I bit my tongue

The other day, faced with a surfeit of hungry family members and a shortage of people eager to shop and cook, Mrs. R.'s folks had dinner single-handedly catered by someone they'd met on a trip to Patagonia (not the oddest place to meet a young chef from the Bay Area). The reckoning came to <$25/person, which is not at all bad for a good meal here, and exceptional for such an excellent one. Afterwards the chef sat and chatted with us. Someone remarked that they hoped she had gotten to eat something. She remarked that she had sampled the raw ingredients as she went along to judge ripeness and so forth and eaten bits to check for taste or doneness. I was tempted to chime in with a half-remembered anecdote from the Shoah or the Gulag Archipelago about a group of people in a camp who had picked one of their number to be the cook (more divider than anything else I think) of their meager food allowance. The cook was less starved-looking than the rest, who investigated and discovered that he was absent-mindedly eating the crumbs off the plate.

Bouc emissaire

The other day the family R was out shopping on a lovely warm November day. I noticed a man at a corner holding up a sign advertising a sale at a nearby store. Usually when I see a person being employed that way it's scorching hot or raining; that day was so nice it was hard to feel bad for the guy. I wondered if in fact he was there for people to feel sorry for, and whether the strategy works better in bad weather.

I was reminded of Benjamin Malaussène, the professional scapegoat in a series of novels by Daniel Pennac (I've read _Au bonheur des ogres_ and _La petite marchande de prose_ which I enjoyed and probably another which wasn't as good) - he's paid to get yelled at by unhappy customers who then feel so bad about making the poor guy sad that they don't pursue their complaint against the company he works for.

There's a Lemonheads song I like a lot - "Paid to smile". Court jesters were once paid to be humiliated, whipping boys were kept so they could be put in pain - no doubt there are modern equivalents.

(The title is the French for "scapegoat" - somewhere in the bible one goat gets sacrificed and the other gets loaded with the tribe's sins and sent out to the desert - from the non-human perspective the good outcome - it escapes.)

World's cutest felon

As usual, click to enlarge; the claimed cuteness may be difficult to perceive due to my continued struggle with baby photography.