Death by Mushroom

« Mushrooms that resemble the Lauttasaari water tower. »

Finland has a thing for mushrooms because, I suppose, they grow pretty well here and they are plentiful this time of year. The first time I visited Helsinki, I fell in love with the Lauttasaari water tower because I thought it looked like an alien space ship or mushroom that had an eerie blue glow at night. The water towers in Finland frequently resemble mushrooms or other fanciful shapes, but the Lauttasaari space mushroom remains my favourite.

On one of the first grocery shopping trips I noted a wide array of mushrooms in the produce section and Jarkko pointed out the false morels that he said were deadly unless cooked properly [I will add here that there is a marvelous Nordic and Russian languages food glossary as well as a very beautifully done Finnish/Russian collection of recipes on the same website]. This, of course, was noted next to the harmless looking fungi, but only in Finnish. I suppose that I was shocked to think that anything in the grocery might actually be deadly, especially for some city kid like me who wouldn't know my ass from a poisonous mushroom if let into the woods on my own. My German mother loved to drag us out into the woods to hunt for morels as well as for blackberries to make into jams. The only problem with this was that if you didn't put at least 3 rubberbands/elastics around your sleeves and pant legs and wear gloves on your hands and plastic bags over your socks, you'd be in agony for a week or more due to the dreaded fuckingus chiggerius. These guys are invisible and invite 5000 of their closest friends to dine on your digested flesh, they make mosquitos look good. My choice whether to forage in the woods with the flesh eaters vs. shopping in the grocery in later years was pretty easy.

I also immediately thought of the liability insurance and lawsuits in the US arising from all the deaths of people who couldn't be bothered to read the warning signs next to them. Perhaps this is passive Darwinism in Finland at work since kids here are trained in the art of identifying mushrooms and berries, even the Latin taxonomic names, from birth so the unsuspecting foreigners who go to the shop and think they look yummy and eat them raw, get removed from the gene pool. I wonder how many cases of death by toxic mushroom happen every year. The woolly milkcap above, a.k.a. Lactarius torminosus, is toxic if not parboiled before eating. I have to admit that its peach colour with furry texture wouldn't lead me to pick it and eat it without the onset of starvation. I think I'll stick with shopping in the grocery and eating only those things that I recognize and am sure won't kill me. :)

The Baltic herring market [note to port of helsinki webmaster: 20 lines of plaintext in a .doc format is really aggravating.] is coming soon so we should all prepare for the herring breath and seagulls. A friend who lives in LA composed a lovely poem one night on IRC about herring that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Burning Herring by Conrad

My herring burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But oh my friends
But oh my friends
It is a fucking FISH on FIRE!

I've decided to work with B&W film a bit more since I actually prefer it to colour film but the cost of developing it is mysteriously double the cost of developing other films. So, I'm going to start developing the film myself and use my cheap negative scanner for displaying them on the net. The equipment needed is actually pretty simple and the instructions from Ilford make it seem very hard to fuck up. I've always wanted to try developing film so why not? Hey, I'm a chemist, I should be able to manage this...I think. If anyone knows of the secret place where one can get development equipment and chemicals, aside from fotoyks, in a one-stop kind of shopping orgy, I'd be much obliged for any information leading to the stinking-up of our sauna-soon-to-be-darkroom.

Addendum: I was thinking why the varmints are called chiggers and went to look it up in the Dictionary of American Regional English and thought I'd share. :)

chigger n Pronc-spp cheeger, chego chigo(e), chigre, chigroe [Alter of Cariban chigoe] CFjigger Note: since both chigger and jigger are used of two similar tiny parasites, a mite (sense 1 below) which is widely distributed in the US, and a flea (sense 2 below) found chiefly in the South, there is overlapping both of the creatures' occucrrence and of the names, with some popular confusion.

1 A harvest mite (Trombicula spp.) Also called jigger,redbug

2 also chigoe flea: A flea (Tunga penetrans) that burrows into the skin. Also called jigger.

The first citation is from 1851 but I'm pretty sure the native Americans had a few choice words for them as well. It's interesting to note that the false belief that it 'burrows into the skin' remains even in the recent DARE definition.