"The idea today was to produce steamed buns that contain egg yolks that break open like a real eggs."

"Shut up, it's an experiment."

"He's a figment of her imagination. An eggment of her imagination."

He doesn't have ego. He has eggo.

"Kentucky man cracks, kills wife and four others over improperly cooked eggs."

Is that a properly written headline about improperly cooked eggs? 6 people are dead... Should you write "cracks... eggs"?

And am I a bad person for wanting the detail — it's not in the article — of exactly how the eggs were cooked? Were they overdone? Underdone? Scrambled instead of over-easy? Over easy? Over hard.

"The government is pushing these food poisoning events because they want to over-regulate."

Writes commenter SWWBO in  yesterday's egg thread:

You should look into some of the regulations currently being considered by the FDA and USDA. These regs are going to increase the price of food considerably, if they are put into place - and they are doing it all under the guise of food safety.

These regs will also likely put small producers like myself out of business. I'll still raise chickens for our eggs, but I'll be disallowed from selling the eggs to anyone else unless I take some draconian steps and agree to paperwork for each individual chicken from hatching until death - if a skunk, opossum, raccoon, coyote or hawk kills a chicken, I'd have to report that to the government.

Ironically, the reason a skunk, opossum, raccoon, coyote or hawk could kill one of SWWBO's chickens is that "they are true free-rangers, they wander around the yard, the pastures and the woods." That makes the eggs taste especially good, those eggs that you won't be able to buy.

What do you egg-spect?

What a waste! I always assume raw eggs are tainted with salmonella and handle them accordingly. Cook them. Wash your hands!

"The pain becomes early if it puts it in the plastic bag etc."

"Garbage of an egg to a trash box."

I'm nostalgic for Muzak.

You could ignore it. It was designed to fade into the background, and we used to scoff at it for precisely that reason. Now, I have to listen to the urgent yearnings of pop singers oozing from tinny ceiling speakers wherever I go. Even stuff that should be good — I've heard U2's "With Or Without You" twice in 2 days — sounds cheesy and insincere when piped into a restaurant or lobby. What are these decontextualized problems the singers are going on about? What does this person's troubled relationship have to do with my scrambled eggs?

What's that brown ooze?

And why all the egg cartons?

Wait. This is nicer. Or is it? The evil you don't see is scarier, perhaps. I'm getting a "The Shining" vibe from it.

Maybe this one will make you happier.

We found morels.

We looked the hard way yesterday... and the easy way today:



At the Dane County Farmers Market:



Where they'll sell you the supplies to grow your own...



... mushrooms. But not morel mushrooms, which is what we buy:



And on to other things... curds perhaps....



Now, we're home, I'm blogging the morels, and Meade is getting some of them ready to fry into the morning eggs.... mmmmm.

***

See the jeans on that guy in the last photograph? That's what, chez Meadhouse, we call Randy Normal Jeans.

At the Checkout Café...

... choose carefully.

"Una had stretched out on the bed of the guillotine; I lifted the lunette, made her put her head through it, and closed it on her long neck, after carefully lifting her heavy hair."

"She was panting. I tied her hands behind her back with my belt, then raised her skirt. I didn't even bother to lower her panties...." Etc. etc. "... Leaning over the lunette, my own neck beneath the blade, I whispered to her: 'I'm going to pull the lever, I'm going to let the blade drop.' She begged me: 'Please, fuck my pussy.' - 'No.' I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg."

Ha ha ha. And with that, Jonathan Littell ("The Kindly Ones") has snatched this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Read all the finalists — and laugh (or climax!) — here. Be charitable. It's really very hard to write about sex. Have you ever tried to do it? If you have, I hope you had the sense to laugh at yourself.

ADDED: From the BBC::

Over the years, some of literature's most glittering names have competed for one of its least coveted prizes.

Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, John Updike and Philip Roth are titans among novelists, generally acclaimed for their representations of every kind of human experience - except one.

When writing about sex, says the Literary Review magazine, their standards slip.

Here's the Roth passage that got noticed this year (from "The Humbling"):

He had let Pegeen appoint herself ringmaster and would not participate until summoned. He would watch without interfering. First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps...

It was a big year for devices, apparently. Again, I'm cutting the most NSFW parts, which you can click over and read.

... There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though, in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. She could as well have been a crow or a coyote, while simultaneously Pegeen Mike. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement - the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.

It was English that Pegeen spoke when she looked over from where she was, now resting on her back beside Tracy, combing the little black cat-o'-nine-tails through Tracy's long hair, and, with that kid-like smile that showed her two front teeth, said to him softly, 'Your turn. Defile her.'....

Oh, okay. I liked the coyote, though, Phil. That was good. And the "mask on her genitals," that "weird totem mask." That meant something.

IN THE COMMENTS: DADvocate wrote:

I've always wanted to write about nerd sex. Certainly, it would win the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

"After the proper amount of digital manipulation of each others genitalia, I inserted my penis into her vaginal orifice and began rhythmic thrusting motions at a cadence I had calculated to maximize her arousal...." 

It suddenly dawned on Conan O'Brien that the Palin speech is "a poem."

So here, as it was — per Conan — intended:



Something about the way Shatner peaks at "north" had me not laughing — as intended — but thinking about Glenn Gould's "The Idea of North." I can't find the audio on line, but it's here, along with 2 other things, on a CD that I have listened to many times and highly recommend.

Here's 10 minutes of Gould talking about it:



"The Idea of North" is also one of the "short films" in "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould," which, you may have noticed, has always been listed in my Blogger profile as one of my favorite films.

Here's the scene in the movie where Gould — who puts ketchup on his scrambled eggs — is getting the inspiration to do sound montages:

Life in southern Ohio.

The cherry trees are blooming:



The robin eggs are cracking:



And the blogger finds a place beside a window overlooking the meadow:

"Obscene, but absolutely hilarious."

According to Right Wing News.

Okay, now I know what's right-wing hilarious. And I'm a little scared.

Especially the part that got me thinking about egg salad.

IN THE COMMENTS: The wonderful Bissage:

I can’t watch the video right now. I’m probably not the only one, so let’s see if something else might suffice:

Bill Bennett walks into an upscale D.C. nightspot and is surprised to see Pat Buchanan sitting at the bar eating an entire chicken. He watches in amazement as Mr. Buchanan tears into the hapless bird and doesn’t stop until all that remains is one chicken wing.

Mr. Bennett says, “You know, Pat, I can’t help but notice you ate that entire bird except for the right wing.”

Mr. Buchanan wipes the slobber and chicken bits from his face and says, “Well, there’s a reason for that but it has nothing to do with my right-wing political inclinations.”

And with that, the ghost of William F. Buckley appears out of thin air and kicks them both in the balls. They double over in agony and fall to the floor. Mr. Buckley sits down at the bar and orders an egg salad sandwich.

The End.