Ever tried finding a decent pepper mill in Mexico? After umpteen years of living with third rate substitutes, my good friend the Fool on the Hill, presented me what according to him was a marvel of German engineering.
For a while it worked great and permeated my kitchen with the smell of fresh ground lemon pepper imported by the "Fool" from who knows where. The little marvel bit the dust, or should I say ground, a year or so back, and the Fool promptly replaced it with something that would satisfy an elephant in search of a dildo.
Today I made the mistake of returning the original mill to the Fool, in case he needed spare parts.
He promptly proceeded to lecture me:
"It is
common knowledge among we pepper mill history buffs, that the Zassenhaus Pepper
Mill has been around for ages and has been long considered the best. Actually,
the mill was invented by a Swede living in Hamburg, who named the mill after his
amigo “Hans Julius Zassenhaus”. This occurred just after the invention of
Germans (also by Swedes), and in anticipation of the invention of pepper – by
Swedes.
Sometime
after I bought my original Zassenhaus Mill, many years ago, and prior to
purchasing your mill, the Swedes relinquished their time honored right to
technical production supervision (They did this after tiring of replacing
millions of the little screw-type caps on the mills that the Germans kept
losing.) Some German then took it upon himself to replace the metal gears with
plastic (undoubtedly a German invention) gears. This accounts for your
dysfunctional mill. Is strikes me as most apropos that you, a German, were the
first in Mexican history to suffer a dysfunctional Zassenhaus
mill.
"Du
gamla, Du fria . . . Ja, jag vill leva, jag vill dö i Norden. . . .
"
I'll be damned if I accept any more pepper mills from a Fool of Swedish ancestry!
