the basket case

(originally posted 9/17/2020)

If there’s one thing that we can’t accuse the United States of doing is trying to put all of our eggs in one basket. Simply put, there would be no benefit to it.

Considering that the US produces 99 billion eggs a year, just the logistics of getting all of those eggs to one location would be a non-starter let alone the cost of constructing a basket big enough to hold all of them, even if there was a good reason to do it.

Which there isn’t.

There will always be those that insist that there is merit in creating an omelet that can be seen from outer space, but now more than ever we have to hope those people are institutionalized for their own good and the good of those around them.

Of course, there will also be people who claim that the ‘eggs’ referenced in the expression “all of our eggs in one basket” are metaphors, of course they are, but there’s nobody that can successfully argue that the basket isn’t real.

All too real.

It doesn’t matter what you put in the basket, the basket is a constant. Basketry predates pottery and stone-carving by hundreds, if not thousands, of years and while we may never know what came first the chicken or the egg, you can be bloody sure that baskets came in a close third. Baskets played a part in the first mathematical thinking as well. In order to make any basket, you have to be counting the number of vertical ribs, and the number of rows. In order to weave a patterned basket, you have to be counting stitches like a knitting pattern. In order to figure out how big the basket would need to be to hold 99 billion eggs, the circle comes… full circle(?)… when you have to use math to figure it out. If you can fit 82 million eggs in an Olympic-sized swimming pool it would take a basket equivalent in size to 1,193 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

That’s a formidable basket. 1,193 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Would it take eggheads to build it?

It’s a big country… maybe the omelet thing is in play after all.

“A desk, some pads, a pencil, and a large basket — to hold all of my mistakes.”

Albert Einstein