So, a report on the last entry’s “to do” list.
- Medically-oriented readers: What the heck has happened to chlortetracycline as a veterinary drug? Or even oxytetracycline? When I was still working in nursing, you couldn’t spit without hitting the stuff. Granted, that was twenty-five years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth. But now it’s hard to find. It seems to have been largely superseded by newer variants like doxycycline…but why? Have the bugs become resistant to it, or has it just fallen out of fashion with the drug company sales reps? My vet wants it because it was very good at knocking down chlamydia-based infections. But now it can’t be found. Mutter, mutter…
- The kitchen is less messy, but only marginally so. Matters have been complicated by some of the cat toys I brought home from the US (i.e., the Flashy Rolly Balls: The Electronically-Squeaky Mouse). Every time you tidy something, the cats find a way to knock it sideways / over / down again.
- Work? What work?
- Satellite broadband info is coming in from all directions, from the companies involved in doing installation in our area. Reactions have varied from “You want HOW much??” to “Hey, that’s not bad…wait a minute, there’s a download cap here…”
- At least the haircut has been handled.
- Wait a minute, I just got home. What the heck am I doing in Switzerland again?
(sigh) It happens. It was a business thing: it came up suddenly: and Peter, that model of forbearance, gave me 20K of his Swiss(air) miles to get me a free ticket. Greater Love Hath No Hubby than He Who Giveth His Wife his Airmiles. So here I am, in Basel, business done, and one clear day left me to run amuck about the countryside on the SBB (that’s the Swiss National Railways to you) before I have to go home Saturday morning.
This is a good time to be in Basel. For one thing, (the soccer team) FC Basel chucked Liverpool FC out of the Championship League competition the other night. It was a tense game, but Liverpool had to win the game to advance to the next level, and all Basel had to to was draw. They drew, 3-3, and shortly thereafter the city erupted in general craziness. The game was a home game for Basel. The team took the tram into the center city after their win (the police gave the team tram a motorcycle escort. There’s an image that may strain your brain…) and shortly thereafter the team greeted the city from the third-floor balcony of the City Casino. And I mean, They Greeted The City…or a significant fraction of it…because there were about fifty thousand FCB fans surrounding the Casino in Baerfusserplatz (see here for Real-format footage from TeleBasel), waving scarves and singing and generally celebrating an astonishing turn of events.
So this place has been in party mode for a couple of nights now.
As well, dinner tonight was at our old friend Chefi’s. “Chefi” is his title in dialect, not his name. He’s the chef at one of the local restaurants, officially a beerhall — the “”brewery tap” for one of the local breweries, Warteck. But you would be lucky to eat food this good in many another strictly restaurant-style restaurant. Chefi is kind of a wild and crazy guy. Not only does he cook like an angel, but every year he spends thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of francs of his own money, turning his restaurant into the venue for a Christmas show the likes of which I guarantee you’ve never seen (unless you’re a Basler).
The pedestrian parts of the show feature things like dry-ice smoke, angels (with turn signals) that fly backwards, highwire-bicycling Santas, Christmas model railways with gesticulating puppets, and other minor entertainments. But three times a night the “main show” runs. This changes every year, and tends to be indescribable except in the most general terms. The first one of these I ever saw featured an audio-animatronic Elvis singing “Blue Christmas” while backed up by a small grove of singing Christmas trees. (I wish I had video of that, but I don’t. I do have some video of last year’s show, featuring “Dean Martin”, “James Brown” and “Edith Piaf”, which I’ll post here when I’ve converted it.)
I’ve never been able to pry any better reason out of Chefi for why he does this than “I like it: it’s fun.” This year, though, he seems to have gone unusually far over the top. Last night he told me that the show was going to feature Switzerland’s first indoor fireworks display. He said he’d engaged the same company who did the centenary display for the Eiffel Tower. “There will be a waterfall of fire inside the restaurant,” he said. “Three times a night.”
I’d pay money to go see that, and as it happens, no one has to pay any money over the price of their dinner (or just a beer: Chefi’s place is a true lokal, a baiz, as the local dialect has it, where you’re as welcome to linger over a single drink or a coffee as you are to pig out on a multicourse meal. ( — I have no idea about the etymology of the word baiz, by the way. From context, it means a neighborhood place, comprising but not exactly equalling a bar, a cafe, and/or a bistro: there is a quality about the word that can also be found in the US English slang term “joint”, though I don’t think there are many “joints” that have twenty-thousand dollar sound systems in them.)
The sound system came briefly into play last night when I came in. Chefi knows that Peter and I live at something of a distance, and he doesn’t wait to show off whatever’s new: though he would not run the show for me — he said it was “too early”, but I suspect that there may still be some work being done on it. However, he wasn’t above doing something which has always delighted Peter: playing, very loud, the sound of a helicopter going overhead, low. The 5.1-or-much-better system reproduces it most authentically. Everybody else in the place looked up at the ceiling, wondering what the heck was going on. They wondered even more when a rooster crowed very loudly right above where I was sitting. Not much I could do at that point but raise my wineglass in the general direction of the kitchen, where Chefi’s wife Nicole was grinning out at me, waiting for the reaction.
A little later (during a lull in the cooking) Chefi came out and we exchanged some gossip. After many previous meetings over lunch or dinner where he and Peter and I discussed food and cooking at length, Chefi asked me and Peter to come out and cook St. Patrick’s Day dinner for him and a select group of twelve or fifteen friends. This we’ll probably wind up doing with (heaven help us) local media in attendance , as Radio Basilisk across the street has expressed interest in documenting what kind of food is cooked on The Day That’s In It by Irish science fiction writers. (Apparently the station manager is one of the people we’re going to be feeding.)
So Chefi and I spent about twenty minutes discussing the menu, which includes such things as wild alder-smoked Irish salmon with key lime butter and brown bread, Bushmills-flambeed Wicklow lamb with three champs (green onion, smoked bacon, saffron) on a rosemary jus, and a choice of a board of the best Irish cheeses, (Gubbeen, Cashel Blue, Cashel White, Milleens, Durrus, Carrigaline, Lavistown, Cratloe Hills Gold, etc…) or that infamous dessert “Scharfe Tricolor” (coconut ice cream on a kiwi coulis, with Swift-style [the poet, not the canning company…] butter-grilled pineapple and a sweet Habanero syrup). And then a selection of high-end whiskies, fraughan mead and spiced comfits for the cognoscenti.
The menu seems to have passed muster. Nothing left to do now but work out logistics…. Chefi headed back to the kitchen as the second wave of diners came in . When I heard a rumble, I thought maybe it was going to be the helicopter again, but it turned out to be just a tram going by. But the helicopters will come soon enough. Chefi will start running The Show next weekend.
