Calling On The Butter Fairy

Norway is suffering a killer butter shortage during the holiday season. This is tragic because Norwegian cuisine in its entirety uses only seven ingredients: butter, cream, flour, potatoes, sugar, codfish, and oven cleaner. And butter is the most important of these for a number of reasons. All dishes owe their structural integrity to butter, which keeps the flour molecules apart. Also, native Norwegians are genetically blessed with massive circulatory systems featuring arteries the size of road culverts, and butter keeps the blood from making knocking sounds as it ricochets through the tubes. Norwegians are stalwart people of sturdy temperament who are not apt to blow over in a stiff breeze, but they're rattled. Without butter the entire collective digestive system of Norway will founder and flake.

In spite of the limited number of ingredients, there is much variety in Norwegian cuisine. Lefse is produced with cream, butter, sugar, and potato. After it is rolled up with more butter and sugar, it is slightly crisp and beige. The potato substitutes for vegetables. Fattigman features more cream than butter but the loss is made up in deep-fat frying; it is somewhat more crisp and darker beige. Cardamom substitutes for vegetables. Krumkake, made of butter, sugar and flour, is beige and very crisp indeed, due to its being cooked on a special griddle. An ornate design stamped onto the krumkake from the griddle substitutes for vegetables. The much-prized gelatinous, soapy and light-beige lutefisk does not require much butter except at the table, where, in sufficient quantities, it masks the flavor of the oven cleaner. Nausea substitutes for vegetables.

In short, it should be possible to invent a cow attachment that could deliver 90% of Norway's culinary repertoire straight from the cow to the plate, but it does not exist, because Norwegian people are not lazy. What appears to be torpor is just a combination of inoffensiveness and deep satisfaction, and the satisfaction is because of the butter.

It was a perfect storm of political, economical, and natural events that produced the butter shortage in Norway.  Demand spiked due to the popularity of healthier low-carb diets wherein some of the potato is swapped out for butter. Climate change ushered in excessive dampness that demoralized the cows. And steep tariffs discouraged imports from butter-rich countries. With citizens willing to fork over up to $32 per pound of butter, a black market has arisen. Several butter smugglers have been apprehended crossing over from Sweden (of course, Sweden), but it's a slick operation. A suspected smuggling tunnel from Denmark was discovered only when it clogged up.

There is no butter shortage in the United States, but that's not my husband's fault. Dave came home a few weeks ago with a starter set of twenty-four pounds of butter and began his annual three-week round-the-clock production of almond roca, which he will distribute in decorative tins to good men and women the world over. Many who regret kicking Santa to the curb of childhood are now fervent about the Butter Fairy, and they anticipate his arrival with clenched capillaries. It's said that he's tall and he's stealthy and he creeps onto your porch like an embolism in the night. Believe it.

Stamping Our Feet And Demanding Our Cake

The leaders of the world have come and gone and we're still getting nowhere with this global-warming business, and I totally blame Rudolph.

Here in Portland, we've had this big uproar over a large neon sign downtown. There's a white stag on it from back when it was owned by the White Stag clothing company. At some point, someone plonked a red bulb on its nose for the Christmas season. People loved it; they went all gooey inside over it. When the sign changed hands, the new owners were prevailed upon to keep the stag, even though they sold china, just so Portland could still have its nose. I mean, folks were getting upset. This was messing with tradition. The stag stayed. Then a few years later the sign changed hands again and holy hell broke loose over the possibility that the stag would be lost. A city commissioner, taking a break from that tiresome schools-funding issue, proposed that the city buy the sign for $65,000 just so that Portland might never suffer a lack of seasonally adorned deer. Because it's always been there.

Well, actually, the stag dates to 1969, when it replaced a White Satin sugar sign. I still remember the fuss when the china people bought the sign. Perhaps I'm in denial, but I find it sort of annoying that anything could be thought of as a sacrosanct tradition that isn't even as old as I am. But that's the nature of people. We believe in our traditions so strongly that we'll eat stuff we don't even like as long as it's traditional. Norwegians scarf down lutefisk at Christmas as though it didn't taste like something a crab would spit out. They say they like it, but they couldn't possibly mean it.

Even a child as young as three is capable of claiming traditions, stamping her feet and insisting on the same birthday cake she's had her whole life. Our perspective tends to be limited by our own experience entirely. The actual song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for instance, is older than me by four years, so that's a solid tradition. Because--write this down--history began when I was born.

That's where the global warming comes in. We are either faced with the likelihood of a man-made cataclysmic change in climate which can only be averted by a serious global application of political will, or it's all a bunch of hooey concocted by a conspiracy of 99% of the world's scientists who don't think they could get a grant otherwise.

That is the view promoted by James Inhofe (R), a petroleum-based senator from Oklahoma, who reminds us that just a couple weeks ago we were all complaining about how chilly it was. In other words, this is just another he-said, everybody-else-in-the-world said situation. And if so, who should we believe?

Here's an even better question. Why would scientifically illiterate people bet the ranch--all the ranches--that the world's scientists are collectively goofing on us?

We living things are all bundles of stored energy, although just between you and me, some of us are dimmer than others. But let's say we pile up mountains of organic material, just like us and maybe several continent-sized expanses of swamp; say we do that for thousands and thousands of years, and then say we press it into a concentrated sludge for a hundred million more years. Now, what say we then suck it up and set it all on fire in a few decades. Why wouldn't we think this might have an effect on the atmospheric status quo?

Why, because all we know is that for our entire lives--forever, in other words--we've been able to get in our cars and roar off to the grocery store five blocks away and buy a banana that grew halfway around the planet. It's natural. Isn't it? Two hundred years after Lewis and Clark, we stand in line preparing to take a cross-country trip that will last six hours and whine about having to take our shoes off. In fifty years, some kid will be waiting inside the human teleporter and he'll smack the side and say "Come onnnn." That's how we are. We have no concept of how unusual fossil fuel is and how special our tiny sliver of history is. Nope. All of this is totally normal. Not only that, but it's our birthright. If we were not meant to sit around in shorts and a tube top watching TV in the middle of the winter, God wouldn't have put all that oil and coal out there for us.

And we feel it is somehow our due that, after another terrific scare, the nose on the White Stag sign lit up once again this year according to sacred tradition, right on time, a week before Thanksgiving.

Loved Ones, With A Side Of Lefse

There is a perennial ad in the obituary section of the newspaper for "funeral alternatives." I'm always drawn to that, since I consider every day to be a funeral alternative of a sort, and I'd like to keep that up. Turns out there are a number of different ways to dispose of a corpse, beyond the traditional methods of embalming and burial, cremation, and concrete boots.

You have that option of being shot out into space, which is nice if you want your legacy to be "I could have rid the world of malaria, but I thought it would be more fun to be shot out into space." Or, in another option available to those with wealth afflictions, you could be frozen cryogenically and thawed out when a cure for your terminal illness is discovered. I always imagine that departed soul floating around quite peacefully, maybe shivering a bit, but happy enough, and then being yanked back into a world of chemo and woe.

There are other possibilities. I am informed that the state of Oregon is considering regulation of a number of new "death care consultants." Among the alternatives out there is the practice of freeze-drying a corpse and turning it into a fine powder, drying it, and putting it into a potato muffin. That would be just the ticket if you want to take your loved one camping. Oh wait, that's potato coffin. Still.

And there are a number of companies in the business of dissolving bodies into a sort of soapy goo. They're calling this "resomation," but you can't fool me--I'm half Norwegian. That's lutefisk.

If I absolutely did have to choose for myself, I guess I'd want to be tossed into a peat bog. A body buried in a peat bog barely deteriorates at all. Thousand-year-old corpses have been unbogged and found to look like they're just a little tired, maybe just a little squashed up. That's how I look first thing in the morning already.

But for the record, if I go before you all do, please note that I do not care what you do with me. As long as I'm still topside I would like to be fed and watered regularly but after that it's going to be entirely up to you. I do think it's a nice touch to be an organ donor. Even skin is harvestable, and there are parts of me that could cover a lot of territory. My eyes probably wouldn't be worth much, except as a novelty to the far-sighted. I've got two perfectly serviceable kidneys. My liver is heroic. Three people could get new chins.