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March 5, 2011
The Ultimate Luxury: Eiderdown Passed Through a Civit Cat and Stamped with an Apple Logo
Their tiny bits of fluff, which have amazing thermal properties, have to be painstakingly gathered by hand from cliffside duck nests by fully unionized Scandinavian workers who are required by statute to receive 25 vacation days a year, massive amounts of parental leave, and a living wage in a country that considers $30 to be the right price for a pizza. So the cost of an eiderdown anything is astronomical. Before synthetic fills were invented, the eider was the Cadillac of sleeping bags, especially for Polar exploration, because of the combination of light weight and unparalleled insulating power. Now it's the material of choice for rich people in all climates. If you can afford the luxury of a cozy eiderdown bedspread, you can likely also afford the cost of air conditioning your house to the low temperature required to sleep under it. Someday someone will figure out how to put this stuff through a civet cat and throw an Apple logo onto it, and then we will have the ultimate luxury. -- Mission: BurfjordP.S. Civet Cat-Pooh Coffee deemed Halal
Posted by Vanderleun at March 5, 2011 7:01 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
I would not drink anything that came out of a cat's ass.
Well- maybe if it got you really really stoned...
JWM
Posted by: jwm at March 5, 2011 8:24 PM
Speaking of organic coffee. My kid brings the stuff home all the time, and when it brews it literally smells like rotten fish. I can't take the smell. I asked someone about this and I was told that the smell comes from the fertilizer used in organic coffee farming which I guess is fish ick.
Posted by: Jewel at March 5, 2011 9:43 PM
Just remember how these "organic third worlders" fertilize their rice paddies and you'll stop worrying about fish ick.
Posted by: Peccable at March 6, 2011 5:52 AM
Just to clarify, the civet is not a cat. It's genetically distinct from other small carnivores and really doesn't have any close relatives, felines included. Also, the civet eats the coffee beans before roasting and other processing, so any, um, extra organic matter gets removed before the beans are packaged. Kopi luwak is popular with expats and wealthy locals here in Indonesia, with coffee shops that specialize in serving it, but I wasn't impressed when I tried it. Give me a nice Sumatran dark roast anytime, for a quarter the price.
Posted by: waltj at March 6, 2011 2:51 PM
The civet has one close relative, the hyena. It's been awhile, but I think there are three species of that group.
Posted by: Alan Kellogg at March 6, 2011 6:27 PM