butcher in Lincolnshire - and the two of us eating chocolate

In my view the best butcher in Lincolnshire is Jacksons Butchers in Louth.  For as long as I can remember my parents have taken me there to get a load of meat in (especially the lincolnshire sausages, and stuffed chine for my dad) for Christmas and special occasions, and when they've been to Louth I've asked them to bring me some too.

Sorry - just had to say that, it's been on my mind.

Just rendered my latest video, this one's of me and Joel eating chocolate.  It's taken me a few days because every time I rendered it, any vertical motion blurred.  Turned out I had a problem with interleaving (basically when you've got two layers, like I have, you need to decide which one shows first - and I didn't) so now it's all hunky dory and I'll post it to my channel later tonight or in the morning.

Peace and Harmony and video editing

I was watching Peppa Pig with my son the other day, and it was a brilliant episode called International Day.  Basically all the kids at Peppa's playgroup dress up as different countries and start fighting.  Madame Gazelle breaks up the quarrel, saying "Stop quarrelling! Do you think this is how the countries of the world behave?"

I can't help but feel there was a hidden message in that one somewhere :)

It's Halloween (or Samhain indeed)!  And I have a bowl of chocolate in my hallway.  It's been really hard these last few days to let those packets of funsize chocolate treats go uneaten, but we've largely managed.

And now we've only had four kids!  Shocking.  I guess I know what I'm having for breakfast.

(Actually I'll be having marmite on toast I expect - I got a squeezy jar of Marmite at the weekend, it is wonderful!)

After watching What's Up Elle's YouTube channel, I've been really keen to try some of her trademark cloning for myself.  Being a cheapskate - sorry, being someone wanting to achieve value for money - I'm trying to work out how to do it with free software!  I've got half an idea so far with an old version of Windows Movie Maker (Microsoft basically took out a load of features from Windows Movie Maker when it was updated to Windows Live Movie Maker, so the old version is actually more powerful) but I've been messing about with it for quite a while now and I want to get an hour of Birth of the Federation (with the All The Ages mod) in before bedtime.

Currently I'm playing the Ferengi and I've got a nice little corner of the galaxy in my command with a load of minor races under my belt, I've only encountered the Federation so far who are behaving themselves, probably because if push came to shove I think I could take them.