Why Would I Write

Category: Thoughts

  • Humpty Dumpty

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
    Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
    All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
    Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

    The other day, I was driving home from work and for some reason the nursery rhyme popped into my head. For no good reason. Anyway, there it stayed, stuck for a bit. I thought about the lyrics and then realized that nowhere in the rhyme does it ever mention Humpty Dumpty being an egg. So how come every children’s book I’ve seen with the rhyme has an accompanying illustration of an anthropomorphic egg?

    Why would an egg have a name? Why would an egg need to be put together again? Why was the egg talked about as though it was a living thing? These questions flooded my mind, so I decided to look it up. Thanks to the very detailed Wikipedia article I learnt a few things:

  • Humpty Dumpty was said to be an egg when the rhyme was told as a riddle.
  • Humpty Dumpty has also been illustrated as a human boy before.
  • “humpty dumpty” was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person.
  • There are multiple variations of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme, the most common one being the one I posted.
  • The character has also been referenced many times in pop culture and literary works.

    • Anyway, I guess the mystery is kinda solved. I won’t ever have to think about the strange egg again.

  • Chef’s Recommendation/Our Other Dishes Aren’t As Tasty

    I’ve always wondered why restaurants do that. I mean, shouldn’t all your dishes be recommended dishes? What’s the point of recommending one dish over another? The only reason I can think of is the restaurant wants to sell something that isn’t selling very well, or something that they have a surplus of. But these star dishes are always on the menu and are rarely changed, so it doesn’t make much sense unless they are constantly overstocking the kitchen with ingredients for those dishes.

    There’s a chance that it really is the best dish available at the restaurant. But if that’s the case, does that mean the other dishes served are sub-par? Why not improve the recipe of everything else so that they can all be recommended too?

    And if only certain dishes are worth eating, why not cut everything out and only sell that? Become a specialized place. That way you can save inventory space, reduce the training for your chefs, and possibly make more money in the process. And it’ll also eliminate any mistakes in the order process.

    Because the ‘chef’s recommendation’ label does work (at least on me). Every time I go to a new restaurant and I have no idea what to order, the little star/chef’s hat/tick next to the dish name makes me lean towards ordering it. Maybe I am just a weak-minded fool. Ever noticed that the recommended dishes are usually the pricier ones?

    Maybe I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill here, and there is no thought process behind the ‘chef’s choice’ label. It was just an idea some random employee thought of doing to make their menu look more interesting, and it somehow caught on to the rest of the industry.

  • Online data and me

    As you can already tell, I’m a huge proponent of the internet because of the convenience it brings me. I love the fact that I can sign in to Chrome on a new computer, and all my favorite sites, bookmarks, logins are synced and ready to be used. I love the fact that when I’m searching for something, the search results are tailored for me based on my past searches. I enjoy having reminders for any upcoming events automatically appearing on my phone even though I didn’t add them to my calendar manually. I love that Google tells me how long it’s going to take for me to get to work based on the usual route I drive everyday. It’s great. This convenience is awesome.
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