The Marketing of Awful Behavior
Peter lived for many years in France and continues to enjoy a good-natured and friendly relationship with his former wife.
I can’t cook.
My wife has issued an edict about this, based on no evidence of any kind.
Therefore, I can’t cook.
I believe she is jealous.
The French can cook, and are the best at it of anyone anywhere which is completely true of anything and everything else which is French (or English, or American, or …)
But the French are world maestros at marketing.
They can take, for example, a bunch of wine that went off, repackage it and sell it at hundreds of times the price of wine that didn’t go off, and not only that, they manage to rig it so that nobody else can let their wine go off and sell it as gone-off wine, which is today called Champagne (capital C).
It is the French who managed to take a bunch of water polluted with unmentionable gases that nobody wanted because it bubbled at you, and repackage it in a pretty green bottle that they were too cheap to make into a normal bottle with shoulders, and instead made it like a tear drop just the way it fell out of the mould, and then sold the whole wide world on the idea that it was chic to drink this polluted stuff that nobody in their right mind would want, and since it was chic, that everyone should pay dollars and dollars and dollars per 20 oz. bottle, whereas up to then, everyone in the whole wide world had thought themselves ripped off if they paid a cent more than 10 cents a ton for such stuff. That, I will have you know, is real marketing skill.
Take your accidents and charge ten times as much for them. Brilliant!
The French are very very good at this and it is not for nothing that the top luxury brands and companies in the world are French. Nobody, but nobody, can overcharge you as elegantly as a Frenchman can.
For example, I was in Hermes yesterday and practically tripped and broke one of their display cases when I spotted a not very large suitcase (no wheels) for 100,000 Euros (130,000 USD, provided the Fed doesn’t wreck anything else, which is likely). See? You could get a whole crocodile for $1.00 or less (nobody wants them as they bite) and these fellas take 1/25th of a croc – value 4 cents, use half a tube of superglue to stick it on a suitcase that would pull your arm off because it is made of wood – just the empty suitcase would put you over the weight limit – use a micro tin of paint to paint it black and Monsieur Bob’s your Euro, with 99,999.15 Euros profit and every Russian in sight is green with jealously and mortification because he does not have six. Now just you tell me anyone else who could get away with that except a Frenchman?
The French can do this, because everything French is wrapped in a reality warp, you see. I know that is true. For example, when I had known my (extremely) French wife for not too long, I was driving one day, and I stopped at a red traffic light.
“What are you doing?” she turned to me with a look of outraged shock and screamed at me in lurid French I dare not translate, “Drive on!!”
Somewhat shell-shocked (a better term might be French-shocked), I drove on through the red traffic light and, to my great surprise, a helicopter did not swoop out of the sky, pick up the car, and deposit it in the forecourt of the country’s largest police station where three thousand armed police were looking ugly waiting for the delivery.
Some time later, we came to another red light, and I slowed down and then drove cautiously through it, like I had just been taught to do.
She slammed her palm on the dashboard hard enough to leave a dent and make the tires says “ouch,” got the same shocked look out of her handbag (Chanel, of course) where she keeps it ready for use to discipline stupid foreigners and screamed at me, “Are you totally insane? Stop!”
I stopped.
From this experience, I first was able to identify the existence of the French mind warp, to which all foreigners are subject when meeting anything French, because clearly, there were four colors of traffic lights in France – Green, Yellow, Red … and Pink. Pink appears to a Frenchman as pink, meaning he can drive through it, while the mind warp makes it appear to a foreigner such as myself as red. You do understand, don’t you?
Now, when it comes to food and cooking, the same mind warp is in full effect. Thus a French chef can take an object such as a pig’s foot, which, good foot though it is, has spent its life steeped in pig dung, pig spit, pig sweat, pig pee and anything else which comes out of pig on a bad bristle day, and dress this up in a couple of lines of French that make you swoon just to read them, heady mental vapors of eau de deliciousness envelope you, your stomach gets out of bed in a hurry and goes into overdrive to have enough gastric juices ready for the splashdown of the expected delight, your mouth waters with about the same quantity of juices that flow out of a Chinese dam when it is letting the floodwaters through, you drool over your Hermes tie (or scarf if you are one of those), your credit card knows what is coming and goes into plastified shock and suddenly becomes unreadable – all for a piece of pig thing that is mostly bone and nails and spent its entire adult life marinated in pig pee. Now if that does not demonstrate complete mastery of marketing, then I’m sorry, I guess I am not smart enough for this marketing stuff.
Since the French can do this remarketing stuff with food a cat would go into paralysis about, if it had not been steeped in French Marketing mind warp first, I thought I would try my hand at it and see if I could repackage and remarket unpalatable human behavior and get someone to buy it from me at about – say a thousand – times what its worth.
Then I will know I am qualified as a French marketeer … or if I have to go back and study more French pig foot recipes.
So be prepared to drool as we get started on these supremely delicious behaviours. (I’m sorry to say, but you will have to warm up your adjective machine to roasting temperature before you start cooking these.)
I’d like to do my menu in French as that is a lot more elegant, but you will have to put up with it in English so you can fully appreciate what I am nonsensing about. For a small extra charge as a deposit, of say, about as much as a small-size snobby car, I am prepared to forward your order to Head Office for the limited-edition French version. The waiting time is not more than six months as we need that much interest on your money to be interested. Et voila! The choicest dishes from my Cordon Yuk Behavioral Menu.
LE MENU*
Roast gamble au money juice with irresponsibility herbs accompanied by a bouquet of fresh impulsion, puree of unsavory bank account. Billionaire melted dream gateau with icy spine shivers. Lost again bitter disillusion chocolates. Pure fright mountain coffee.
Braised pain in the neck with extract of filthy language, perfumed with tropical ego and accompanied by melted overbearing attitude with fresh spring pathetic insults.
Iced angry looks with fresh spears of sarcasm accompanied by ridiculously disgusting sneers flambé with cream of raised eyebrows. Minted deliberate thoughtlessnesses in an infusion of cremated rudeness.
Horrendously disgusting vanity pimples in superiority sauce accompanied by whipped haughtiness and their diamond watchlets. Looking down nose chocolate gabbles.
Crème da la nuisance with explosions of infuriating nuts. Golden fried show-off with its diamond sauce, served with a glass of artisanal homemade high proof one-upmanship.
Caviar of obnoxiousness served with freshly made sillies, baked hopelessness with sauce of despair, fresh par-boiled miserables, frozen tears and sorry-for-self herbs.
Cream of inflationary soup sprinkled with financial meltdown, accompanied by roasted sprigs of excess spending and o-ha-ha pickles garnished with twisted-financial- teleprompted arguments. U.S. Federal Reserve chocolate helicopters and their rain of freshly minted dollar bills.
Half a whole IQ, marinated in boredom, accompanied by ego sauce and smoked illiterate certainty with supreme of righteousness. Holier than thou rant of cheese.
* Please present your credit card with your order. Management reserves the right to be rude, haughty and positively infuriating. Refund requests are entirely at the customer’s own risk.