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Eggs roll... No, no, no, not "egg rolls"... eggs roll. Sometimes, when cooking with eggs, you put them down and they wander off the bench and leap on the floor, with predictable results.
What most people don't know is that eggs, when freshly laid, have soft shells... presumably to make life easier
for chickens (Gallus, the chicken god, is a caring individual after all). Anyway, the eggs have soft shells, which harden within a few minutes of being laid.
During the interregnum (the time between laying and hardening), it is possible to gently shape the shell, to make a shape that isn't... well, egg-shaped.
If this was done commercially then it would be possible to mould the eggshells so they have four flattened sides on them, facilitating better packaging, transportation and storage. It would also prevent those embarrassing egg BASEjumping incidents, in the kitchen.
Viola! The Squegg has arrived.
~bz
[bristolz,
Jun 07 2005, last modified Jun 28 2005]
Square things to eat
Standardized_20snac...hapes_20_26_20sizes
[Ling, Jun 06 2005]
Grow your own square tomatoes
http://www.en.varta....varta-consumer.com
[Ling, Jun 06 2005]
See the poem: "In defense of square eggs"
http://tenderbytes....eye/eggs.htm#square
[Ling, Jun 06 2005]
I feel you would need to strap something to some part of the bird's anatomy
electrically_20assisted_20eggs
[po, Jun 07 2005]
Tetrahedral bricks
Tetrahedral_20bricks
In fact it seems tetrahedra aren't space-filling, but other polyhedra are. [hippo, Jun 07 2005]
Q&A re soft shells
http://www.thepoult...umSel=producersvets
“Eggs should be shelled and hard when laid.......if not, this could be as a result of either disease (for example Infectious Bronchitis) which temporarily affects the shell-gland or could be lack of calcium or phosphorous in the diet. hope that helps and that your stock are better.” [Shz, Jun 07 2005]
[link]
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Four stitches in a square of the os, and you'd be on your way. |
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Goes well with square tomatoes. Now that's what I call a square meal. |
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Now the ADA can make a food pyramid entirely of eggs! “The incredible, edible squegg.” |
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Hmmm, if it doesn’t spin, I’ll need a new way to identify the hard-boiled ones. |
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Please post photos of your eggsperiments. |
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Concept [+], name [+]. Hail the rise of the Squegg. |
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[2_fries], many years since I, as a whippersnapper, had the duty of collecting the eggs from the chookhouse and bringing them up to the kitchen. My cousin and I would wait for a hen to drop a cackleberry, then pounce. |
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Many eggs were delivered with shallow finger indentations in the shells, hence the idea. |
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Excellent idea. See link for a discussion of other polyhedra apart from cubes which are 'space-filling' - i.e. tesallate nicely in three dimensions. |
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I vaguely recall stories of square eggs somewhere.... |
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I didn't realise that freshly laid eggs had
soft shells. Sure you're not making that bit
up, UB? |
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No. We used to grab them within seconds of exiting the chook. They were always soft. |
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[shapu] I remember a gadget from the 1970s that produced square boiled eggs, but this is much better, though it is going to be difficult to spin a squegg to see if it is fresh or boiled. |
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My daughter got me some eggs from the fridge this morning, to cook for breakfast. One of them did the BASE (Bench Averse Suiciding Egg) jumping thing. |
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I wonder why nobody has
sold eggs with at least a flat spot so that
you can
stand them on end. Have this square
croissant. |
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Nice idea. You could probably patent a square egg-cup as well .. get some money out of it ;) |
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//I wonder why nobody has sold eggs with at least a flat spot so that you can stand them on end.//what would happen if you stick an elastoplast ( band-aid) on the round bottom end and just thump it flat on the working surface? |
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Instead of a post-production modification, why not shape the egg during the extrusion process with a square cloaca insert? |
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Heh. I almost said that. No I didn't. |
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is it the shape of the cloaca that decides the shape, do you think? you'd think the act of dropping to the floor would result in a droplet shape or a flat bottom at the least. |
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I think I have decided this is a huge hoax. in my research for electrically assisted eggs, I didn't come across this phenomena at all. |
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[UB]’s birds were ill or malnourished? <link> |
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"Sliced squegg and cubicumber (qv) sandwiches, anyone?" All we need is square-leaved cress, (Squress?) and the rectilineaphile contingent among us is happily fed. |
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Maybe they were malnourished. Other birds used to get a pretty good go at the feed trough. These were free range chooks, after all. |
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You could just give them DDT. That softens egg shells pretty well. |
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//when freshly laid, have soft shells//
If this were only true! But alas, it isn't, except maybe with these chooks south of the equator. |
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With the introduction of Squeggs, could Squeggos be far behind? Square-egg-shaped building blocks with which to unleash the imagination ... |
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I've seen those... But they looked more like an unusual flashlight. |
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Could have been DDT. There was a lot of it around, during my childhood. |
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Thank you for the illustration, [bris]. It's exactly how I imagined them to look. |
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14 in that stack? Must be a Halfbaker's Dozen? |
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I hope it's not true that only sickness or malnutrition causes soft shells. I was thinking yesterday that if the eggs were put in small vacuum baggies when they first hatched the working time would be extended.
Molds could be made and if the air was slowly evacuated from them after the soft-shelled eggs were inside, then some amount of sculpting could be achieved. Paint-able sculpted eggs would sell like hotcakes around Easter, heck you could make little historical busts or snowman shaped eggs. |
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That does it Faberge is going down, we could call it Ovumolding. |
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If it's just a shortage of calcium or phosphorus that makes eggs soft then these factors could be exploited for this purpose. |
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if you fed the chickens on a diet of iron fillings would the
eggs all swivel round to point north and stick to the
outside of the fridge like magnets? |
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Maybe, if you could find some. But if you use ordinary fillings, the hens would be poisoned. |
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The use of stainless steel fillings was popular, in Russia. |
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Magnetic or non-magnetic? |
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1) Fertilization of the ovum (if it's to take place) occurs in the upper funnel end of the oviduct, call the infundibulum, also referred to as the sperm pocket. This fertilization process takes approximately 15 minutes. (That Rooster's bragging)
2) Then the fertilized ovum travels to the magnum where it spends approximately 3 hours while the albumen protein (egg white) is secreted.
3) Further down the tract in the isthmus, two shell membranes are secreted loosely around the ovum and albumen, which takes approximately 1-1/2 hours.
4) This soft egg continues its journey into the uterus (shell gland) where it stays for 20-21 hours while the shell is secreted in layers over the membrane.
5) Once shell is fully formed and hardened, the egg is then passed immediately through the vagina where it is 'laid'. |
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Thus if you surgically or genetically reshape the uterus, you could influence the final shape of the egg, but you couldn't go too far or the laying process would be distressing. I'm sure some solution could be found though, and flocks of "Squegged" Chickens would fetch a premium. |
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Sea birds that roost on the sides of cliffs lay eggs with elongated shapes, so that instead of rolling off the cliff, they simply roll round and round in a circle. So my solution would be to cross a chicken with a puffin. A chuffin? |
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On one episode of a show called Green Acres, Oliver, the main character, has dreams where he finds square eggs laid by his chickens... |
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See the Banana Unbender, a similarly bizarre idea. |
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