Written by Mark Jacob
As if the Obama administration didn’t have enough trouble, First Lady Michelle Obama was criticized over the ticket sign-up system for the White House’s Easter Egg Roll. In these scrambled times, let’s examine some incredible but true egg facts:
1 When the Bulls’ Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen were in their prime, Jordan liked to say that they were “ham-and-egging.” Which meant that one of them would start strong and the other would finish strong. And opponents were toast.
2 At breakfast, President Woodrow Wilson drank two raw eggs in juice.
3 To demonstrate his versatility, the Japanese master artist Hokusai sometimes painted using the stick end of the brush, or with his fingers, or with chicken eggs.
4 Paul McCartney came up with the melody for “Yesterday” long before he had the words. While searching for just the right lyrics, he and John Lennon referred to the song as “Scrambled Eggs,” which had the same meter as the eventual title. “We called it ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it became a joke between us,” Lennon said. “… Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.”
5 A common numbers racket in the ’30s and ’40s was called “butter and eggs.” Gamblers would bet on the closing commodity prices for butter and eggs. Before that, a “butter-and-egg man” was slang for a visitor with a lot of money, a yokel ready to be separated from his funds.
6 In golfing slang, a ball half-buried in a sand bunker is called a “fried egg.” In diner slang, if you want to order scrambled eggs on toast, you say, “Adam and Eve on a raft, and wreck ‘em.”
7 Nobody seems sure about the Benedict who was honored by eggs Benedict. According to one story, LeGrand Benedict, a customer at the famed New York restaurant Delmonico’s, asked the chef to invent a new egg dish. But a rival story says the dish was inspired by Harry Benedict, a customer at the Waldorf Astoria in New York who wanted a meal to help him overcome a hangover.
8 The Easter bunny must have been wearing jackboots in Tumwater, Wash., in February 2006. Residents found neo-Nazi leaflets taped to plastic Easter eggs and scattered on their front lawns. The ethnic slurs were appalling, but residents found the Easter motif to be particularly offensive. “They shouldn’t be doing the eggs,” said Shirleyann Westman. “That’s not right at all.”
9 Joseph Coyle, who ran a small newspaper in the 1910s in British Columbia, quit the news business after inventing a different paper product: the egg carton.
10 Birds generally lay eggs that are 1 to 10 percent of their body weight. But the kiwi produces a single egg that is 20-25 percent of its weight. The San Diego Zoo’s Web site compares it to a 120-pound human female giving birth to a 24-pound baby.
SOURCES: “Hokusai: Life and Work” by Richard Lane, “The Berghoff Family Cookbook” by Carlyn Berghoff and Nancy Ross Ryan, “Eggs, Nests and Baby Dinosaurs” by Kenneth Carpenter, “Woodrow Wilson” by Arthur Walworth, ” The Beatles Anthology” by the Beatles, “Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang” by Jonathon Green, Seattle Times, Hiway 16 Magazine, king5.com, doubletongued.org, mygolfrounds.com, sandiegozoo.org and Tribune news services
