I’ve occasionally mentioned my friend Dawn Taylor, a fellow Portland film critic and one of my best pals here in the Northwest. Before she became a writer, she was a pastry chef, and she retains those skills to this day. She has made me birthday cakes the last two years that were the most delicious things I have ever put in my mouth.

So it is with great delight that I tell you she is starting a homemade-candy business called Polidori Chocolates, and that she’s offering some early sales before the official launch. She has the details on her personal blog. The main offering is a box of eight truffles, seven of them correlating to the Seven Deadly Sins, and then an extra one just for fun, I guess. She also does hand-crafted chocolate-covered marshmallows — she makes marshmallows! I didn’t even know you could do that!

The Seven Deadly Sins (Plus One) collection costs $15. Dawn gave me a sampler box today, and I can personally attest to their extraordinary taste and quality. She has mouth-watering descriptions of them on her blog. A couple of them, I wasn’t sure about. Like the Envy truffle (pictured above): key-lime flavored white chocolate ganache truffle, enhanced with the hot, sweet chewiness of candied ginger.” Lime? Ginger? White chocolate? Hmm. Then I tasted it and repented of my skepticism. It’s my personal favorite of the eight. It made my mouth dance and sing.

These are luxury items, obviously. Fifteen bucks plus shipping for eight chocolates is more than, say, a bag of Hershey’s Kisses would cost. But I can tell you it’s worth it. If you like fancy chocolates and can appreciate the homemade, hand-crafted quality, you simply must take advantage of this offer. Your taste buds will thank you for it!

Did you know I wrote and recorded a bunch of comedy songs? Well I did! And they were on two CDs for a while, until I sold all of them (and printed some more … and then sold all of those), and then they became, officially, “out of print.” But now they have returned in digital form, thanks to an online outfit called Snocap.

It works essentially like iTunes: You can download an entire album for $9.99, or individual tracks for 99 cents. You can hear a 30-second sample for free. (For some reason it’s the first 30 seconds of each track on one album, but a random from-the-middle 30-second chunk for the songs on the other album.) Click the + sign next to the album titles to reveal the full track list, and pick ‘n’ choose whatever you want. I’ve noted the songs that deal with Utah and/or Mormon culture specifically, in case you want to only choose (or only avoid) those.

Liner notes for the songs can be found here for “Will Make Jokes for Food” (2003) and here for “Monkeys and Pirates Are Funny” (2006).

I’m going to try to the get the old Garrens Comedy Troupe CDs on here, too, once I’ve cleared it with the various other people involved. Figuring out who gets what percentage of the 99 cents per track is going to be a b-word. Maybe I just won’t tell some of the performers what I’m doing and keep the dozens of dollars I get all for myself.

Let me know if there are any bugs in the system. Snocap seems to have a pretty good set-up, but it’s all new to me, so I don’t know what problems there might be.

(My Snocap store should appear in the space below. If it doesn’t, try reloading the page. You might have to wait several seconds for the store to load.)

My trip to New York was fun, thank you very much for asking! I’m back now, and “Snide Remarks” is back, though it has nothing to do with New York. (That will come later, surely.) Today’s edition is entitled “Brovaries, Duderus, Sirvix, Vaguyna, and Fellow-pian Tubes: A Guide to Male Pregnancy,” and it’s about that “man” who’s pregnant. He was on Oprah and everything.

A friend of mine said he wanted to subscribe to the “Snide Remarks” podcast but didn’t know how to do it with iTunes. I realized I didn’t know either, since I, um, don’t subscribe to any podcasts. (Just not my thing.) So here’s how you do it, in case anyone else didn’t know: In iTunes, one of the drop-down menus is “Advanced,” and under that is an option that says “Subscribe to Podcast.” Select that, then paste in the URL for the podcast’s feed — which for “Snide Remarks” is http://www.ericdsnider.com/blog/?feed=rss2&cat=25. (There’s always a link to it at the end of these “Snide Remarks” blog entries, too.) And there you go.

Some of you are rolling your eyes, but I guarantee my friend was not the only regular reader of this site who didn’t know how to do it. And yeah, five seconds of searching in iTunes’ “Help” menu would reveal the answer, but I’ve found that a lot of people would rather go without whatever it is they’re trying to do than spend five seconds figuring out how to do it.

This week’s “Snide Remarks,” including the audio version, is here.
The audio version (i.e., the podcast) is also here.
Subscribe to the podcast’s feed with this URL.