Chocolate Review: Chocolate Palette: Tanzania by Trader Joe's

Brand: Trader Joe's
Flavor: Chocolate Palatte: Tanzania
Cocoa content: 73%
Review: "Subtle fruitiness with a fine hint of vanilla." A robust chocolate, full-flavored and only moderately sweet, settling into a comfortable place between having a personality all its own and being a palatable, approachable, but potent take on an everyman's chocolate. The higher cocoa content tones down the grittiness of the sugar and its strong aftertaste, and so I find this bar much more enjoyable to eat. I prefer a more distinctive flavor and so Tanzania isn't my new favorite, but the experience of eating this full-bodied chocolate is truly enjoyable.

Passing along a good zombie poem by rozk. I know, the idea is s

With a heads up from docbrite I revisited the poem Zombie 1 by rozk, who I read occasionally.

You should go read it, too.

Zombies are not my thing simply because their popularity has worn them down to .... oh, something like steampunk: intriguing and recognizable imagery which promises meaningful content to back it up, but in reality offers little of depth at all. All crispy outer skin, no inner meaty goodness, such as it were. That imagery tempts me, but I find myself disappointed by all the rest and become increasingly likely to avoid the genre.

Sometimes, someone will pick up the premise that's lead to all that imagery and popularity, and take a new angle on it—to great success. I've mentioned Valente's wonderful "The Days of the Flaming Motorcycles", before: that quiet, lonely, depressed apocalypse, the zombies who shamble and haven't the energy to bite. That's a zombie story that I love.

Sometimes, someone will play the all tropes straight, but they give you skin and meat. (And brains?) That takes skill and actual depth, and it fills you full to bursting. That's what Roz Kaveney's poem does. That's why I love it.

And as docbrite was reading the poem, drawing his connections, and seeing it as the progression not just of a fantastic disease but of depression, I realized that that was what had stopped me, held my attention and memory as I scrolled idly through someone else's friends page. And so I love this as a zombie poem, a good zombie poem and hell that seems like a bit of a miracle, don't it? And I love it for saying—

And of the pains
you feel, the worst as beauty, brilliance go
to rot, will be to be that thing, and know.