Dinner with my illustrious 'rents tonight. Just how illustrious, you may well ask. Well, cop a load of this: my dad, as I was telling folks the other night, enjoyed a brief stint as Sydney's foremost amateur potato-sexer,* shares a name with the erstwhile chair of the sewerage management committee formerly known as the NSW Waterboard, and has entertained countless international audiences with the antics of his false tooth; me mum does cryptic crosswords in the time it takes lesser mortals to tie their shoelaces, has the world's most fascinatingly webbed toes, and - I think this is true, correct me if I'm wrong - wrote the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. They are, additionally, two of the loveliest people in the whole world.
Aw.
* Potato-sexing, Pater Harlot-style, performed by dangling a nail by a piece of string above the suspect potato. The trajectory of the nail's gyrations will indicate the potato's sex.
8 comments:
Aw, Shucks!! You are too generous in your comments. I didn't really write The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
I mentioned your toes in a lecture yesterday, and someone came up afterwards and told me that both his sister and his daughters had them!
Dear LH,
Sexing a potato, eh! I know I am a naff naif and my mother says it was because I was brought up genteel, but what is the point/ending of the potato sexing. Do the spuds get together as in Harry met Sally? Y'see I've never noticed this. So is this a half-baked idea? The only magic I know of potato productivity/pro-creation is nice white flowers above ground and spuds beneath the grounds. Please explain.
Blessings and bliss
Now I'm going to love potato sexing and especially boiling the male ones.
Every time you make mashed potatoes from now on, it will be like the uniting of two lovers...
THE MOST LAMENTABLE TRAGEDY OF DESIREE AND PONTIAC
PONTIAC: (Approaches balcony) But soft! What light from yonder window breaks?
It is the east - and Desiree is the sun!
DESIREE: 'Tis but thy name that is an enemy.
Thou art a Pontiac. What's a Pontiac?
It is not potato, nor potato, nor potato, nor any other part belonging to a potato.
What's in a name? That which we call a pumpkin
By any other name would taste as sweet.
PONTIAC:
I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptised.
Henceforth I never will be Pontiac...
(And wait till you see the scene where Pontiac turns Pink Eye into chips!)
Carbohydrates and gender...
Enquiring minds want to know, "Why sex a potato?" The answer, according to me Pa, back in his potato-sexing days (although he now denies all recollection of ever having dangled a nail above a spud), is that the ladies are good for the planting and the chaps are good for the eating. When I raised this subject at dinner on Tuesday, my mother very sagely pointed out that potatoes' sex cells are in their flowers, not their starchy fundaments, but it is possible that some taters are more likely to sprout compatriots than others. That this supposedly makes them female I suspect derives from a dubious analogy with female mammalia.
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