‘Anthropology With A Basket’

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Grocery tourism is trending.

Nice to see others catching up with Nicole James and your humble blogger who has long enjoyed weaving aimlessly through the aisles of foreign grocery stores.

Nicole is my type of person.

“I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.

Every country gives itself away eventually. This is usually somewhere between the biscuits and the cleaning products. Finland offers Moomins in places no Australian supermarket would dare put a cartoon hippo. Singapore understands the spiritual importance of salted fish skin. Sweden puts things in tubes that should never be in tubes and then offers fermented herring.

And then the Netherlands has licorice. The Dutch have built an entire moral philosophy out of licorice. Sweet, salty, double-salty, hard, soft, shaped like coins, cars, and warnings from your dentist. I’ve always admired the Dutch, but this commitment to black chewy punishment is heroic. Sweden is not to be outdone and has thus flirted with licorice-flavored chips.

Then there are the products that cause the traveler to stop dead and reconsider the whole Enlightenment. In Vietnam, I couldn’t walk past snake wine without dancing an involuntary flamenco of horror. There was a snake in a bottle suspended in alcohol. Sometimes there were scorpions.

South Korea has canned silkworm pupae. Peru has coca tea. Colombia has arequipe. America has cheese in a spray can, which I respect as both a product and a cry for help.”

My grocery tourism friend hitting her stride:

“Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince. . . .

And unlike most modern travel pleasures, grocery tourism remains relatively democratic. Not everyone can bring home a handbag from Paris, but almost anyone can bring home mustard or a jar of something that will be later placed in the pantry and avoided for six months because the instructions are in Finnish.

These are the souvenirs I love. I want the supermarket trophy. I want the tea that tastes of a mountain I didn’t climb and the chocolate I meant to give as a present but ate in the hotel room while watching a foreign game show.”

Damn, that chocolate was for me. I’m sure of it.

A Novel Idea—Have Some Fun

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Slate notes that Erling Haaland, the Striking Viking, is having hella fun while on a Scandinavian run of a lifetime.

“The Norway national team striker scored two goals to send soccer royalty Brazil home. After the game, he’s chuckling to himself, telling reporters that even he’s surprised he won that game. Haaland has spent most of this World Cup looking like two completely different people. On the field, he is still the ‘Striking Viking,’ a terrifying 6-foot-4 goal machine who runs at defenders like a marauding berserker. Off the pitch, he’s posting selfies with Shrek, trying on a Southern accent, and generally behaving less like one of the most accomplished athletes on Earth than a very tall guy having the best summer of his life.”

And then this.

“There’s a clip of him in Dallas trying on a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and then with Team Norway, doing the Viking Row after games with a huge smile on his face. It’s clear: The dude is having so much fun out there doing something that you’d think an 8- or 9-U soccer team would do.”

That Viking Row clip is so great. Everyone, unabashed joy.

Brad Stulberg with another paragraph to ponder:

“Imagine Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the middle of the NBA playoffs—not after winning it all, mind you, just after winning a playoff game—going to half-court and doing a celebration. They’re not doing that. They’re all business. They’re going back to the locker room. The Michael Jordan thing is: You’ve got to suffer for greatness, everything needs to be serious, you always need to be angry.”

Further into the piece, Stulberg shares how he approaches his teens’ athletic endeavors.

“I don’t pretend that winning doesn’t matter, because I think that’s dumb. Competitive kids are going to be like: ‘Dad, that’s dumb. Winning matters. Why else do we keep score?’ So I say: ‘Winning matters. Winning is part of the game. We’re trying to win. And you know how you’re going to have the best chance of winning? By having fun. If you’re not having fun, I can almost guarantee that you’re not going to win over the long haul.”

Then, prob without realizing it, he sprinkles some Stoic “trichotonomy of control” on top.

“Then I tell them that there are things we can’t control. We can’t control the points, because we don’t know how the other team is going to play. We don’t know what the weather is going to be like. All we can control are these two things: What’s our effort—are we trying hard? And are we appreciating the moment and having fun? If we do those things, then we’ve already kind of won the internal game. And if you play sports for long enough—which is the goal, because you’re having fun—you’re going to lose a lot and you’re going to win a lot.”

There’s a lot of ink being spilled about the exorbitant costs of US junior soccer travel teams. And how that is an impediment to the USMNT being among the best in world. This Slate conversation makes me think it’s probably the raised expectations that come with all the $. More specifically, having fun gets lost in parents’ emphasis on some sort of return for their investment. Like winning each match, increased social status, and college scholarships. Again, that combo drowning out Viking Striking-like fun.

Paragraph To Ponder

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From The New Yorker.

Alexis, from Michigan, was in college studying to be a welder when she found out she had metastatic spinal cancer. To cover her medical bills, she created an OnlyFans page. Her first day, she made six hundred dollars. “That was absolutely life-changing,” she says. “Like—I called my mom.” Nowadays, as Alexis XJ, she brings in half a million dollars annually posting videos of herself in a bikini fixing cars. She says that she once made twenty-five thousand dollars in tips for live-reading a textbook on diesel-engine mechanics: “One guy said, ‘I’m learning something.’ ”

I need a new saying. I always say, never underestimate the male ego. Update. Never underestimate the male libido. Both and.

Dear Belgium

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Of course I coulda/shoulda titled this “Dear Europe” or “Dear World”, but it’s you I’m thinking about most today.

I’m sorry. If it’s any comfort, many of us are counting down to January, 2029. Of course that is no consolation for you right now. If the (dis)United States wins, there will always be an asterisk attached. If you win, I will celebrate your overcoming the double whammy of FIFA and DJT corruption.

And if it’s any consolation, I will be in Belgium with my bike and several friends in September. At which time I can apologize in person on behalf of many, many of my fellow citizens.

Backgrounder.

Postscript. Nevermind.

Positively Positive

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I want an executive assistant like Trump’s “human printer”, Natalie Harp.

From Harp’s Wikipedia entry:

“She (Harp) often accompanied Trump when he played golf, bringing a printer and a laptop to show him articles; Harp’s use of a printer, which began from Trump’s preference for paper news, led to her being given the nickname of the ‘human printer’.”

What this excerpt doesn’t explain is that Harp only feeds Trump a steady diet of the best news coverage available at the time.

Yeah, I want someone just like Harp who would follow me around everywhere and provide a constant flow of unrelenting praise. Offloading self-compassion if you will. How great would that be?! Truly, this is an idea that only a stable genius could come up with.

Ironically, I played nine holes of golf for the first time in forever the other night. I somehow started out on fire but missed a short one for par on the par-5 fifth hole. How great would it be for my Natalie Harp to be sitting in a cart greenside at the ready to lift my spirits after a boneheaded bogey. Maybe handing me a printout that documents just how great my drive and five-wood were before the weak sand wedge and failed up and down that would soon be forgotten in all the praise for my amazing long game. And then, on the way to the next tee, she would whisper, “Many people are saying Ron, that was the best drive/five-wood combo this hole has ever seen. I know you’re going to make birdie on the next hole, so I’m just writing it in now.”

Yesterday, after an excellent group ride, I was day dreaming about my own Natalie Harp when I had an epiphany. I already have one in the form of my Strava AI assistant! Strava is a personal fitness app where people upload their workouts and applaud one another’s efforts. Think of it as a pseudo, cloud-sourced executive assistant/cheerleader of sorts.

But with an AI overlay, distinguished by its toxic positivity, it’s even more. Dig this recap of my ride.

“Crushed it.” “You’re clearly dialed in.” “What’s really impressive. . . ” I’m blushing. Never mind that it’s only the fifth day of the month.

Now, if we press pause for just a little bit and reflect on a very real possible downside to continuous over the top praise, there’s ample evidence that one could become a narcissistic sociopath.

But that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Paragraph To Ponder

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From London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe.

“But the truth is, everybody lies. We all do it, in ways large and small, more often than we might care to admit. Scholars known as “deception scientists” have studied the psychology of lying and concluded that as a human behavior, it is incredibly common. Most studies on the subject have found that the average person lies at least once or twice a day. But this may be an underestimate, because the methodology of these studies usually depends on self-reporting by subjects, and when people answer questions about how often they lie, they might very well be lying.”

Since you are likely average, what have you fibbed about today? I have not stretched the truth at all today. Yowza, upon further review, there’s my first one. Or is it the second? Third?