Start-of-Week Randomness

So wrong it’s right

Good taste, Harley Parker (he designed Marshall McLuhan’s book, Counterblast, after which the NYU journal is named) once said, is the refuge of the witless. There’s wit aplenty in an online comic that has the following line:

“I’ll give you a buck if you promise to ask Daddy why Mommy’s goodnight kisses are so salty.”

Any comic with a line like that has got to be worth reading. And Something Positive is.

Twice the yolky goodness

Today’s breakfast is a croque madame, which is just a snooty french way of saying “ham and cheese sandwich with an over-easy egg on top of it”.

The eggs we have in the fridge at the moment are the preternaturally large. They look as if they’d been laid by turkeys, not chickens. Better still, these are “Super Bon-ee” doubles — there’s a guarantee that at least half the eggs in the carton will have double yolks. My housemate Paul and I are keeping a tally to see if it’s true. So far, we’re at three double-yolks, one single.

Here’s a question for any egg farmers out there: how do they ensure such a high percentage of double-yolk eggs? Sorting by optical means (I remember reading something about houw you could see a chick embryo inside an egg using only a candle)? Selective hen breeding? Something they put in the chicken feed? Radiation?

I may end up mutated eating this stuff, but I’m going to have some killer Eggs Benedict on the way there.

A real-life Niles Crane in the making

My sister went to visit her friends Tanya and Ian yesterday. Tanya and Ian are lawyers who live in Forest Hill, a very tony part of town, a neighbourhood so WASPy that they step out of the shower to pee.

While serving snacks, Tanya was asked by her four-year-old son: “Mom, may I have some Perrier in a sippy cup?”

This kid’s going to go places. Or get beaten up a lot. Possibly both.

Amato Pizza, late Saturday night

(Not my usual branch of Amato — Queen Street West — but the uptown one at St. Clair West. I was there with my friend Anne and Gil, a visitor from Israel. I had my accordion with me — natch — and was spotted by a table of white high school kids in sports-cum-hip-hop clothing.)

Guy #1: I bet he’ll play accordion for us.

Girl #1: Could you please play something for us?

Girl #2: I know what the keyboard does, what do the buttons do?

(I play the first verse of Sloan’s Underwhelmed and a little Jungle Brothers, collect my applause, answer some questions about the accordion – “I taught myself, the buttons play chords,” etc., etc.)

Guy #2: Damn, you must be the biggest pimp at all the clubs!

Girl #1, to Anne, pointing at me: Do you go out with him? He’s so cool!

Anne: I used to think he was, when I was 19.

(Anne gets some money for pizza from me, and walks to the counter. I bemoan the fact that high school girls of my era didn’t hold me in the same esteem as today’s do.)

Me: She’s one of the “Exes of Evil”.

(I shrug.)

Girl #1, surprised: Whoa. Sometimes a girl doesn’t know when she’s got it good.