August 13th, 2006
The innovation curve
I have only ever once seen a chicken and egg sandwich… it was at a service station just outside London. Clingfilm wrapped and smelling of sulphur.
There is something about that sandwich that really disturbs me… Perhaps it is the idea of surrounding a cooked bird carcass with the mushed-up remains of its embryotic young. Perhaps it was the lack of mayonaise.
A mother and child reunion, if you will.
Just realised what a great pun that is… sorry for the months of lag, I’m a bit slow sometimes.
“Parent-child” (“oyako”) is, in fact, the slighty discomfiting name that chicken and egg dishes bear in Japan.
(Beef and egg get called “tanin”: “strangers.”)
Ahh, and now it has a name…
I’ve been learning Japanese for a little while. not with great sucess, but I find a lot of Japanese words have some great literal-English meanings… that said, those are two brilliant examples.
i need a bit of help learning Japanese, if you find anything useful, would you share?
Mmm… Oyakodon. One of my favorite cheap meals….
Twice in my life have I purchased egg salad sandwiches in London. And twice I have gotten food poisoning. Be ‘ware, be ‘ware, be very very ‘ware.
All we need to do is determine if it is the ‘egg sandwiches’ or the ‘London’ that his this effect on you.
Having spent some time in London, I cannot rule either out.
The answer to the chicken and the egg question can take two forms.
The religious form: The chicken came first, because according to Genesis 1:21, God created every bird, but it never mentions Him creating any eggs.
The scientific form: Eggs came first, because dinosaurs laid them.
But if you had to choose?
Oh, I’m sure dinosaurs laid eggs.
But if one is specifically asking about chicken eggs, it’s really true that the question can’t be answered, since the development of the chicken involved such gradual evolution (and,in its latest stages, gradual selective breeding). Even if one had a family tree listing every individual bird in the chicken family’s heritage for millions of years, it would be impossible to choose a bird that you could call “the first chicken.”
I suppose that if you could, then the egg from which that bird hatched would have been the first chicken egg, and therefore the egg would have come first– but identifying the first chicken is like identifying what day of one’s life is the first day of old age, or how many grains of sand you must have in one place before it’s considered a heap.
But the first chicken certainly didn’t just appear from thin poultry air. It hatched from an egg, therefore on that thinking the egg definitely came first.
10 Print “chicken!”
20 Print “egg!”
30 Goto 10
of course the egg!
think about the chicken to be! can it be by itself? but if u watch the nature u can see so many examples of eggs…
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