Text 16141, 110 rader
Skriven 2014-08-23 05:58:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: odd cons. 835
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Minor con, or "my sin."

As I said, I'm back in the states for a couple days
to pay the bills and refill my prescriptions and such.
Speaking of which, CVS has balled things up and not
filled them despite my having warned them in advance;
they will eventually fix the issue but mess up the
paperwork, so I get debited two shipments - for some
of the medicine only, so everything's out of order,
and in this case I am a month off on one of the drugs
and three months off on another, the rest of them,
ones I need but need the least, being on time.

Anyhow, I consulted with my brother, who said that
he was probably going to be late home from work. So
around 6 or 7 I made myself a bowl of popcorn (from
a recent hotel stay, Orville Redenbacher's microwave
stuff) and was settling in, when the kid showed up,
saying, oh, from the smell I can see you've already
eaten (meaning, oh, crap, I wanted you to take me out
to dinner). I replied, oh, it was only popcorn (meaning,
yeah, I could take you out if it's not too expensive).
So he offered, slyly, oh, I'll buy dinner if you buy
the gas (meaning, let's go to Popeye's, and you can
spend, essentially, $60 for a couple chicken thighs).
I laughed at him rather lightly, which he took to mean
no. He reflected, that's not such a good deal for you,
is it, to which I said no. But the kicker is that he
went away without making a counteroffer, so he didn't
get what he wanted, and I returned to the remains of
my popcorn, which by this time had gotten kind of cold
and not nearly so appealing as it had been. My sin,
of course, was not making a counteroffer, which should
have been that I'd pay for the meal and he'd do his
own gas, rather generous insofar as I derive almost no
benefit from his tank of gas.

Major con, or "their sin."

I was going to do a separate post on this issue, which
is truffles. I spent the first thirty years of my life
wondering what the deal was about them, then grudgingly
admitted that they might be okay but certainly not worth
the price. Then came my first visit to Ian and Jacquie,
who are plump in the middle of truffle and foie gras
country (I always liked foie gras, but that translates
across the ocean much better, taking well as it does
to canning, which truffles don't). There I met truffles
that - unlike the cheap crap ones that one generally
gets in the States and unlike the canned real ones that
one can occasionally find - I could actually justify
spending the $250/lb that they cost two decades ago.
Real truffles (T. melanosporum) have an aroma - you
remember the Hungarian I think poem about onions emitting
an odor bringing to mind the scent of a woman waiting to
meet her lover (no? oh, this is a family echo, so I won't
go any further) - well, that times 10. And the deep sexy
fragrance I've found in truffled dishes only a few times,
maybe fewer than I have fingers. 90% of the time you get
truffle smell from the largely if not wholly artifical
truffle oil; 10% at most they use T. aestivum, which is
a much lesser variety of fungus and has less and worse
aroma than the industrial oil. I wouldn't be so exercised
about this but that the public, associating such words as
Cognac and truffles and Champagne with unbearable luxury,
has gotten used to pay huge rates for inferior product
that just happens to bear the name. I don't know what
happens to the real stuff, but I haven't seen it in a
while and probably couldn't afford it anyway.

Anyhow, I was at the Saturday Brive market, wandering
around minding my own business, when one of the stall
attendants called me over, holding a big lump in his
hand. He said, in French, and I paraphrase, look here,
people say that truffles are expensive, not so - I have
them for 1/5 the price they charge in the wintertime,
and smell that aroma (pushing the thing into my face).

Number one, if it were a real real truffle, I could have
smelled it across the room, and this one could hardly
be detected up close to my face - I could see it better
than I could smell it, and that says a bunch.

Number two, 1/5 the price of the winter ones is highway
robbery - like charging silver prices for fool's gold
represented as real gold. And this isn't chump change -
we're talking 20-30 bucks an ounce for tasteless black
mushrooms that just happen to grow underground. 

Number three, you can't get fresh real ones in the
summertime, they grow only in the fall and winter. Any
gibbon knows that.

Number four, is this guy hoping to make a fast buck
on tourists who will go home and unwrap their treasure
only to find it not so wonderful at all, so they will
hop the next train back and track him down and kill him?

Number five, the tourists won't have the gumption to
do number four, so they'll reverently shave a fiver's
"worth" onto their noodles and say to themselves, maybe
this is the way they really taste. Or worse, they'll
actually think this is the way they really taste. Or
worst of all, they won't be able to tell the difference.

I ended up edging away from him as if he were a crazy
person, which I guess he was.
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