Meat is murder: lovely, tasty murder.

When I left my job recently, my distraught colleagues rewarded me for seven years, 10 months and 19 days of unrelenting perfection by buying me an eighth of a cow.

The beast, butchered then hung for 21 days, is now in my procession. You can see all its bovine bits displayed below in the blogjam bedroom (I don’t usually photograph meat in the boudoir, btw, I just thought the blood matched the colour scheme quite nicely). Eagle-eyed readers may also have spotted the rather magnificent cat-shaped lamp, and be interested to learn the it’s the only feline-themed item I own (apart from the websites, of course).

I’m not sure what to make from all this meat - apart from some kind of beef igloo - so I’d like suggestions for recipes. Here’s the list of cuts and weights.

Any ideas? I already have the skirt steak marked out for a serving or two of Uccelletti Scappati, but the rest is awaiting your input. Go mental.

I’m beginning to think that the nice people at Hotel Chocolat are out to kill me.

Not content with forcing me to eat a mammoth easter egg a few months back, this week the company elected to torment me further, posting a Rocky Road slab and a goody bag to the blogjam mailbox.

First: the goody bag.

Keen-sited readers might notice that the bag is empty. This is because I’ve already eaten the contents, which comprised: a selection of six deliciously creamy truffles; a 100g chunky slab of delicious milk chocolate with delicious cookie pieces; two delicious chocolate dippers to swirl into a delicious hot drink and nibble; 180g of deliciously creamy caramel drops; and some entirely average chocolate flakes ready to melt in hot milk.

Why is it that you can’t buy quality drinking chocolate? Charbonnel et Walker make a half-decent version, but you can’t find anything of the standard found at the brilliant Paul chain of bakeries, the otherwise catastrophic Apostrophe, or the excellent Caffe Vergnano. Why? WHY? Hotel Chocolat, I demand that you rectify this cowardly cocoa chaos - I need my nightly dose of top-end phenethylamine, and I need it now.

The chocolate slab is the real treat here. As well as being most toothsome it’s enormous, about the size of a medium sheep’s head.

It’s so vast, and so chunky, that I’m convinced Hotel Chocolat are missing a trick or two. As well as selling it as food, why not also offer the slabs as building material, or as sporting equipment, or indeed as some kind of alternative weaponry? To demonstrate the possibilities, I’ve cleverly mocked up just one example of this.

There are endless variations on this theme, of course. Hotel Chocolat, while making sumptuous artisan fare, are in many ways naive, and the slab offers a myriad of opportunities they’re quite obviously not taking. This is perhaps why they send me these samples: they appreciate my lateral thinking, and the degree of hard-nosed business acumen I bring to the table, an attribute that the firm so sorely lacks in-house.

I hope this entry helps.

Bollocks to this, I’m off to Serbia, for some hot trumpet action. More here. And here.

At first glance, Auschwitz is not what you expect. You’re so used to seeing those chilling, horrific, black and white images of the camp, it’s almost a surprise when everything doesn’t shift to bleak monochrome the moment you arrive. Instead, it actually looks quite beguiling, Butlins dressed up in barbed wire. The sky is a brilliant blue, silver birches line the avenues between the red-brick barracks, and it’s flooded by camera-happy travelers in brightly-coloured clothing. It’s almost impossible to reconcile what happened here with present-day reality when the site is so dominated by coach-trip tourism: at lunch I overhear a British guest uttering the familiar, ‘we must never let this happen again’ line, before moving on and complaining about the coffee she’d just been served, all without missing a beat.

It’s only inside the barracks that you really get a flavour of the Nazi brutality - the vast cabinets full of human hair and empty suitcases and discarded children’s shoes; or the grim pictures of emaciated twins, victims of Mengele’s grotesque experiments in human fertility; or the corridor lined with thousands of individual portraits of prisoners, each given two dates: deportation, death.

After lunch we’re driven a couple of kilometres to Birkenau, where the Nazis ramped up the killing as the Allies drew closer. I talk to our guide, a nice Polish lady with a soft, sad face, who tells me she’s been showing tourists round the camp for seventeen years. Originally she found working at Auschwitz hard to cope with, and now forces herself to stop thinking about the dayjob when going home to her children. It’s not that she’s become inured to what happened here, but it does probably explain why she delivers the appalling story with all the detached formality of an air-hostess revealing the location of the emergency exits. It’s the only way to cope.

Bollocks to this, I’m off to Berlin.

Actually, I’m already there, at the beginnings of a whistle-stop tour of human misery in Europe. This morning? The Hohenschönhausen Memorial. This afternoon? The Stasi Museum. Tomorrow? I’m off to Auschwitz.

Never let it be said that I don’t know how to enjoy myself.

I like list songs.

Mary Lou Lord performs one stand-out, ‘His Indie World’, a nicely twee tribute to boys who love a particular type of band. In it she reels off the names of a number of lo-fi types, even rhyming ‘Sebadoh’, ‘Sentridoh’ and ‘I don’t know’ in one verse. This takes a particularly rare kind of talent indeed.

Then there’s ‘I’ve been Everywhere’, most famously performed by Johnny Cash, but far more satisfying in its original Australian guise, if only because you don’t get to hear the names ‘Woolloomooloo’ and ‘Woodenbong’ mentioned in song too often.

My favourite, however, is ‘88 Lines About 44 Women’ by The Nails, which is almost certainly unique amongst list songs in that you know exactly what you’re getting before it starts. There’s no messing around, no ambiguity: in all likelihood the single came shrink-wrapped with a warning declaring ATTENTION: THIS IS A LIST SONG. GOT THAT?

It’s also a completely pointless record. It doesn’t really have a beginning, a middle or an end. There’s no proper verses and definitely no chorus, unless you count the tuneless humming. It’s literally a list of ladies and their likes, read out in increasingly hysterical fashion over an electronic backing that sounds as if it came free with a breakfast cereal.

It’s a triumph.

Update: It’s like waiting for buses. I haven’t written about music in an age, then three entries come along at once. The third is over at the Greencine blog, where I rattle on at length about some music films you might not have seen.

“We’ve always felt that in the battle between the corporates on the one hand and the nutters in bedrooms on the other, the latter would prevail. Hence we’ve hired our own nutter.”

I have a new job. Quite why this is the kind of news that makes the media pages of The Guardian (registration required), I’m not sure, but I’m not complaining, and do I love the quote. I feel like it gives me carte blanche to turn up on my first day at work on all fours, pushing a pea along with my nose, or to arrive by tricycle, dressed as Kate Bush, juggling soot.

More worryingly, I’m going to be surrounded by people who’ll know more about music than I do. So I’ve decided to turn blogjam into one of those occasional mp3blog type-things, at least until I get bored, or until the first cease & desist order arrives. This, of course, is a willfully crude attempt to curry favour with my new colleagues, and to give them the impression that I’m not the musical ignoramus they’ll no doubt suspect.

My first track is Dynamite Chair by The Poster Children, and because there’s a video on YouTube, I’m not even going to bother with the mp3.

I’ve never been convinced by the theory that music is supposed to mean anything, but it should make you feel something, and Dynamite Chair makes me want to bounce. Up and down. Frantically. Or if, I’m not in a environment where I can safely bounce, I’ll flail. No other track generates this reaction for me.

I have no idea what the song is about - the video may offer some clues, containing a series of rather spectacular explosions and a man being gaffa-taped to a chair before being offered sushi - but none of this matters.

Just bounce.

Some things appeal to the 12-year-old schoolboy in me. This is one.

Imagine the scene: You’re a bored junior designer at an ad agency. You’d love to be working on prestigious TV campaigns, but you’re stuck producing banner ads at the thin end of the budget. Your latest brief is for Easyjet’s summer promotions, and you’re struggling for inspiration.

Hmmm. Holidays. The Beach. Sun. Sunburn. Sun cream. Yeah, that’ll do. Whatever.

Then you spot something. You’ve noticed that often the bottom half of skyscraper ads drop below the fold, and with a cunning bit of graphical trickery you can make that lotion look like… well, you figure it out.

Or, to put it another way: I don’t believe this was an accident.

Without wishing to resort to racial stereotyping, the Asians really do appear to eat absolutely anything. Oxfam run a programme in India that pays locals to capture rats that are then sold for food. In Vietnam, delicious baby mice are served up on a bed of ginger, garlic, coriander and rice. The Burmese are fond of settling down with a nice plateful of grilled bat, while birds’ nest soup (actually made from saliva) is an expensive delicacy in much of South-East Asia. Give a Filipino balut (the partially formed foetus of a baby bird, served warm from the shell), and you’ll have a friend for life, whilst north of Phnom Penh there’s no finer Cambodian hospitality than that which is accompanied by deep-fried tarantula.

China, of course, excels at this sort of thing - visit the night market a couple of blocks east of the Forbidden City and you’ll be confronted with stall after stall selling scorpion and sea horse, while Beijing also plays host to an internationally renowned penis restuarant: last time I was in town I tried to drum up support for a trip to sample its glandular gastronomy, but nobody took the bait, and I don’t think it’s the kind of place you want to be seen visiting unaccompanied.

The tail-end of the same trip found me in Seoul, where I followed esteemed food-blogger Noodlepie’s advice and visited Noryangjin Fish Market in search of freaky food. It’s an extraordinary place, 6000 square metres of space containing 700 shops stacked high with all the creatures of the sea - every possible variety of fish, crabs, octopus, squid, prawns, abalone, clams, oysters, giant pink sea slugs… the shopping list is endless. The market seems to contain enough food to feed the World’s hungry, but Seoul chomps its way through through this mountain of sea-meat each and every day. It’s genuinely staggering.

While I’d like to try a slice of raw monggae (a mottled red sack of soft flesh covered in acne-like spots, and apparently delicious), it’s only 6.30 in the morning and the first floor restaurants aren’t yet open. I wander the streets for a while in search of food, finally grabbing some snacks from a 7/11, and it’s here that I strike the mother-load.

At first glance it looks like an ordinary tin, but turn it round so the English translation is visible, and voila! Salvation in a tin.

Yep, it’s silkworm pupa. Seasoned with soy sauce and sugar. Sounds like some kind of heavenly nectar, right? I’m determined to find out, so I stow the wormy wonder in my hand luggage and return forthwith to the UK, where I open the tin.

It doesn’t look good. If anything, the pupa resemble miniature cockroaches that have had their legs and antennae removed, as if to streamline their appearance.

Raw, it doesn’t taste great. Not that I’m an expert on bug eating or anything, but it kind of tastes like you’d expect it to; a bit dusty, a bit husky, with bits that get stuck between your teeth and probably don’t digest too well. Your Koi carp might disagree, but I think it needs cooking.

Pizza is the answer. I rustle up a batch of dough, add a layer of tomato paste, sprinkle some grated mozzarella over the top, then carefully arrange some asparagus spears clock-style over the base. (Note: this artistic flourish gives the casual viewer the impression that I’ve laboured many hours over the recipe, and that my cooking skills have advanced to a point where the fine art of final presentation has become as important as flavour. This couldn’t be further from the truth, of course: all this arseing around merely disguises the fact that I’ve made no effort at all). Finally, the pupa are laid out in their cheesy graveyard.

Visually speaking, it’s an obvious triumph. The asparagus wheel draws the attention, while the silkworm pupa nestle cozily in the melted cheese, wilted and glistening. Breathlessly I steer a pizza cutter through my doughy prize, carving out a generous slice of Korean-Italian ecstasy.

It isn’t very nice. In fact, it’s quite nasty. So I throw away the pizza and eat some toast. With jam on it. Nice jam.

Mmmm, I like jam.

Outside the Kimilsungia-Kimjonglia Exhibition Hall, home to Pyongyang’s spectacular annual flower exhibition, there’s a gift shop (wherever you go, there’s always a gift shop). This one sells the usual DPRK faire: seeds, ginseng, motorbike parts, postcards, that sort of thing… and it also sells computers. There’s a gleaming, unpriced Mac G5 sitting in the corner, while several PCs clutter up the counter-space. Unusually, a couple of them are priced in tourist currency (in this case $US, although the euro is more commonly seen) and North Korean won, suggesting that there’s a bustling local trade in used computers.

On my flight from Shenyang to Pyongyang, I sat behind several rows of young North Koreans, Kim badges shining proudly on their lapels. Three of them were also wearing iPods. And if they have mp3 players, you figure they have access to computers. Perhaps they bought them at a flower exhibition.