Hypothetical

Happy New Year!  And now for a purely hypothetical situation that I'd like your input on.

Just say, hypothetically speaking, that you and your dear wife had had a trying day with your darling newborn baby.  And just say, hypothetically speaking, that after cooking a delicious meal you prepare a plate of cherries, apricots, and seasonal stonefruit varieties to be enjoyed by you and your dear wife.

And imagine, if you will, in this hypothetical situation, that one of the red plums on that plate was the very same red plum that languished alone in the refrigerator for a week while you and your dearest went home to celebrate Christmas in the lunatic asylum that passes for your family home and as such this hypothetical red plum is past its prime.  To put it bluntly, the red plum is too soft.

And, hypothetically speaking, imagine how you would feel if your dear wife was to say, "I don't like the look of that plum", and you, in this hypothetical scenario that bears no relation whatsover to any events that may have occurred right here in my own house this very evening, were to bravely offer to try the super-soft plum and then were to pronounce it fit for consumption only to have your dear wife decide that "fit for consumption" was perhaps setting the bar too low in terms of the suitability of after-dinner treats and thus decide that the entirety of the super-soft red plum was yours to eat.

So hypothetically speaking, which do you think is true:

1. You are entitled to some of your dear wife's cherries to compensate you for having done the manly thing by eating the possibly suspect fruit on her behalf?  Or,
2. Your dear wife is entitled to some of your cherries to compensate her for having missed out on the red plum?

I really want to know how you think on this weighty issue.

Fruit again

First, thanks to those of you who voted in the most recent poll.  I'm pleased that 71% of voters disagreed with the statement that I am needlessly proprietary about fruit.  When I triumphantly presented my research findings to my Smaller Half she said something along the lines of, "I can't trust that poll.  It was probably answered by a bunch of white people like you who know nothing about  fruit."

Well - you can't argue with that.  It's demonstrably true that most of my readers are Australian, most Australians are white, most Australians shop at Coles or Woolworths, and Coles and Woolworths sell garbage fruit. I get really cranky at the little signs at the supermarket giving blatantly misleading advice about fruit and when it is at its best.  "Cherries - best enjoyed when firm and crunchy" was one I saw recently.  Nonsense.  Crunchy cherries are flavourless and sour. Cherries should be dark, soft, smooth, glossy, and sweeter than a mother's embrace on Christmas morn. Clearly the supermarkets have an interest in selling you under-ripe fruit - it's easier to store and transport with less wastage.  So until Australians learn to appreciate good fruit they'll keep selling us bad fruit.

On the topic of fruit, my Smaller Half asked me to nominate my favourite three fruits.  I thought for a moment and nominated the cherry, the white peach, and the strawberry.  The cherry and the white peach earned me praise but the strawberry earned me condemnation.  Not because the strawberry is not an intrinsically worthwhile fruit, but because I had by its inclusion neglected the mango.

Now the mango is a nice fruit and all, but in my opinion it's over-rated. In particular, it's extremely annoying the way the little fibres get stuck in your teeth when you're raking your jaws up and down the inside of the skin and the outside of the pip to get the last little bits of flesh off.  Of course you could simply cut it up with a knife and not try to extract every last morsel of flavour, but if you do that I submit to you that you don't love mangoes enough to include them in your top three list anyway.

It's a Catch-22 situation.  If you like the mango enough to include it in your top three, you must eat it in such a way that it is excluded from your top three.

All hail the mighty strawberry.  What's your favourite fruit?

Fruit ombudsman

You may have noticed the new poll at the right.  (If you're reading this after January 2010 then it's now an old poll and has probably been deleted.)  A brief word of explanation...

We eat fruit every night after tea (or, as some people like to call it, dinner).  I casually enquired of my Smaller Half a few days ago how the plums had been coping with the heat.  She said they were doing just fine, so I asked why half of them were gone, and she said she had eaten them.  I replied that such unilateral eating of fruit really wasn't the done thing.

She said that I was free to eat fruit any time I liked.  I said that on the contrary I felt that she was in charge of fruit in the house and I would wait politely to be allocated my fair share.  She then asked why it was that I always ate all the apples, to which I said that I stood corrected, that she was in charge of all fruit except for apples and I was in charge of apples.

And then she said, "You're needlessly proprietary about fruit".  I disagree.  I think I'm being needfully proprietary.  Without a clear chain of command over the deployment of fruit, there will be chaos.  People will gobble up the stonefruit willy-nilly, while the slightly wrinkled grape slowly sags and decays.  I think the GFC has shown us the perils of rampant competition with inadequate regulation in an environment of crisis.

Do you agree or disagree?  Vote now - only Democracy can resolve this stoush.

Tales of the fig-headed man

This morning I bought some figs from the fig-man at the markets. I approached the stall and noticed that the figs are smaller and greener than the figs last week.

PTR: "Hi, I bought some great figs from you last week."

Figman: "Yeah, those would have been ..."

PTR thinks: This guy has big round cheeks. He actually looks like a fig himself (and hence misses the name of the figs)

Figman: "... which are a dessert fig, very sweet and oozy. These ones here are a more technical fig."

I've heard of technical drawing, technical climbs, and technical innocence, but never technical figs. Apparently a technical fig is one which has superior shape-retaining properties and doesn't get too oozy and over-ripe. Think of it like a Platonic Ideal Fig. All the figs in your life that you thought you had enjoyed were nothing but the shadow of the Ideal Fig which exists Out There, outside The Cave, in the bright sunshine, eternally retaining its shape and not getting oozy or over-ripe. Eating this technical fig would be like eating fruit from Narnia, like having ET cure your taste-buds with his cute little glowy finger, like snatching Gilgamesh's morning tea and sinking in your fangs. (This isn't exactly what the fig-headed man said, but it's the general gist of it.)

So I bought some. They were okay, but were a little bit firm and under-ripe. Maybe they'll have the oozy dessert figs next week.