Monday 14 May 2007

Pic of the day: I have read (repeatedly) online that pizza is a bit like sex: When it is good, it is really good. When it is not so good, it is still OK. (I assume that both are without anchovies, but I wouldn't really know.) There is no mention of the fact that they can both be risky, and more so when certain cultures are involved. Actually pizza is probably the safer of the two. It is also the only one that I can occasionally get at work. Or so I sincerely hope.

Good pizza, evil pizza

We had pizza at work today. This is generally a good thing: I like pizza, and it is surprisingly healthy. The fat content is actually quite moderate, and this again is largely healthy plant fat. Not that the healthy fat is healthy for me: Too much fat and I get violently sick, no matter what type it is. But a couple slices of pizza is not too much, as long as I don't eat any other fat for a while before and after. Which I didn't.

Of course, there is another consideration. My workplace is not popular among most restaurants, including pizza restaurants, for reasons that might not be wise to write about here. While I just work as a computer resource person there, I still work there. I'd still eat pizza bought for the workplace if it is made by a Norwegian pizza chain, and probably Italian too. But there are ethnicities in our town at whose restaurants I would not buy any food on behalf of the office. To put it bluntly, spitting in the food might be the least worrisome thing they might do. I wouldn't rule out outright poisoning. Human lives are not nearly as respected in some other cultures as they are here.

This is certainly not due to some racial superiority in Norwegians. Remember the Vikings? Those were our ancestors, or at least the ancestors of some of us. (Not all Scandinavians were Vikings... it was a profession, not an ethnicitiy. Kinda like pirate or terrorist, that kind of profession.) A dubious bunch, to say the least. Later we were embroiled in numerous wars with our fellow Scandinavians, usually Norway and Denmark against Sweden. And yet here we are today, an almost unimaginably peaceful people. Violent crime is so rare that when it happens, you can assume it is committed by an immigrant unless something else is said. Intriguingly, some crimes like murder and rape actually were on the rise until the waves of immigration hit our shores, then the same crimes seems to have become "outsourced" to these other ethnicities. Fewer ethnic Norwegians do them, although the total numbers are higher.

So that's why I check the packaging before eating pizza at work. Because we have outsourced our evil to other nationalities. And I have this deep sense of foreboding that someday, somehow, it will come back to us.