Peter Krupa

Every so often in this life one runs across a food product that so completely violates accepted norms and categories that it must immediately be purchased and consumed. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Choco Cheese.

No, that is not a plastic-wrapped brick of poop that I have just sliced up on my kitchen countertop. It is cheese. Chocolate cheese. It peered out at me one afternoon from amongst its sibling dairy products at the grocery store.

True that the chocolate/diary combination is not without precedent. We have chocolate chip cookies dipped in milk, we have chocolate milk, we have chocolate cheesecake. Yet somehow, chocolate-flavored cheese (a “block,” according to the packaging) seems to transgress an ancient code of common fucking decency.

What’s next? Sausage-pops? Chicken-flavored caramels? Strawberry gravy? I had thought the era of, for example, boldly adding chopped up root vegetables and green peppers to the jell-o mold had long-since passed on.

The “chocolate flavored cheese” doesn’t give any indication what kind of cheese is being flavored here, although you’d think that might make a difference. I can imagine chocolate flavored Parmesan causing swelling followed by a painful death.

Ona and I had a few nibbles of the Choco Cheese, and to be honest it’s not bad. That is to say, it’s not offensive. If you close your eyes and forget the “block” thing, it tastes a bit like a chocolate cheesecake that has been sitting in a cooler at a university cafeteria for the last 12 hours.

Yet context is everything, and I have a hard time placing Choco Cheese in a context that might make it regularly consumable. Desert fondue? Choco Cheese cookies? Maybe a baloney and Choco Cheese sandwich? Kids have been known to eat worse.

Let me know if you have any suggestions. I would hate to see 190 grams of perfectly good Chco Cheese go to waste.

Ever wonder where your former college acquaintances have ended up in life? Me neither. But every once in awhile, you run across them, serendipitously, or whatever. Like today, for example, when I was reading an interesting piece in the New Yorker about how pirates actually had a pretty sophisticated system of self-governance that distributed power and put checks on would-be tyrant captains.

The article is basically a gee-whiz summary of an academic paper written by one Dr. Peter T. Leeson, an economist at George Mason University.

Peter Leeson. That is, Pete Leeson, Hillsdale class of ‘01.

If I remember correctly, Pete had a supply and demand graph tattooed on his bicep. I imagine he still does. I’m not really clear on when the New Yorker started paying attention to radical libertarian economists (or whatever Pete is now that he has a PhD), but well, I guess it’s all pretty kick-ass.

Nice job, Pete.

Blogging is, in many ways, like friendship. For example, if you don’t contact a friend for a good long while, you feel guilty. So you put off contacting that friend more, and feel more guilty, and so on.

Eventually, you just have to contact that friend, and pretend like nothing changed.

…

So! Al Gore’s son just got caught going 100 mph. In a Prius. Possessing pot. We can safely assume that the country’s comedy writers all finished their work early tonight. Also!

New Yorker: This shield-the-kid plot is pilfered from “Terminator 2,” and there are matching nods to “Godzilla” and the recent “King Kong,” but, if you really want to know what “Transformers” feels like, think of a hundred-and-thirty-five-minute, hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar retread of “Herbie Goes Bananas.”

I think we can all agree that more retreads of Herbie Goes Bananas isn’t the worst thing that could happen to Hollywood. Especially if we get Al Gore’s kid to play the lead.

Tonight, I have discovered that box wine and the Costa Rican equivalent of Doritos is actually kind of a nice combination. Please don’t judge me. We just put the newspaper to bed.

When you start a new job at a newspaper, you also get new legends, new myths, new gossip about coworkers who have affairs with each other, or the absurd thing so-and-so did when he was covering such-and-such.

Yesterday, for instance, I learned that one time, one of the page layout guys, while standing in the lobby of the building, got shot in the leg.

It was a glancing blow, as the bullet ricocheted off the floor and dealt him a flesh wound, but a wound nonetheless. Members of the OIJ (the Costa Rican version of the FBI) were called to the scene.

They stood there in the lobby, laconic, shrugging. Who knew where the bullet came from? They suggested that probably someone, somewhere, had just been cleaning a gun.

A busy blog is the product of an idle hand, and vice versa. That is to say, I no longer waste huge swaths of my day reading various and sundry media, meaning there is not much grist for the ol’ mill.

Oh, there’s a lot I could post about, but I doubt you all are interested in the intricacies of the Costa Rican state telecom monopoly vis-à-vis looming free trade agreements, or whatever. I will, however, note that Fidel Castro has come out against Costa Rica’s free trade agreement with the U.S., which is weird considering that he spends the other half of his time complaining about the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba.

Free trade: Good or bad? Castro isn’t sure.

At any rate, in times like these I think we can all look for answers in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Part III, which I happened to see today, teaches impressionable minds like my own that piracy is all about fighting for Justice and Liberty and Freedom. The British, on the other hand, are evil, and it has vaguely to do with capitalism.

“Good for business”? Fuck that! Let’s go pirate stuff!

Anyway, it’s possible I’ve drank too much Coca-Cola.

Sometimes my wife needs help with her English. For example. The Spanish word puta connotes something similar to the English word bitch - son of a bitch translates as hijo de puta.

Literally, however, puta means whore, and so occasionally I find myself explaining to Ona that, no sweetie, that woman is not dressed like a bitch, she’s dressed like a whore.

It’s all very cute.

(Previously: Prologue, Day 1, Day 2)

Ona wanted me to buy poison. She wanted to get glue traps and air rifles and maybe rent a cat (craigslist?). Her mother (my mother-in-law) would arrive in a few days, and the rat, she said, was getting the better of me. There was a bit of drama.

“Maybe you’re just drawing this out so you can write about it on your blog,” she said.

The thought had crossed my mind. But I preferred to think of rat killing as at once a battle of wits and a process with rules, like a bull fight. One of us would end up dead - in this case, the rat by my hand or me at the hand of my wife.

Sure, the bull fighter could expedite things by using firearms, just like I could sprinkle anti-freeze all over the building. Yet no one likes to pay money to watch a man in tight pants and a funny hat murder a bull so efficiently, and likewise my landlady probably wouldn’t be so happy if I inadvertently poisoned her small dog.

No, the contest would continue. Ona would have stomped off into another other room if we didn’t live in a studio apartment. Marital bliss hung in the balance (not really, but work with me here – I need a story arc).

The next step in this battle of wits, therefore, wasn’t to change tactics completely but to adjust the ones I was using. The rat safely licked the peanut butter off the trap triggers because, firstly, the traps weren’t set delicately enough; and secondly, peanut butter is practically a liquid, and no fatal tugging/gnawing/finagling is required.

I resolved that second problem with canned anchovies that had been languishing uneaten in the cupboard. A chunk of that smelly, stringy stuff mashed good and cleverly onto the trigger seemed irresistible, though I resisted. Then after a few false starts, I set the traps on “whisker-touch” mode. Put them in the usual places. Then we left.

***

And so the story comes to an end. When we got back a few hours later, I found our little friend caught right on the bridge of his nose, eyeballs protruding, limbs splayed stiffly in what must have been a spasm of surprise.

I took pictures. Ona kissed me. Ding-dong, the rat is dead. We celebrated because, hell, any excuse to celebrate. I was a little sad to see the contest come to an end so quickly, and Ona suggested that I drag the “rat” saga out by posting fiction, or I guess these days we could call it “embellished memoir,” and not tell anyone about the “embellished” part. Sadly, I declined, due to time constraints.

Oh, but we left the other traps set. Just in case.

Has anyone figured out yet what “Threat Level Orange” means? And is it really necessary to card me for requesting alcohol on an airplane flying over the fucking Gulf of Mexico? Maybe there’s some connection. Word has it, terrorists are sucking down minature bottles of pinot grigio to get their nerve up. Better check their IDs.

Well, I do have a beard.

Anyway, it’s raining in Costa Rica. Now, back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

At the moment, things are complicated. This week there are visitors, a graduation, and oh yes, I’m moving to a foreign country in five days. That being the case, the blog will most likely fall silent for a bit, only to be reborn in Central America, where I will regale you with tales of exotic fruit, passionate people, and cultural foibles, all while beating some sort of drum and chanting out the lyrics of Manu Chao’s complete body of work.

Or maybe I’ll just drink rum and abuse Christopher Hitchens from a safe distance. Stay tuned to find out.