They brought me an avocado

First published 9 May 2010 @ just some words

Ten years ago today, I wrote a post for my (now defunct) blog just some words. Today, by a strange coincidence, I bought an avocado. So here they are: a 10-year-old post and a brand new photo by Tamara, happy together.

Umberto Eco’s essay How to Travel with a Salmon contains a funny if puzzling line:

I asked for a lawyer, and they brought me an avocado.

But why? Original Italian text Come Viaggiare con un Salmone says:

Ho chiesto un avvocato e mi hanno portato un mango.

Avvocato means “lawyer”. Mango, apparently, is the next best thing to avocado. The pun is clearly lost in translation.

Avocado, as well as tomato and chocolate, are of Central American origin. The Nahuatl words āhuacatl, chocolatl and tomatl were adopted by Spanish as aguacate, chocolate and tomate, respectively. In her seminal Chocolate: The Consuming Passion, Sandra Boynton jokes that

it was not until chocolate came to the United States that people began spelling and pronouncing it correctly: CHOCOLATE

— even though the Spanish spelling of chocolate is exactly the same. Most European languages accepted (with some variations) the Spanish versions, while Italians invented their own word for tomato: pomodoro (literally, “golden apple”). Russian employs both words, in slightly different contexts: томат typically refers to the whole tomato plant while помидор is just the fruit. Still, we drink томатный сок (tomato juice).

Nahuatl	āhuacatl	chocolatl	tomatl
Spanish	aguacate	chocolate	tomate
Afrikaans	avokado	sjokolade	tamatie
Dutch	avocado	chocolade	tomaat
English	avocado	chocolate	tomato
Finnish	avokado	suklaa	tomaatti
French	avocat	chocolat	tomate
German	Avocado	Schokolade	Tomate
Greek	αβοκάντο	σοκολάτα	τομάτα
Italian	avocado	cioccolato	pomodoro
Portuguese	abacate	chocolate	tomate
Russian	авокадо	шоколад	помидор, томат
Turkish	avokado	çikolata	domates

More photos related to avocado, chocolate and tomatoes @ Shutterstock.

Things Yuri likes

One sunny day, Timur and I were waiting for this or that appointment. I knew it could take quite some time so I took a pencil and a notebook with me. This is what we wrote.

Things that Yuri likes

• British panel shows
• Chess
• Discworld
• Undertale
• 2-D animation
• Critical analysis
• Game Grumps and their 2 bands
• Comics
• Walking on his own
• Coming up with ideas for comics, movies, games, etc.
• Oranges
• Coffee with milk and sugar
• Chocolate ice cream
• Meat (also, to cook it)
• Dark comedy
• Sherlock Holmes (various implementations)
• Blues
• Cowboy-related stuff
• His black cap

Las cosas que le gustan a Yuri

• Programas de concursos británicos
• Ajedrez
• Mundodisco
• Undertale
• Animación 2-D
• Análisis crítico
• Game Grumps y sus 2 bandas
• Historietas
• Caminar por su cuenta
• Encontrar ideas para cómics, películas, juegos, etc.
• Naranjas
• Café con leche y azúcar
• Helado de chocolate
• La carne (también cocinarla)
• El humor negro
• Sherlock Holmes (varias realizaciones)
• Blues
• Cosas vaqueras
• Su gorra negra

Юра любит...

• Британские телеигры
• Шахматы
• Плоский мир
• Undertale
• Рисованную мультипликацию
• Критический анализ
• Game Grumps и их 2 группы
• Комиксы
• Прогулки в одиночестве
• Придумывать идеи для комиксов, фильмов, игр и т.д.
• Апельсины
• Кофе с молоком и сахаром
• Шоколадное мороженое
• Мясо (также, готовить)
• Чёрный юмор
• Шерлока Холмса (различные реализации)
• Блюз
• Вещи, связанные с ковбоями
• Свою чёрную шапку

Vivani organic dark chocolate

by Vivani

A couple of weeks ago we discovered this nice little organic food shop called Zoe Market (Calle Pérez Galdós, 37, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria). I can’t pinpoint what exactly it was prompted us to walk in but I am sure it was not organic food as such. Inside, it is full of wonderful vintage stuff, like Singer sewing machine, aluminium milk pails, 1950s Italian magazines, etc. We chatted for a while with an owner and learned that this is a part of a very small chain called Zoe Food, with two shops in Las Palmas and two shops in Trieste. Ah! Trieste! And so we chatted a little more.

Eventually, we left with a bar of 99% Panama cocoa dark chocolate — did I read it right? I didn’t know these things even exist!

It turned out to be even better (and less bitter) than I expected. You simply can’t get a bar of chocolate chocolatier than this.

More photos of chocolate @ Shutterstock.

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

by Alexander McCall Smith

Just like in the previous book, the Sunday Philosophy Club never meets, but I’m beginning to warm to Isabel Dalhousie. Maybe this is because she started to acquire some sort of third dimension.

The title is rather misleading: the novel talks a lot about friends and friendship, much less about lovers, and almost nothing about chocolate. Which is a shame.

Other cultures had much more elaborate forms for the recognition and cultivation of friendship. In South America, she had read, two men becoming friends might undergo a form of baptism ceremony over a tree trunk, symbolically becoming godchildren of the tree and therefore, in a sense, brothers to each other. That was strange, and we were just too busy to arrange ceremonies of that sort; meeting for coffee was easier. And in Germany, where form is preserved, there would be linguistic milestones in the development of friendship, with the change to the familiar du address. Of course one should not too quickly start to use the first names of friends in Germany; in some quarters a good few years might be required. Isabel smiled as she remembered being told by a professor from Freiburg of how, after several years of knowing a colleague, they were still on formal terms. Then, one evening, when the colleague had invited him to his house to watch an important football match on television, in a moment of great excitement he had shouted out ‘Oh look, Reinhard, Germany has scored a goal!’ and had immediately clasped a hand to his mouth, embarrassed by the solecism. He had called his colleague by his first name, and they had known one another for only a few years! Fortunately, the visitor had taken a generous view of this lapse, and they had agreed to move to first-name terms there and then, drinking a toast to friendship, as is appropriate in such circumstances.
Isabel had been intrigued. ‘But what happens,’ she asked, ‘if two colleagues agree to address one another as du and then they fall out over something? Does one revert to the old formal usage and go back to sie?’
Her friend had pondered this for a while. ‘There has been such a situation,’ he said. ‘I gather that it occurred in Bonn, amongst professors of theology. They had to go back to the formal means of address. It caused a great many ripples and is still talked about. In Bonn.’

Montezuma’s Very Dark Chocolate

This is no ordinary chocolate. The quality of the organic beans from our friends in the Dominican Republic don’t just shine through it, it almost burns a hole in the carton! You get a full and balanced flavour without any overpowering bitterness. Don’t judge chocolate by cocoa content, judge it by flavour and consider the beans, climate, soil, weather and about another zillion things more important than the number.

Helen Pattinson, Co-founder

Although I agree with Ms Pattinson that numbers are not what chocolate is all about, one particular number won me over. Not 70, not 80, not even 75 per cent: precisely 73% cocoa. I never even heard about Montezuma’s Chocolates until yesterday’s trip to Waitrose, but I simply had to buy their organic 73% cocoa bar. Now my curiosity satisfied, my tastebuds crave... more Montezuma’s please!

The Vicar of Dibley

by Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer

I can’t believe I spent all these years in England without actually watching The Vicar of Dibley. (Wait... I remember seeing a part of one episode in some hotel during school holidays. But that was it!) I had to move to Fuerteventura to correct this oversight. This is the first sitcom we watched with kids from the beginning to the end, and they loved it.

As a whole, the series is not as brilliant as, for example, Father Ted. Some episodes are all over the place. But with fellow chocoholic Rev. Geraldine Granger (Dawn French) that close to unattainable ideal — at least, shape-wise — I really shouldn’t complain.

Curiously, the first five (out of six) DVDs in The Ultimate Collection do not have any subtitles.

Sex, Drugs & Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure

by Paul Martin

A book about pleasure: mmm... what a great topic. Just like Counting Sheep, it is a pleasure to read. Don’t be discouraged by the word “science”: according to the author,

There are good biological reasons for believing that the brain is engineered to reward us with pleasure for acquiring and understanding new information.

So there you are. I hate to give away the ending, so... I’ll give you the last paragraph without the last line. Check it out.

There is no single golden key that will unlock huge new realms of pleasure, nor is there a single golden path to escape addiction. Nonetheless, science and everyday human experience point to some simple tactics that should help the wily hedonist to derive more and better pleasure from life. They include adopting a little-but-often policy of favouring frequency rather than intensity of pleasure; searching for pleasurable experiences that have a good ending; having plenty of recreational sex, preferably with someone else; napping, sleeping and dreaming to your heart’s content and not feeling guilty about doing it; smiling, if necessary with the help of a pencil; eating chocolate made from at least 60 per cent cacao solids.

Chocolate: The Consuming Passion

by Sandra Boynton

This is, simply, the best book on the topic ever written, illustrated, and overresearched. The book of ultimate truths, so to speak. An inexhaustible source of quotes, any of them a surefire way to enliven a dull lecture. A perfect gift for a choc lover. A perfect gift for a lover. Even shorter: a perfect gift.

Whoever said, “The best things in life are free”, was, of course, just kidding. The best things go for $6.50 a pound and up. *

There always seems to be someone looking over your shoulder, just waiting for an opportunity to lecture on The Darker Side of Chocolate.

Chocolate was never meant to be shared.

Invariably, the chocolate department goes by a French name, such as “Le Chocolatier” or “Au Chocolat” or “La Maison du Bonbon”.

It is possible to overestimate the intrinsic value of hand dipping.

Chocolate is not a privilege; it is a right.

__________________________________________________

* So says my copy (first edition, 1982). In the 2015 edition of this book, the same passage reads “$65.00 a pound”.