Big-Endians

Somebody! Please tell me what this means!

(pubbed at joecsmolen.com 7/9/22)

Even though Sheila’s stereo quit shortly after their first Toast, it had been a really pretty nice party until they started to worry about the dietary effects of eggs; there was so much known about eggs! A lot of eyes rolled, but the egg subject endured so long they started to get on each other’s nerves. Somebody suggested Tequila shooters would be fun. They did that all around and shivered, but they drifted back to eggs.

Rhonda said when she could afford them, she candled all of her organic eggs. She hadn’t seen anything at all in there, but she was unsure she even knew how to candle eggs. She said she ate them anyway.

One of the guys – Freddy - contributed that there was a huge cholesterol difference between farm eggs, organic and commercial – that he had read on-line and seen a You-Tube about commercial embryos hatching obese – not even needing to peck through the shell. “Just bulged!” Everybody grinned and scoffed because they said it was well known that Freddy “screwed with people”.

Absolutely nobody mentioned what they all knew – that there’re brown, white and duck eggs and that the information found on-line or elsewhere never referred to color even though they were all thinking a superficial thing like color could completely skew rational thought: you can’t be switching colors and call yourself consistent.

On the occasion of the party, there was a guy in the corner who lived in Sheila’s building, but that no one really knew but all had accepted. Actually, they were kind of afraid of him - his stony, diffident expression. When he egg-testified, he got real scary. He said the key to understanding the “potential toxicity” of eggs was the ratio between the diameter and the length of an egg. He said duck, chicken, brown, white didn’t matter. He stated condescendingly that the diameter-to-length ratio could be measured and calculated for any egg. He said he’d conducted several government-funded studies in each of which a “gross squared” of eggs were girth and longitudinally-measured to one ten thousandth and the numbers were crunched using “an algorithm” he’d written himself and it was proven that only eggs with a ratio of .79 or greater were safe to eat.

Somebody wanted to know, “I thought you said diameter. Why measure the girth?” The deal was, he said, is that eggs are random - naturally asymmetric - and so the girth divided by 3.1416 gives the “mean diameter” of the egg. Accuracy, he said, is crucial.

The group wanted to know the mechanics of egg analysis. From his pocket, he produced a micrometer – similar to a Machinist’s. His was golden. He pointed out it said “Made in West Germany”. They asked why the “west”. He just answered, “Lab quality. Lab quality. Nothing but the best.”

A problem for the group was that they were partying in Sheila’s apartment and her stereo had crapped out and so for noise, they had her giant-screen TV blasting and the commercials were driving them nuts – they seemed louder than the programming.  Channel surfing didn’t help. The commercials seemed to them blatantly capitalist, monotonous, manipulative, sexist, even in one case neo-Marxist. But the bursts of machine gun fire were attractive.

 More shooters were accomplished.

Somebody wanted to know how he defined egg-“unsafe”-ness. What would happen to you if you ate a lot of substandard, deviant eggs – say .75s or with a diameter/length Ratio maybe even as low as .72?

“Heart disease,” he said. “Certain exotic cancers, Emphysema, Eczema, Impotence, Pneumocyclothymia(Bursting Eyeballs)…” He listed it all.

They wanted to handle the West German instrument again.

Somebody came back from the kitchen with a carton of what is generally acknowledged as commercials. But there were only five left. Nobody spoke of what this implied.

With an indelible marking pen, they labeled the five remaining commercials from “e-sub1” to “e-sub5” and undertook to measure this “control group”. To avoid individual bias, each participant took his/her own separate readings. Without pre-disclosing their measurements, they all calculated their five Ratios to three significant figures. Shandra was unaware that she was prematurely drunk. Her result deviated by 16%, so hers was thrown out as aberrant or contaminated - depending. This angered her, but Freddy kissed her and she slapped him hard and felt better and smiled. The remaining measurements were averaged commercial-by-commercial across the total group, and determined to be as follows:

Egg sub1: .74

Egg sub2: .71

Egg sub3: .71

Egg sub5: .74

Egg sub4: .69

The obvious ominosity of these results was something else they dared not speak directly to one another about. Instead, Tequila shooters were again thoughtfully embraced – in two separate - Wham! Wham! - applications.

They dodged eggs. They instead talked about Aflac commercials. They hated the exploitation of that duck. They hated the thought of eating duck eggs. Ducks are so cute. They all agreed they missed the Aflac commercials though. That the Progressives were boring was consensus.

Nobody dared, either, to ask his credentials, but (the) he - an obvious professional - broke the between-commercials silence by startlingly muting the TV:

“Well, there it is. You’ve seen it now for yourselves. And they’ve absolutely, empirically got to be above .79 to be safe to eat. No one is out danger unless they eat only above-.79s. Repeated exposure to low-Ratios is probably fatal! I’ve also discovered the danger’s not limited to commercials. All eggs are suspect, too. I’ve just received further funding to conduct a follow-up study to determine if it’s safe to bare-hand eggs during the measuring process in the Laboratory. I’ve decided not to risk humans. I plan to conduct the study robotically.”

But ever since their individual diameter-to-length calculations had been published in their group, nobody had really been paying attention to (him) any longer. Everyone, privately, had been worrying about who had swallowed the other seven commercials. It was kind of obvious because Sheila and Rhonda were roomies. Fear in her eyes, alone with her truth, in the big, plate glass entry-way mirror, worried Rhonda was examining and tugging at a nit-nat on her face.

When Rhonda started bawling, everyone knew who was next to die.