Egg-selent things.

‘I can’t go within 50ft of a Catholic church or risk violating my restraining order’. They’d asked if I’d gone to church to thank baby Jesus for my Easter eggs’. Not gonna bait me with your false narrative I think smugly… I know where the chocolate comes from.

The progeny were awake before me this morning, so I had use ALL my ninjitsu dark arts to cache the Easter eggs. You know, the stuff they only teach you once you’ve passed the threshold of the sixth gate in the subterranean Hong Kong headquarters of the Black Dragon Society. All these years I knew I was training for something. Today was that day.

Ten minutes later they’re back in bed, smashing a Lindt-bunny into their faceholes and streaming Gravity Falls on their devices. ‘My god, you have the best lives and don’t even know it’ I muse and briefly consider hitting them with a fractious old man’s diatribe. The one about when I was their age and I was coming off a four day super stint of being an altar-b… server.

Maundy Thursday into Good Friday, morphing into Holy Saturday and then the Easter Sunday Service. All conducted in German I would mutter. Which, unlike those slovenly English churches, means we were relentlessly drilled in uprightness and precision of action. On the plus side our parish priest had a mistress and so couldn’t be bothered to fiddle with any of us.

‘Mom! Dads going on about the 80’s!!!!’

Which is my queue to shuffle off and do something venerable and grown up. Like… clean the kitchen. Which is taking on its own unique and calamitous persona. I’ve been cooking up a Sunday roast. Moroccan lamb more precisely but I’ve made quite mess of the surroundings (as is my pernicious nature).

I still have time though I decide, glancing up at the analog, before the guests arrive and things start taking on a sense of urgency. Or perhaps just the sense that if I don’t shovel the plates into the dishwasher it’ll look like the later chapters of Lord of the Flies in here. Which it sometimes is. About forty percent of the time. But I’m embarrassed to put our/my savagery on display like that.

I’ve been reading this, he says adjusting his camera, and segueing into something else.

It really good. Like maybe even top ten. But… he added, pausing for a moment, probably not a broad appeal subject matter. That and Nassim Nicholas Taleb has an… odd (to me anyway) syntax that I couldn’t quite get used to. He’s also supremely arrogant, with no subtlety to it, which I found a little jarring. DEFINITELY skip the prologue.

BUT, having said all that, its still an egg-selent book. One that, after a hundred pages, I went and bought a Kindle version of so I could make better notes, lest my paperback version just became a forest of multi-colored sticky markers and Stabilo Boss bleed through.

A rare happenstance. In fact Thomas Sowell is the only other author to garner this accolade thus far. So esteemed company indeed.

Read it if you like staring into the abyss.