Tuesday 20 June 2000

Pic of the day: OK, no mushrooms here yet. But this barely visible hole in the forest is the beginning of a small path. The trees almost seem to part as if by their own free will, just enough to let a wanderer through - preferably a child, or at least someone willing to duck from time to time.

Blood and mushrooms

Eventually enough is enough. Today I went to the doctor, who happened to have a few minutes for me since someone else did not show up, and discussed my recurring digestion problems. The first thing will be to reduce my workday by 50% to see if it is somehow work-stress related. As usual these days, the lab assistant also drew several small glasses of blood from me. Officially these are to test for various possible diseases, though I'm sure they could do that with less blood. I suspect that it's a placebo thing: Bloodletting was common in the middle ages and people generally did feel better, though of course most of them died anyway. (Actually, they are all dead by now, but you get the drift.)

Ironically, I don't even know my blood type. I guess that could be a bad thing if I'm rushed to hospital without an arm or a leg. It just never came up. Unlike Jehovahs Witnesses, I am not opposed to blood transfusion in principle. I believe that the commandment to abstain from blood refers to eating. Given the christian doctrine that we are saved by Jesus' blood, it makes sense to honor blood with a special, non-food status. Also the Bible repeatedly insists that there is a mystical connection between soul and blood. Incidentally, blood was used for food back on the farm, and it tasted disgusting. -Anyway, so far I have neither given nor received blood during my rare visits to the Norwegian health care system.

***

After the bloodletting, I went to get myself some food, since my digestion had stabilized for the day and I was hungry. McDonalds had a line of youngsters, so I moved on. I eventually went to the brasserie in 2nd etage (that would be 1st floor or something to those with mad measures - it's one staircase up from ground floor) of Det Hvide Hus (The White House) in Markens, the main street of Kristiansand. The place used to have a great reputation and was popular for lunch meetings. So imagine my surprise when not only were there free tables, but the rest were almost uniformly filled with aged pensioneers nursing their cup of coffee. This is a bad sign.

Still, they had survived, so I took courage and ordered a meal, Tortellini "Pavarotti". I can see how the pensioneers avoided this, being mostly unschooled in foreign languages. (In Norwegian, "rotte" means rat.) It wasn't all that bad, actually. But it was not all that good either. It seems that they used common supermarket tortellini, and champignons. The vegetables were OK, but sparse. The meal was too "hot" with spices. Italian restaurants around here usually use mild herbs, which are pleasant to my sensitive palate. This dish had so much peppers that it was bordering on the unpleasant, though I guess the elderly might have appreciated it, if they had actually bought that kind of thing. I'm still thirsty hours later. It wasn't bad enough to send back, but it was no better than I could have done myself. The serving wenches were very nice and helpful, though. Not bad looking either.

Oh, and the music was nice too. Classical thingies. Before I got the food, I listened to the melody my computer uses to play when I win a game of Civilization. Very encouraging. Duh, it seems I just revealed my level of knowledge of classical music. Uhm, it's called "Freude" or some such. That would be "Joy" in British. It's composed by one of those famous dead Germans, I think.

More pensioneers came tottering while I was there, and it reminded me of an article in Scientific American Presents, the magazine I babbled about yesterday. There was the expression "From baby boom to geezer glut". Now I saw a rather pointed illustration of what we can expect in the near future, barring some drastic world event. There was like one woman of my generation, plus the wenches. (Are they still called wenches? It sounds so ... dated. Not that I have ever dated any wenches, but it just does not sound 21st century.) And then old people groaning as they tried to ease themselves into the chairs without hurting anything. Gray, gray, gray. And not exactly frivolous with their money either, it would seem. Coffee and perhaps some small snack, like an ice cream or piece of cake, mostly. Hmm.

***

So how do y'all feel about champignon? Not champagne, I mean the mushroom thing. Me, I like them but I don't trust them. Too similar to the white killer mushroom. Hardly even an expert can tell them apart when they are small. Of course, these days champignon are grown in monoculture in large dark cellars, where they are reproduced by taking pieces of their mycelia (the mushroom equivalent of roots) rather than by seeding with spores. Still, how do you really know that one of the poisonous spores don't drift in through the window? They are so small as to be invisible, after all ...

I just spent ten minutes just looking at the screen, thinking "what if those mushrooms were poisonous"? They tasted quite good, but it sure would not be worth it. Then again, this is the case with many of the risks people take in life. Some are hit by a car while crossing the street. Some are infected with HIV while making love. Some fall down while washing their windows. Some choke to death on a piece of beef. (Vegetarians please not comment on that one.) Some go swimming and drown or are eaten by sharks. Some get bitten to death by dogs during the US census. And some survive to sit, groaning and nursing their coffee, at a brasserie in Kristiansand. And then they die anyway.

I think there was a point to the above, but I'm not sure what.