La Madeline au Truffe, created by Fritz Knipschildt (whose shop, Knipschildt Chocolatier, is in Norwalk, Connecticut), has a ganache (rich chocolate center) made of Valrhona dark chocolate.

High-quality stuff yes, but is that a legitimate reason for a single chocolate truffle to launch into the triple digits? $250 to be exact.

This ganache also contains heavy cream. Well, so do many handmade homemade truffles but we’re not selling those to our friends and families for $250 a pop.

Click Here to View a video of how the truffle is made.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra is a rock orchestra founded by Paul O’Neill, Robert Kinkel, and Jon Oliva in 1996. O’Neill had managed and produced rock bands including Aerosmith, Humble Pie and Scorpions, later writing for and producing Savatage, where he began working with Kinkel and Oliva.

The roots of TSO are found in Savatage, a traditional heavy metal band that gradually progressed into an operatic metal act. Savatage’s rock operas, starting with STREETS, began the experimentation with what would become TSO culminating on the track “Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24” from DEAD WINTER DEAD. This track was a minor hit for the struggling band, and demonstrated that there might be an audience for the symphonic metal approach to holiday themes.

The concept for a band playing Christmas carols in a rock opera style was not received warmly by the industry, but quickly proved a success with adults as well as young people.

In the recording studio, Trans-Siberian Orchestra uses a full 60+ piece orchestra and a choir. Trans-Siberian Orchestra released their debut album Christmas Eve and Other Stories in 1996, and it remains their best-selling album. Their 1998 release The Christmas Attic was similarly a concept album with a Christmas theme.
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Does our brain trick us when we have the choice between two wines - one more expensive than the other?  It seems that we tend to like the taste of the more expensive wine.

A study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology discovered that when people were given two different bottles of wine and told that one cost $5 and the other $45 (in reality, both bottles were identical), the pleasure-center part of the brain became more active when the participants were drinking what they believed to be the more expensive bottle. They also reported that the wine they believed to be more expensive tasted better.
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In my never ending efforts to find the right tools and aspects of technology that make my computing life easier to manage I happen to run across a new player in the managed server hosting space.

Now, I don’t give recommendations lightly and I also don’t give them without an extensive amount of research. With that said, I’ve checked into these folks and they are pretty good. The company’s core business lies in data center co-location services and they’ve branched out into the smoking hot segment of managed hosting.

Here’s the scoop - IronScale is a fully managed, fully automated server provisioning and management environment. True, there are countless companies out today that do this, but what I’ve learned is that IronScale is unique in that they perform all this rapid provisioning magic on real NOT virtual servers (a huge plus in my book!!!)
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The movie-star glamour and ladylike sophistication of the 1920s is being reinterpreted for fall 2008.

Chris Benz, Donna Karan and Milly are just a few of the names returning to the nonchalant romanticism of the flapper era. Heidi Handler, designer for fashion line Lovenia, pays close attention to details such as beading and fringe, which were trademarks of the 1920s.

In Brian Reyes’ fall collection, he focuses more on longer hemlines and ruffles, while Benz plays with the masculine undertones that began appearing in women’s fashion during the era.

“The 1920s were a lot of fun,” Handler says. “It was a time of escape, and with the current war and state of the economy, we could all use an escape.”
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Misty May-Treanor and “Six Feet of Sunshine” Kerri Walsh, won their second consecutive gold medal in beach volleyball Thursday at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing China.

Playing through a steady and sometimes driving rain, May and Walsh defeated China in straight sets and extended their amazing winning streak to 108 matches in a row.

The winning American team defeated Wang Jie and Tian Jia 21-18, 21-18 for their second Olympic gold medal, after also winning in Athens. This win confirms their dominance of the sport.
May and Walsh did not lose a set in seven Olympic matches, playing through smog, sweltering heat and a drenching gold medal game before a loud, sold-out crowd.
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Varq, Delhi’s newest fine dining Indian restaurant, opened August 1 at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

Varq is a modern Indian gourmet dining experience with authentic, artistic dishes created by Taj Corporate Chef Hemant Oberoi and paired with teas to enhance enjoyment of the dishes’ ingredients.

Varq is part of Chef Oberoi’s masala cuisine concept, which reinvents Indian food with new techniques, innovative plated presentations and organic produce and spices. Chef Oberoi is faithful to the diverse homemade Indian dishes, while evolving traditional Indian recipes for contemporary palates.
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It looks like there’s a changing of the guard in luxury car market.  The Bugatti Veyron is no longer the most expensive car in the world. The Veyron also lost its spot as the fastest car.

That most expensive car title now goes to the One-77. It’s a $2.3 million hand-made coupe that Aston Martin will sell next year.

Rumor is that no more than 77 cars will be built, a figure that makes Bugatti’s run of 300 Veyrons look mass-market and just beats the 80 Veyron roadsters in exclusivity.
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People tend to purchase fractional properties in places they frequent for vacations.

A fractional property is an alternative to a second home. Luxury fractional ownership properties appeal to those looking for amenities found in homes valued in excess of $3 million.

Globetrotting interior designer Carl Ross knows what rich people want — more of everything luxurious, and then something unexpected. So that’s what he has bundled into the model apartment for the Hyatt Corp.’s newest vacation real estate venture in Florida.

It’s a $100 million, fractional ownership project of 44 designer-furnished apartments called Hyatt Siesta Key Beach. It will be located on the sand where the old Sea Castle Resort used to welcome tourists who were considerably less wealthy than the buyers of this new property are expected to be.
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To commemorate its 150th anniversary, the fine jewelry house Boucheron teamed up with the renowned watch designer Richard Mille to create the RM 018 Tourbillon Wristwatch Hommage a Boucheron.

The resulting timepiece is a never-before-seen design that uses stones hand-picked by the jewelry house that have been carved down to make wheels of the Mille movement.

Price from $700,000 to over $1,000,000
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