A few years ago, after we had first created the fictional world of XPT, my brother (who’s a lot more familiar with the art world than I was then or now) alerted me to Finnish artist Alvar Gullichsen’s Bonk Business Inc.

…a multiglobal industrial enterprise at the forefront of 3rd millennium technologies. The company is the world leader in fully Defunctioned Machinery, Cosmic Therapy applications, Advanced Disinformation Systems (ADS), Repacked consumer products and LBH (Localized Black Hole) technology.

All this began when an anchovy fisherman’s family more than 150 years ago discovered an ancient recipe for Garum, a “mildly stimulating condiment made from the anchovy” and anchovy oil, which “greased the wheels of Nordic industry for many decades until overfishing by interlopers in the Baltic caused the Great Oil Crisis of 1883″ (all this and more from the hilariously deadpan Bonk History page). Bonk’s re-definition of R&D as Repacking and Disinformation seems like a good definition of what we’ve been doing at XPT in the last few years too. (Personally, I’ve always wanted to repackage an airline, turning air travel into something much more transformative - like Kahuna Airlines in Pynchon’s Vineland - and for a while Tim and I worked intermittently on an idea called LA Jet (La Jetée without the ‘e’s…) along those lines. Perhaps it’s time to start working on the livery again.)

The machines, photographs, products, artifacts, graphics and written history that made up the world of Bonk were exhibited widely in the mid to late 90s and the company even featured in the first issue of Fast Company in a 1995 article entitled The Finnish Company that’s Never Done. Also worth checking out are Bonk team member Magnus Scharmanoff’s images of the various Bonk machines.

I was reminded of all of this when I discovered (by looking up the exact meaning of the cycling term Bonk on Wikipedia!) that Bonk’s web presence hadn’t stagnated as a bunch of first-generation websites and that there’s now a shiny modern website for the Bonk Museum in Uusikaupunki.

The long-awaited (by me at least) new album Plat du Jour from Matthew Herbert was released last week. Over two years in the making this is a ‘concept’ album about “the international language of food” with some great tunes, including two standout tracks: Celebrity, made entirely from food aimed at children endorsed by celebrities and the only vocal track (”Go Gordon, go Ramsay, go Beyoncé…”) and The Nine Seeds Of Navdanya, generated from seeds provided by a conservation organisation in India. Check out the Plat du Jour website for the complete list of ‘ingredients’ for each track including a grain of sugar, 30,000 chickens, a salmon farm and the sewers below London (then download the album here for a fiver.)

(Cover image from the awesome CoverFlow)

Not unsurprisingly it’s perfect to listen to in the kitchen, especially if you’ve got a lot of chopping or mixing to do.

Knowing my predilection for liquorice, some family members recently brought me box of crushed liquorice root back from Egypt. Rather than drink the infusion, I thought I’d attempt to recreate a Heston Blumenthal dish we ate at the Fat Duck 18 months ago: SALMON POACHED WITH LIQUORICE. I remembered I’d kept Blumenthal’s recipe for liquorice jelly from The Guardian in 2003 for exactly this reason. The dish we ate at the Fat Duck was garnished with chicory (without doubt the best chicory I’ve ever tasted), but The Guardian version (and the version on today’s menu at the Fat Duck) recommends pink grapefruit and asparagus alongside the salmon, as “both liquorice and asparagus contain a compound called asparagine”. I didn’t have the required agar flakes to make the all-encasing, heat-resistant gelling agent, so in the end simply grilled the salmon, but nevertheless it was terrific, even if the asparagus was from Peru and the dish looked absolutely nothing like this. My (vege-gel) jelly looks dark and mysterious in its jar though.

I now also feel like I’m one step closer to my ambition to restarting my career as a sculptor by making a grizzly bear-sized liquorice cat (I once made three life-sized marzipan pigs).

Overheard on a train (two women chatting about lunch): “Is taste symmetrical?”, meaning Are Human Taste Thresholds Similar on the Right and Left Sides of the Tongue? Basically, the answer is yes: “taste threshold sensitivity is equivalent on the left and right anterior tongue for most individuals.”

And whilst we’re on the subject of eavesdropping, check out Overheard in New York.

David Hempleman-Adams, who broke a 25-year-old world balloon altitude record in December last year with the aim of drawing attention to climate change, broke another world record yesterday, hosting a dinner party for his mates Bear Grylls and Alan Veal, 7,000m (25,000ft) above Salisbury Plain. The three-course meal included asparagus tips, duck a l’orange and fruit terrine. Dining four miles above the earth has its own particular hazards as Patrick Barkham reports in today’s Guardian: “they had to snatch off their masks and gulp their food before taking some more oxygen, while being careful not to drop anything - a spear of asparagus falling from that height could kill someone.”

(Shameless plug: check out The Climate Challenge which we made for The Climate Group to support David’s world balloon altitude record attempt).

Just had my first SkypeIn wrong number: “‘Ello, is that KwikFit?”

Gravity’s Rainbow being my favourite book and all, seems like I have to link to this: “nobody asked me to, but I did it anyway”. Although this is perhaps a more impressive page.

After a year long fling with Sony Ericsson, I’ve come back to Nokia and upgraded to a 6630 Smartphone. Actually, I haven’t dumped the T610 entirely, this will sit next to my server, with a pay as you go SIM, so I can start working on a couple of SMS apps using Tim Ellis’ excellent UltraSMS utility.

The 6630 is a great phone. Not only does it have a very usable 1.3 megapixel camera (I tried to love the T610’s pitifully lo res images, I really did), there are new development tools like Flash Lite and Python for Series 60 and a whole bunch of freeware apps: see David’s review for some examples, and more here. Best of all though is Lifeblog, Nokia’s diary/media manager, the perfect accessory to your Flickr account (see here for details).

Of course mobile phone love is always short-lived and it doesn’t take long before you’re lusting after another, like these just-announced Nseries phones.

If you can work your way around the site’s terrible navigation, there are some great free fonts to be had here.

My new favourite internet radio station. Also available in iTunes’ “Eclectic” category.