Saturday, September 15, 2007

Egg Salad: a game

So my friends and I used to play a game we called "Egg Salad", and here's how it goes: you try to find things that are new things but are really just combinations of one item and another form of that same item. What is egg salad? It is eggs plus mayonnaise. What is mayonnaise? Eggs! So egg salad is eggs + eggs.

Other basic food examples are things like cucumber salad, which is usually cucumber (and yogurt) sauce on cucumbers. Or ice cream with whipped cream on top. Buttered croissant? Or... well, I can't think of many right now, but you can, and you'll tell them to me in comments.

Anyway, the game got extended to include metaphorical or more figurative things. One of my all-time favorites was this: my ex-boyfriend came running to tell me that he got dental floss stuck between his teeth.

In 2004, I wrote him email to explain that I had just washed my drying rack for dishes. Now that it's clean but wet, I asked, what do I do with it?

He tried karaoke once, in an egg salad kind of way: the song he sang was by Milli Vanilli. (This is kind of reverse-egg salad. It should have been lip-synching, not karaoke, right?)

McSweeney's once had a pretty good one: Thumb

I'm mentioning this now because I just bought a bag of chip clips, you know, those little plastic clips that you use to hold plastic bags of potato chips and the like closed. I think you see where I'm going with this... I used a chip clip to close up a bag of chip clips:



(See how much fun this can be? Get this meme in your head and it will occur to you at extremely odd moments... which you then immediately need to tell me about.)

Update:
Look at that! I post this post and then am wasting time reading some new blog I happened on today that I like and the guy has a PERFECT example of egg salad, a really nice one. He has a task to do, a (in his words) "Herculean task". He needs to throw away a garbage can. Oh, the beauty of good egg salad.

16 comments:

Sivan said...

Question- Does paying comission when you withdraw money from the ATM counts as an egg salad? Or is it just plain stupid?

Scot said...

hmmm. I ave thrown away a couple different trash cans of varying size including one of the big plastic outdoor 30-gallon types. Not that hard.

I did want to share: the house I live in, there was an old wooden ladder on the tin roof of the patio room and nothing to stand on to get it down. That's not quite egg salad, but I'll keep you posted.

Anonymous said...

I am 100% sure this will come up in my life at some bizarre moment in the next week. I'll keep you posted.

Also - um, you are such a geek!! And I love you so much for it!!!!

ReadDanceBliss said...

Sivan: paying to withdraw money? Just plain silly. Now, paying to DEPOSIT money? Definitely egg salad!

Scot: it counts! I love the visual of people standing in a yard, looking up at a ladder on a roof, trying to figure out how to get up there to get it down.

Alexis: Click here.

Scot said...

RDB- Love the new profile picture.

Briane said...

Hey, I'm the garbage can guy. I love your game (and your blog). My life is full of that stuff. We also have a lot of little boxes that Sweetie saves for use in present-wrapping and sending. To organize them I got (right?) a box.

Anonymous said...

As a habitual selector of the 3rd option of the "paper or plastic" question there have been several times I've refused a bag for a canvas bag I bought.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure if this is egg salad or not:

When you look at your own Facebook profile, in the status, it says "You are online now!"

You are looking at facebook telling you that you are looking at facebook.

Egg salad, or incestuous cousin of egg salad?

Wunder said...

Egg-Salad or Obsessive Fan Friend of Mine:

My friend called me last Sunday; he was at the San Diego Chargers game and this happened:
"How's the game?"
"It's been great! The color commentary is really annoying though."
"aren't you at the game?"
"yeah, but i'm also watching it on CBS on my iPhone for the stats."
"Look at the scoreboard."
"I can't, i'm looking at my phone."

Anonymous said...

jjd, you should check out "infinite flickr": a photo group on flickr.com where people post "recursive" images of people looking at flickr of people looking at flickr of people looking at flickr....

http://flickr.com/groups/infinite/pool/

more egg salad examples coming soon (soon? who am i kidding? i read this post months ago and haven't taken the time to post the ones i've been thinking of.) coming "later", i think. ...gotta get some floss out of my teeth.

Anonymous said...

Popping corn in a corn burning stove:
http://flickr.com/photos/satjiwan/3152244077/in/set-72157603275808482/

Sat Jiwan said...

a friend of mine is a green building construction manager. we had a meeting scheduled but he had to cancel to meet a materials delivery at the job site. he didn't want to miss his window window.

Aloni said...

http://buzz.blogger.com/

Sat Jiwan said...

From a tumblr collection of things that look like other things, these earrings made me laugh: http://www.etsy.com/listing/96312728/little-third-ear

(the tumblr pages have some more redundant and humorous items: http://thingsthatlooklikeotherthings.tumblr.com/page/4 )

Sat Jiwan said...

Lately my wife has been having a bowl of cereal as a late night snack. She makes it, leaves it on the counter for a bit and I walk past becoming a serial cereal stealer.

Sat Jiwan said...

For you especially: http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2012/08/la_garage_door_painted_to.php
And 
http://thingsthatlooklikeotherthings.tumblr.com/image/26146085837