6/18/2008 – Editorials

I’m just burned out and haven’t got an idea for a column. It seems that’s an ongoing problem. Oh, I could write about politics, but you wouldn’t want that, would you? I didn’t think so.

Lee Larson of Leeds said he got so upset with something I wrote a few weeks ago he didn’t sleep for three nights running. So to make sure Lee gets some rest, here’s an item from this column 11 years ago.

I’m getting kind of tired of hard boiled eggs. Grandson Ethan Howard came over the Easter weekend and he and Grandma boiled eggs and colored them. Ethan had a great time with this project.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t eat eggs. Grandma’s high cholesterol keeps her from eating them. Guess who gets the honors.

I’ve tried mashing them up for the cats, but they won’t touch hard-boiled eggs. Pookie the cat will eat one egg, but not the hard boiled variety. He likes a raw egg mixed thoroughly in a dish and microwaved for 10 seconds to remove the chill from being refrigerated. But he stops with one egg.

That’s one way you can tell he’s not human. Humans seem to want their eggs in pairs. At restaurants, two eggs are always offered on the menu. I’ve never heard of anyone ordering one egg or three eggs in a restaurant, always a couple.

Why should this be? Do the food police demand eggs be eaten in pairs?

I got tired of conforming to this silly rule and now whenever I have eggs, I have three of them. So there!

And Pookie has his egg. The only fly in the ointment is when you add his egg and my three eggs and divide by the two of us, it turns out we average two eggs each.

I guess to get away from this business of eating eggs in pairs I’m going to have to be like Primo Carnera. I’ve got a clipping from the Free Press at Fessenden dating back to the late 1940’s when former heavyweight boxing champ Primo Carnera came to Fessenden and ate two steak suppers at the Connor Hotel. Carnera was a giant of a man who had an appetite that wouldn’t quit. If I remember right, the article said he had a dozen eggs for breakfast. I’m going to find that clipping and give you the accurate details. According to my 1996 World Almanac, Carnera was heavyweight champ in 1933-34.

(Wikipedia states that the 6 foot 6 inch, 265 pound champ ate a normal breakfast of a quart of orange juice, two quarts of milk, 19 pieces of toast, 14 eggs, a loaf of bread and half a pound of Virginia ham. Wikipedia wasn’t available when this column was originally written in 1997.) In the movie "Cool Hand Luke" Paul Newman’s character eats 50 hard-boiled eggs. Boy, I could sure use Cool Hand Luke around my place right about now. Of course that was just a movie. Nobody can eat 50 eggs. Not even Primo Carnera in his prime.

As long as we’re on the subject of eggs, I’ll tell you how to make perfect hard-boiled eggs. Take a thumb tack (I don’t use a thumb tack any more since Stephen and Mary Beck of Everett, Wash. gave me an egg

piercer) and pierce the more rounded end of the eggs. Then place the eggs in water and bring to just boiling. Then turn the stove burner down so the water just stays warm. Let the eggs sit in this warm water for exactly 10 minutes. Then pour off the hot water and run cold water over the eggs until the shell surfaces are cool. Take them out of the water and let them cool in the air. You’ll have perfect eggs. Few of them will have a green tinge around the yolk that comes from overcooking the eggs.

The purpose of piercing the eggs is to allow water to get into the shell, separating the membrane around the egg from the shell. As a result the pierced eggs are much easier to peel than unpierced eggs.

Incidently, if you’re going to color Easter eggs, don’t pierce them or the dye will get into the egg.

It’s time to quit. This column is getting too eggciting.

—000—

A teacher was giving a lesson on the circulation of the blood. Trying to make the matter more clear, she said, "Now class, if I stood on my head, the blood, as you know, would run into it, and I would turn red in the face."

"Yes," the class said.

"Then why is it that while I’m standing upright in the ordinary position the blood doesn’t run into my feet?"

A little fellow shouted, " ‘Cause your feet ain’t empty."

—000—

Two farmers were sitting in the local cafe one morning discussing the latest news.

"Did you hear that a bridge collapsed in Franklin County last night?"

one asked.

"No," the other replied.

"Was anyone on the bridge when it happened?"

"Yep, three fellows in a pickup truck. Luckily the driver rolled his window down, squeezed through it and swam to shore," the first farmer said.

"What about the other two?"

The farmer shook his head sadly and said, "Nope. They both drowned.

They were Norwegian hitchhikers riding in the back and they couldn’t get the tailgate open."