The town down the hill recently extruded a restaurant featuring crepes. I knew before the place even opened that I would never go in there. Because I saw through the twenty-foot-tall glass walls that they had placed a bottle of Heinz ketchup on every table.

Crepes are quintessentially French, while ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid produced by Germans who don't understand salsa. Throughout much of France ketchup is actually banned, and for sure if you go into a restaurant there and order crepes, and then ask for ketchup, the chef will come at you from out of the kitchen, screaming and waving a cleaver.

Germans like Heinz and Hunts pummelled the Americans with ketchup for many years, but that is over now. Which buggers me why these crepes-people would put out the ketchup now, when ketchup has clearly become a buggywhip in the foods. Among the Americans, salsa sales surpassed that of ketchup more than twenty-five years ago; the hamburger, another invention of Germans with names like Otto and Oscar, is also coughing up blood, stomped now every year in the sales by tortillas.