There are two foods I don't like: egg yolks and capers. Pär likes both. In fact he likes to add capers to all kinds of dishes he cooks. The two key words in that previous sentence are: he cooks. I kind of figure if the guy I live with is willing to cook for me, I'll damn well take whatever he offers, so I try not to fuss too much about the capers. Basically if they're in there, I just don't want to know about them. So in our home, capers are referred to only as "Secret Ingredient." However, since only one food is called Secret Ingredient, it's not so secret any more. It's just an alias. And he's always trying to sneak them in.

"How do you like this pasta sauce?"

"Tastes kind of funny. Something off about it..."

"That's probably the Secret Ingredient."

"Dammit!"

As you may have noticed, Pär and I use a lot of our own names for all kinds of things and people. These names don't always spring into being in their final form right away; they sometimes evolve gradually. The guy who starred in Starship Troopers and some Tarzan junk or other has for a long time been spoken of in this apartment only by his full title: Aryan Poster Boy Casper Van Dien. Well, don't ask how it happened, but Pär and I ended up renting The Omega Code and watching it. Reader, DO NOT DO THIS. Learn from our mistakes. My god what an inutterable piece of crap, not even worth describing. Really.

When we finished the video and were sitting there trying to recover, we made some comments about its star, Aryan Poster Boy Casper Van Dien.

I began with the obvious. "He is simply awful."

"Glossy and... turgid, at the same time."

"It's not only that he's a dumb, smug, smirky frat boy... he's also just a terrible actor!"

"If he had been in Invasion of the Body Snatchers," said Pär, "he would have played a rat turd."

This threw me for a moment. Gears in my head whirred, tried to connect, and slipped. "Uhh... what?"

"You know."

"I really don't, though."

"Remember that scene in Body Snatchers, where Donald Sutherland is a health inspector and he goes into a restaurant kitchen and looks in a pot and says 'You've got rat turds in your food.' And the chef insists they're not poo, they're capers. So Sutherland says, 'Okay, then eat one.' And the chef won't do it."

"Ahh. Yes."

"If Aryan Poster Boy Casper Van Dien had been cast in that movie, the role for him would be one of the rat turds masquerading as capers."

"Aryan Poster Boy Caper Van Dien."

And that is the name that has stuck. Perfect in oh so many ways.