WARNING: Do NOT rub chocolate on your body. Let me do it for you. No, hang on, what I mean is I recently conducted a scientific experiment on chocolate-flavoured body spray.

A reader named Sheila Jade, writing from Hong Kong, wanted to know where to buy dark chocolate deodorant. The idea is that since women worship chocolate, they should leap on men who smell of it.

A male reader told me that he was unable to find the spray (and, I’m guessing, a woman) and wanted to know if a guy could just rub ACTUAL chocolate on his body. “Can you try it and report back?” he asked. “Also, what brand should I use?”

Honestly, the things I do for science! First, I discovered an application problem. M&Ms don’t work – the shells don’t melt. Ferrero Rocher chocolates are scratchy. High-end 80 percent dark chocolate leaves a stain like dried blood on your shirt collar. Your best bet is Kit Kat. You rub your finger on it until it gets a bit melty, and then smear it behind your ears and under your watch strap.

Did women leap on me? No more than usual. That is to say, not at all. Towards the end of the morning, one female DID sit a millimetre closer than normal – and then ended the chat abruptly to head to the nearest convenience store. I think I succeeded only in making her hungry.

At lunchtime, I re-applied “eau de Kit Kat” and wandered the streets. No-one took any notice. Reader Thomas Seifert sympathetically commented: “Why not hang a lamb chop around your neck? At least your dog will play with you.”

Food issues seemed destined to be a challenge that day. In the evening, I ate at a seafood restaurant where a waiter dumped a large plate of live prawns on skewers in front of us. Each seemed to be waving its tiny arms as if to say, “Don’t eat me.”

Eww! What to do? Pretending to have an urgent call to make, I stepped away from the table to phone my friend Sara, an animal lover. “Rescue them,” she hissed. “Grab them and run towards the nearest body of water. Remove the skewers unless they are running through major organs.” I asked her whether their heads counted as “major organs”. She said: “Yes, in all species except supermodels.” Sara said the prawns would need to be anaesthetised and have their tiny severed nerves sewn together by microsurgeons, before being placed on lengthy rehabilitation programmes.

Does the local animal protection society provide such a service? I suspect the answer is no. Would my family health insurance cover this? Arguable. Would ambulances respond to a call to aid a distressed seafood appetiser? This could not be guaranteed. I got off the phone and returned to the table. There was only one thing to do. I dumped the whole lot into the boiling hotpot soup. Death was instantaneous.

The following morning I confessed my actions to Sara. “You murderer,” she said, forwarding me a news report about a Danish TV reporter who was successfully prosecuted for killing 11 fish. Thank God I live in Asia, where seafood molestation is not such a big issue.

It’s different in the West. Readers told me that in the US, there’s a campaign to halt a Seattle tradition where fishmongers throw dead fish and lobsters at each other across the market. US animal lovers say being hurled across the room “harms the dignity” of the deceased seafood items. Normally I side with animal lovers, but not this time. Once items of food are on my plate, the bulk of their dignity is pretty much already gone, I reckon.

Now, if only the Americans could be persuaded to send a few microsurgeons with experience in rehabilitating injured crustaceans to Asia, those I could use.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

What would you like Nury to write about next? Drop him an e-mail at unbelievable@readersdigest.com.

Read Nury's blog at mrjam.typepad.com.