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This holiday season, the Coca growers union in Bolivia created a special Christmas Panettone, featuring traditional ingredients like candied fruits and raisins, but made with Coca flour. According to Ebococa’s prez, Coca flour is a great source of calcium, vitamins and other essential nutrients. This makes Coca Panettone a noble product and reminds us of other formidable coca products that have come to market over the years. After the jump, our Top 9 Coca-themed products of the last hundred years. Viva la Pachamama!

Hithchiking in the U.S. is a dying art, possibly because it may result in you, the hitchhiker, actually dying at the hands of some Charlie Manson type. Luckily, there are still places in the world where hitchhiking is not only possible, but one of the more entertaining modes of transportation. Places like Chile.

There’s lunch, there’s drunch (dinner + drunk + lunch), and then there’s Nello, where the European art of the extended late afternoon meal has reached theatrical levels. I was having lunch at the celeb-heavy eatery recently with proprietor Nello Balan, John A. Gotti accountant Paul Tong, and a Chinese soprano named Hsuan Ma, who’d just stopped by to say hello before her performance of Traditional Chinese Folk songs at the China Institute. She introduced herself, asked for a tea, and whispered that she was taking care of her voice for an upcoming performance. Naturally, we cajoled her into regaling us with aforementioned Chinese heat, much to the delight of the Nello patrons.  

A once troubled Mexican space in SoBeCa gets an American makeover from a Brazilian dude – only in New York, kids. The gregarious Brazilian-about-town Dival Ramiro has opened AOA in the spot that formerly housed Pelea Mexicana, a magnificent space in that little section of town just south of Soho, on the north edge of Tribeca (you know, SoBeCa).

Wednesday night at Milk Studios–the venue models lovethe most–dozens of tall girls got wet for a great cause: LakayPAM, a phenomenal nonprofit that helps orphaned kids in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. The rain-soaked event featured an emotional short documentary entitled Letters to Haiti, about a post-quake tour of Haiti by supermodel Coco Rocha, Victoria's Secret model Behati Prinsloo, and LakayPAM founder Cedrick Roche.

Imagine if Wikipedia founder and fundraising genius Jimmy Wales consummated his crush on Jeopardy silver fox Alex Trebek. Assuming Trebek could bear children, they’d give birth to WikiMaze, an addictive new trivia app that flips Wikipedia entries upside down and turns them into questions.

Art Basel is one big, enticing, honey pot of rich folks, semi-rich folks, and broke folks posing as rich folks, and generally a lot of inebriated folks with expensive things. In other words: a grifter’s paradise.

"You down here working or partying?" was the most quoted line at Art Basel this year, and more often than not, the answer was a bemused shrug, and then the latter. 

For good reason, Miami is known as a cocaine town. The skyline is built from the stuff. But the girl on everyone mind and in everyone’s cerebral cortex this year was Molly, and she made this one of the most touchy feely, affectionate Basel editions thus far. According to insider Basel sources, everywhere one went, the quest was on to link up with Molly, otherwise known as MDMA, or Ecstasy, or the drug that shut down nightlife as we know it in New York City.

Like we just said, the best performance at Art Basel was a tie between Theophilus London and Shaggy. Theophilus London was in the middle of a rocking set at the Bing-sponsored Art of Night party at the Shelborne Hotel, when the Brooklyn-based London jumped into the deep end of the pool (the stage was built on a plexiglass island in the pool) and immediately began frantically flapping his long arms and thrashing in the water, apparently unable to swim. The lanky crooner was eventually rescued by quick thinking members of his BK entourage. Meanwhile, blasé Baselers surrounding the poolside concert and casually observed the event with a free drink in hand, while a ripple of "well, you know the stereotype" murmured through the crowd. Was it a deliberate and provocative performance piece playing off racial stereotypes? Or was it the reckless rock antics of a brother who can't swim? Either way: great material, which we'll post of a video of soon.