This country is so weird...

The clickable vignette to the right preserves for all posterity ample proof of this failed civilisation's depths of stupidity. You can not currently buy a bottle, can or other preserved food item that does not have some idiotic little pieces of paper attached. The can of dried shiitake has a bona fide map attached to its head, six or so little bits that unfold like an accordion. What's in these colorful, shiny items of import desperately but ingeniously hanging on to everything you buy ?

Information.

No, seriously. For instance the litter attached to the one liter bottle of Filippo Berio virgin olive oil informs us that a. we may win a trip to Toscana (which consists of 3 days' worth of unspecified hotel reservation, plane tickets and plane to hotel shuttling) and b. we may use extra virgin olive oil to cook the thing therein depicted, which to me looks exactly like MSMⁱ in crust.

Everything is wrong with this. Everything!

For one, I do not wish to "win" a trip to Tuscany. The only thing I am interested in winning is money. Anything else is stupid nonsense. I do not wish for the government to keep half my paycheck and in exchange "take care" of half my needs, especially not if it gets to define what "half my paycheck" and "half my needs" mean in this context. I do not wish for some company to provide for my travel interest. I do not wish to relinquish any control whatsoever to anyone whatsoever. I keep the gates, I make the rules, everything else gets in line to get on its knees and blow me.

As things stand I can buy myself a trip to Tuscany absolutely any time I feel like it, for three days or thirty, at any hotel there I please, using any air carrier I judge adequate. The upside to this is that should I be dissatisfied with the cocksucking services provided by the aircraft, hotel, shuttle or in general Tuscany crew I will bitchslap them all the way to the primordial soup, resting securely on the footing of my paying for it.

Because that's the difference between me paying for it and someone "taking care of it". This is why you don't want insurance, health or otherwise, this is why you don't want to support any government which has a "human services" department and this is why you do not wish to buy from companies that "send you to Tuscany". They should be sent to Coventry instead.

For another, if you've got some virgin olive oil make a salad, pour it on some ciabatta (home made!), use it to cook salmon if you must. Or even chicken thigs, but for the love of all that's holy : chicken thigs have bones in them! That's what makes them thigs.

And here's where the weird country starts : these people are fixated on sunflower oil. It's a sort of national obsession, you wouldn't believe it, the only aisle larger than the soda aisle in any supermarket is the sunflower oil aisle. You've probably never had it and with that you've probably never missed a thing : it's a cheap, sad and unremarkable palm oil equivalent for the temperate zone third worlders.

Unpalatable but cheap as it may be, it's of course widely supported by oodles of tired gimmicky advertisement, like anything else sold to the poor. Chief among that, the buy and win sort of crap. Stuff clearly intended for the sort of human refuse that believes government is a good thing for the plain and simple reason that they're too low value to be able to function without governmental assistance (which, of course, "should" materialize out of thin air, because they need it).

Well, today I've learned that to the executives doing the marketing for the extravirgin olive oil, this item is practically speaking... a sort of sunflower oil the rich people use. That's it, they cook the same inedible crap through the same processes, they just use oil that costs five dollars an ounce instead of three dollars a quart. The differences stop there, they figure.

Seriously now...

1. Take a look at white slime. [↩]