Wasabi, Luxury and Acid

The Wagamama restaurant chain is better known for its ramen noodle soups than desserts, but their chocolate fudge cake with a hint of wasabi goes down a treat despite sounding as mad as a bag of cats.

Deutsche Welle has an interesting article about how Lufthansa has decided to deal with competition by going upmarket and positioning itself as a premium service, rather than getting down and dirty with budget airlines such as Ryanair. In the past when I have flown Lufthansa, I have always been very impressed by the service. My one concern would be, how can Lufthansa maintain this stance and do code sharing through the Star Alliance if it is relying on other airlines to maintain its even higher standards? Its is an interesting contrary move as many of Lufthansa's peers are in the process of dropping standards further, for instance British Airways has dropped first class on six routes, Swiss only has a first class facility on intercontinental flights and Spanish flag carrier Iberia is consolidating business and first class into one.

Finally, humble HMV the music retailer has been retailing some high-quality but very naughty bootleg records. Of particular interest are the DJ's Friend series of bootlegs. Volume three has a rare vocal mix of Fast Eddie's classic early house track 'Acid Thunder' from 87. Volume four has 'U Girls' by Nush: a handbag tune that used to get half the north of England up on the dancefloor with major chord piano stabs and the 'you girls are soo sexy, I want you up here with me' hook line that got drilled into your memory like a Courts furniture store commercial.