Sunday, March 23, 2008

Egg day

Wendy responded to my plea for eggish material with a lovely clutch of links!

Egg babies. (Hmm, not sure quite what I think about that one!) The biggest Easter egg in the world. More pictures of the biggest Easter egg in the world. Eggs online for those inclined in the natural-historical direction. Good news if you enjoy eating eggs. (I had two poached eggs for my post-run breakfast this morning, with toast, granola and a double skim cappuccino, but on the eating front, I am not an egg enthusiast--more of an egg pragmatist.) Egg handbags. (Very desirable, but perhaps slightly too literally Faberge? If I were going to make slavishly Faberge artifacts, I would make them in a delicious edible medium--chocolate! On which note, demented as it may be, I kind of want one of these! But these are more tasteful, as it were. This is rather extraordinary but in my opinion built on the wrong scale--sometimes small really is far more appealing than large...)

My own offerings are meager in comparison! Egg-related New Yorker cartoons. (Here's an apt one!)

Nigel Jones's Telegraph review of Toby Faber's Faberge's Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces that Outlived an Empire.

A great egg passage from Larissa MacFarquar's profile of chef David Chang, in this past week's New Yorker (not available online):
Serpico noticed a giant eggshell next to Chang's computer.

"Is that the ostrich egg you cooked up the other day?" he asked. "How was it?"

"It was awful," Chang said. "I wanted it over easy, you know---I wanted to pretend I was Fred Flintstone. So I got a big rondeau, put like two inches of oil, and I was gonna deep-fry the motherfucker, but there was so much water content in the white that it just sort of dispersed. It looked like cottage cheese."

"Eww."

"The egg yolk, though--the egg yolk was massive. Equivalent to twenty-four chicken eggs."

"Wow."
A delightful egg-related moment from one of my favorite novels from childhood, Eric Linklater's The Wind on the Moon:
(Also highly recommended: Rob Nixon's Dreambirds: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food and Fortune.)

Finally, for those who were children in the 1970s and fought with their siblings for the prize of the infinitely alluring plastic egg-shaped container Mom's panty-hose came in: The L'Eggs Idea Book.

4 comments:

  1. Excuse my late submission. During my recent self-refresher on the lifecycle of the schistosomiasis parasite, I noticed that the WHO/Wellcome Trust's Tropical Disease Research (TDR) Image database has a good selection of schistosomiasis egg pics. Note how the spine of the S. Mansoni egg grows out of the long side of the egg, while the spine of the S. haematobium egg comes off the end of the egg. I wonder if that little difference is all it takes to cause blood in the urine vs. diarrhea...

    http://www.who.int/tdr/media/image.html (you have to put in the keywords schistosomiasis and egg to get the egg pics)

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  2. I liked the last experiment noted in today's NY Times story about how water pressure crushes voids in objects (such as lungs and styrofoam cups):

    "In its early days, Alvin, a pioneering American submersible, often carried outside its crew sphere compressible items like cork bricks and foam balls, cups and wig holders (to make shrunken heads), according to 'Water Baby,' a profile of the craft.

    'It’s an old trick,' the author, Victoria A. Kaharl, wrote, adding that the pressure of the deep makes 'perfect miniatures.'

    But the experimentally minded on such expeditions were also tempted to see what might withstand the pressure, and in at least one instance sent down a raw egg.

    Filled with incompressible fluid, Ms. Kaharl wrote, the egg returned to the surface 'perfectly intact and edible, but salty.'"

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