Jan

25

You Don’t Even Need A Golden Ticket.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

January 25, 2008 |

In his hilarious travel blog, Charles Starmer Smith says, “Willy Wonka would be proud” and calls a chocolate-powered car “a typically British hair-brained scheme”, but, as he explains, the project also had a serious message. British adventurers Andy Pag and John Grimshaw drove six-thousand miles from England to Timbuktu in a car powered entirely by biodiesel made from waste chocolate. To some people that might seem like, well, a waste of chocolate, but, hey, in spite of the best efforts of some of us there must be some chocolate that doesn’t get eaten. It’s good to know there’s a potential use for it.

I don’t remember whether Roald Dahl suggested that any of Willy Wonka’s inventions were actually powered by chocolate, but Smith is right. Mr. Wonka would be proud, or at the very least pleased that someone would go such a long way to find a new use for chocolate.

By the way, Mr. Smith, not to nitpick, but the expression isn’t “hair-brained” but rather “hare-brained”. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “hare-brained” means “Having or showing no more ‘brains’ or sense than a hare; heedless, reckless; rash, wild, mad. Of persons, their actions, etc.” And maybe Messrs. Pag and Grimshaw were hare-brained, or maybe they were just mad as March hares–but that’s another story.


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