My diet has derailed. Fortunately, I've not entered weight-gain mode yet, so there's hope I can reapply self-discipline. What's caused me to jump the tracks? Chocolate.

Plain and simple: chocolate.

Specifically: M&Ms, Chantico, and Häagen-Dazs brownie bars.

My little brother, Tony, is a great salesman (at least from the customer's perspective). One of his innovations at Custom Box was ice cream. That is, during the height of summer, he'd pack coolers full of ice cream bars and popsicles to deliver to our customers. When Tony left, his customers all wanted to know, "Will we still get ice cream?"

Last week, I played ice cream man for the first time. I traveled from customer-to-customer, stopping at a grocery store to stock up on goodies, waltzing in to play ice cream Santa Claus. Once per day, I exacted a tithe: I took an ice cream bar from somebody. My favorite tithe was the Häagen-Dazs brownie bar.

The Häagen-Dazs brownie bar features "vanilla ice cream on top of an indulgent brownie, enrobed in rich milk chocolate with walnuts". Essentially, it's 360 calories of delicious chocolate, with a little vanilla accent flavor.

Better than a Häagen-Dazs brownie bar is Starbuck's chantico (a "drinking chocolate", as they call it). A chantico is an oversweet chocolat chaud. While I'd prefer it were made with darker chocolate, it's damn fine just as it is. It's six ounces of hot, thick, and creamy chocolate you can't find anywhere else.

I had a chantico yesterday. "It's a good thing I only have these once or twice a month," I told Kris. "They're indulgent." But today I left the house early, so what did I do? I stopped for another chantico. Oh baby!

The M&Ms? Well, the M&Ms are my candy of choice since I started this diet. I've mastered a technique whereby I'm able to make a single bag of regular M&Ms last for half an hour. I eat them one at a time, rolling each candy over on my tongue, gently cracking the shell with my teeth before sucking down the chocolate. (It's very similar to eating sunflower seeds, actually.)

Oh, chocolate. Without you, I'd be thirty pounds lighter.

Last night, Kris and I watched another of the Greatest Films of All Time: Ingmar Bergman's Persona. This is the first of the bunch that really has me scratching my head. It's beautifully filmed in black-and-white, but hell if I know what it's all about.

"Is this movie po-mo?" I asked as we watched.

"I don't know. It's Swedish," Kris said.

Parts of it — particularly the odd first seven minutes — felt like rejected scenes from the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Top films remaining to be seen: The Passion of the Christ, The Sting, and Decalogue.

Tangent: I've now seen all but one film on Time Magazine's recent "best films" list. Decalogue (which is actually a series of ten short films) is in our Netflix queue. Here's Time's list:

Time Magazine's best film from each decade
1920s: Metropolis (1927)
1930s: Dodsworth (1936)
1940s: Citizen Kane (1941)
1950s: Ikiru (1952)
1960s: Persona (1966)
1970s: Chinatown (1974)
1980s: Decalogue (1988)
1990s: Pulp Fiction (1994)
2000s: Talk to Her (2002)

What do I think of this list? I think it sucks. Chinatown is good. Metropolis and Citizen Kane are acknowledged classics, and though each drags for me, I recognize the quality in each. Dodsworth, though? Dodsworth is an above-average film of the thirties, but it's nowhere near the best. (Off the top of my head, 42nd Street, Gone With the Wind, It Happened One Night, and Mutiny on the Bounty are all better.) Ikiru? I love Kurosawa, and I appreciate the story he's trying to tell here, but this film is overlong. There are other better films from the 1950s.

Persona? Pulp Fiction? Talk to Her? Talk to Her? No way. These films aren't even close to the best films of their decades. Talk to Her probably wasn't even the best film released that week, let alone month, year, or decade.

(Secondary tangent: Pulp Fiction is one of those films I need to see again. I remember thinking it was very, very average. So many people rave about it, though, that I think I must have missed something...)

Time's list reads like a misanthrope's version of the greatest films of all time: they're all about lonely, alienated people, unable to cope with society.

I think I should collect all the "best films" lists and rank them: a sort of top-ten list of top-ten lists.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2002 — Animal Intelligence   "I dreamt that Aimee came in a bear suit. I said, 'Aimee, won't you be hot in that bear suit?' She said, 'Yeah', but when I offered her some shorts she refused. Afterward she took a bath to cool off. She plugged up our bathtub with bear fur."