Big-Endians

Even though Sheila’s stereo quit shortly after their first toast to their educational Educated People’s Education Society, it had been a really pretty nice meeting until their repartee descended again into “safety,” at which nadir a guy in the corner who no one knew, commented, “Eggs are slow death.”

Without knowing what she was talking about, Sheila jumped to agree “there’s so much unknown about eggs!” A lot of eyes rolled, but their minds were stuck now - thinking eggs – in pensive silence. The strange guy in the corner seemed satisfied. He pulled-out a Pez dispenser and offered little candies all around. Preoccupied, they all sucked on Pez – pensively, anxiously. Somebody suggested straight Tequila shooters would be fun. They did that all around and shuddered, but when they drifted back to eggs, they got shot by even more shooters.

Rhonda said when she could afford them, she “candled” all of her organic eggs. The flame of her candle had never revealed anything at all, but she was unsure she even knew how to candle eggs effectively. She said she ate them anyway.

One of the guys – Therapist 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, already obese – not even needing to peck through the shell. “Just bulged into the world!” Everybody grinned and scoffed because they said it was well known that Therapist Freddy, “screwed with people’s minds purposely.”

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 analysis; you can’t be switching colors and call yourself consistent.

I already mentioned that on the occasion of the party, there was this Pez dispenser guy in the corner who lived in Sheila’s building, that no one really knew, but daren’t ostracize. Actually, they were kind of afraid of him - his stony, diffident, bleary-eyed 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, “You people with your duck/chicken/brown/white distinctions,” he heaved a fatigued sigh, “you need to get under the skin of the thing.” He floated the unambiguous concept, “See-Hear-Measure.” Ducking the issue of duck variants, he stated condescendingly that the commonality of the diameter-to-length ratio could be measured and calculated for any egg. He said he’d conducted several, initial “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 “admissible in society.”

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 π(3.1416) gives the “mean diameter” of the egg. Accuracy, meeting “Federal Standard,” he said, is crucial. Somebody muttered that the bleary-eyed stranger was, “...just talkin’ shit.” The group demanded to know the mechanics of egg analysis. The way he smacked on the Pez in his mouth made them want their own, just as a murder of crows hawks on a pile of puppy food. From his pocket, he produced a micrometer – similar to a Machinist’s. His was golden. He pointed out it was stamped, “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 meeting 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 Pezman 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.

Same way drunks at any party revel in handling a pistol, they wanted to handle his West German instrument again.

Somebody came back from the kitchen with a twelve-egg carton of what are generally acknowledged as “commercials.” But there were only five left.

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 high, very high. 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.

For a brief while, they dodged the egg thing again. Instead, they argued about Aflac’s duck 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. .

Nobody dared, either, to ask Pezman’scredentials, but (the) he - an obvious professional - broke the between-commercials silence by startlingly muting the big-screen TV.

“Well, there it is. You’ve seen applied science now for yourselves. And they’ve absolutely, empirically got to be above .79 to be safe to eat. No one is out of 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. 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 follow-up study robotically, using AI.”

But ever since their individual diameter-to-length calculations had been published in their group, nobody had really been paying attention to Pezman any longer. Everyone, privately, had been worrying about who had swallowed the other seven commercials. And why did their minds want so strongly to insist that the “unsee-ability” of color be included in Pezman’s data?

Color isolated Rhonda more than it did the others. Sheila and Rhonda were roomies. Tears in her eyes, in front of the big, plate-glass entry-way mirror, worried Rhonda had pulled her collar down and was examining and tugging at a nit-nat skin-tag at the base of her neck - near her port-wine stain birthmark.