Subject: it's time we talked . . . ...about chocolate. I am a recovering chocoholic. I admit my sin and my weakness, in the audience of my friends and family. I have embarked on a 12-step program, day by day taking steps toward sanity, serenity, and inner peace. NOT!!!! I refuse to apologize for a love of brown stuff (now, there you go, your dirty mind at work once again). Chocolate is just a good thing, I don't care what you say, and even if I have Hepatitis-B I'm going to put the good stuff in my face. May the milk chocholate melt in my mouth, as well as my hands. But I'm not going to take the direction with this that you think I am. I'm actually going on a tirade, once again, against the Europeans. Not for the reason you might expect: the real issue at stake here is their decadent chocolatiers. I have bought chocolate in just about every country I've ever stayed in for more than about 8 hours. Every real civilization has lots of choco-variations, interpretations, and creative ways of overindulging. Most of them are fun, if fatty. In Europe, particularly France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany, they just don't get it. They make the chocolate too rich (97% butter, way too much sugar) and the merchants get too rich from it (about 4 times the price of good US chocolate). Bitter-sweet chocolate on the continent?? Forget about it. Ability to send kids to college after purchasing a kilogram of candy for them? I don't think so, unless your last name is Gates. Last Christmas, I bought some of my employees chocolate in France. Then I figured out how much it really cost...I could have bought them Chateau Montrachet and Mouton Rotchild. It would have cost me less, it would have brought them more pleasure. Lindt chocolate or Chanel, which one costs more?? Which one makes me more attractive?? You be the judge. I'm almost ashamed to say that you can't beat Messrs Hershey and Ghirardelli for cocoa-indulgence. The price is right, the taste is even better. To think that the Europeans could be brought to their knees by big factories in suburban Pittsburgh and Castro Valley. The Europeans have got to figure out how to fix this, or forever be left behind as a bunch of third-world chocolatiers. Dave