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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, September 27,2006 Basic Black by Arthur Black Somebody - obviously a devoted cheese-ophile - once described cheese as "milk's leap toward immortality". Personally, I wouldn't leap too high in defense of cheese. There are lots of different kinds out there and one man's cheddar is another man's gorgonzola. gorgonzola. Cheese and I didn't get off to a very good start. The rest of my family favoured, for unfathomable reasons, a gooey, fluorescent oran-ge confection called Velveeta. They ate tubs of the stuff. As a kid I was a bottomless pit and a. dedicated 'fridge raider. I Say cheese! would pluck out and hoover back just about anything that wasn't lashed to the refrigerator refrigerator shelves--but never the Velveeta. I would have gnawed the rubber gasket off the refrigerator door before I'd sink to that level. To me, Velveeta looked (and smelled) like a used diaper. There's an irony there, because as I discovered in later life, a lot of delicious cheese, well... stinks. The reek can range from cheese that smells like un-washed feet to a nostril-searing, pass- the-bucket stench redolent of Junior's unwashed football uniform mouldering mouldering in a high school gym locker with a hint of long-dead mouse thrown in. It's a sadistic little game we play with our senses. We hoist a wedge of cheese to our face; our nose cries "Yuk!" But our taste buds croon "Yum!" Nine times out of ten the taste buds win. Gorgonzola reeks but we eat it anyway. Roque-fort and Munster •cheeses are pretty whiffy. Camembert can make your eyes water and there's a French cheese called Vieux Boulogne that paramedics should use to revive heart attack victims. And Blue Stilton! Why, Blue Stilton smells so bad we... ...Dab it behind our ears??? Thought you'd heard of everything? Figured that the weirdness quotient had been used up in a world where people people pay for bottled water, vote for George Bush and accord celebrity status to airheads like Paris Hilton? Not quite. ig Calces \^\ • Cefecs {o/t dH Occasions ÿ/ Pastes - donuts - 9i.es yftj Proprietors: Gary, Caro! & Cory Vrecker 905-983-9779 Closed Sunday and Monday ■Si IlM 9/ieod Ô Otitis "Come in and see our full selection ofNEW giftware & kitchen gadgets" Make room for Eau de Stilton. It's a perfume being marketed by the Stilton Cheese Makers Associ-ation and yes friends, they arc dead serious. A company company spokesman explained (while maintaining a straight face): "Our perfumier was able to capture the key essence of the (Blue Stilton) scent and recreate it in an unusual but highly wearable perfume." Where do we go from here? Cheddar roll-on deodorants? deodorants? Brie colog-ne? Parmesan face powder? I hate to see the Stilton gang getting into the perfume business. It can only lead to nasty rivalries as cheesemakers attempt to outskunk each other. And that means, sooner or later,, somebody's going to roll out the Casu marzu. Casu marzu is the plutonium plutonium bomb of cheeses. It is native to Sardinia, and fortunately fortunately Seldom gets very far from its roots. Casu marzu doesn't travel well. In fact there's not an airline in the. world that would let you bring it aboard. ' It's kind of self-explanatory if you know Sardinian dialect. Casu marzu means 'rotten cheese'. Even if your nose is on strike you can always tell if you've got some Casu marzu on your plate. It will be moving. That's because Casu marzu . is riddled with dozens and dozens of living, wriggling maggots. They are fly larvae deliberately introduced in the fermentation pro-cess to give Casu marzu its trademark runny, stinky character. Removal Removal of the maggots prior to ingestion is... optional. Purists like to crunch them along with the cheese. If you ever do summon up the nerve to try some Casu marzu you might want to . bring, along a pair of safety goggles. The maggots are highly active andean jump up to six inches when agitated. And how does Casu marzu taste? Awful, apparently. A food critic writing in The Wall Street Journal describes it as "a viscous, pungent goo that burns the tongue and can affect other parts of the body". Indeed it can. Indulgers run the risk of intestinal lesions, nausea, vomiting, hallucinations hallucinations and bloody diarrhea. Cheese. I recently read a front page story in a British newspaper that starts out: "A deranged cheese counter assistant assistant has been convicted of terrorizing terrorizing a leading Limehouse psychiatrist for more than a year." Check the guy's passport. Sounds like a Casu marzu junkie to me. 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Real to me and to others, ' Not marred by the rush of today, Where seasons can pass in their beauty-- Long may it be this way. Springtime in the valleys! Wild flowers carpet the ground While the birds above are singing In an ecstasy of sound. We know that summer s upon us When the sounds of spring are still, When butterflies flit o 'er the meadow, And mulleins grow tall on the hill. ' In fall the glory of colour, Migrants against the moon, Mist rising over the marshes, . . .The haunting call of a loon. . I love the quiet of winter, Aurora's eerie glow, Shadows by the woodland, -, Footprints in the snow. Esther Allin Newcastle