An ode to mediocrity

Meanwhile over at Dead Penguin Society, DScott writes about The spork, the pressure cooker, and the back burner… and it got me thinking about sporks.  Not quite a spoon and not quite a fork, these are the utensil apparently designed by cunning chopstick manufacturers to disappoint everyone equally.  I say it’s time for the lowly spork to take its rightful place in English-language pop culture by replacing the words “fork” and “spoon” figuratively in much the same way as it attempts to replace the physical utensils for which it is named: poorly and with connotations of low price and low value.  If along the way it replaces any other words that happen to rhyme, that’s fine too.

• Bad muggers can continue to ply their trade by setting victim expectations low: “OK buddy spork over the wallet!”
• Not good enough to play team sports? You may qualify for team sporks!
• Somewhere between being a good loser and poor loser there’s a gray area of passive-aggressive ambivalence known as good sporksmanship.
• Is it an oxymoron to be “born with a silver spork in one’s mouth?”
• Not sure what base you made it to: “So what happened after you two left the restaurant?”  “We sporked all night.”  “What does that even mean?”
• A Sporking Goods Store would be a grocery store that sells only foods particularly suited to sporks.  Think of a low-end bodega, then go down a notch or two.
• Spork Theory would be like Spoon Theory except that in addition to using up all your spoons, half of them break off at the base of the handle.
• Someone who lies a lot is said to “speak with a forked tongue.”  Someone who runs for public office speaks with a sporked tongue.
• Alternative Matrix dialog: “It is not the spork that breaks, it is only yourself.”  Totally changes the movie, right?
• When you arrive at a fork in the road you take the path less traveled.  When you come to a spork in the road you say “fuck it” and turn around.
• A really bad play-by-play announcer would be a sporkscaster.
• To make an inferior version of Open Source Software you first spork the main code.
• If you ever take a job as a sporklift operator, make sure you get paid by the hour and not by the piece or else you will go broke. Those things are worthless.
• The less-well-known sister city of Grand Forks North Dakota is Grand Sporks North Dakota.  It’s a little South of affluent.  OK, that’s somewhat generous.  It’s actually so far South of affluent it’s effluent.

Back in the day I used to solve the Great Mysteries of the Universe by pairing them off against one another.  (e.g. “Where do the socks go that disappear from the dryer?” and “What are Steak-Ummm’s made of?”  Boom!  Solved.  “What are those black specks in Doritos?” and “Whatever really happened to Jimmy Hoffa?”  Boom! Solved.)

The existence of the spork spawns several new Great Mysteries of the Universe that I haven’t yet solved, but don’t worry because I’m working on it.  Answers will be had to these and other questions:

• What does the tray in the silverware drawer look like if sporks ever go mainstream?
• What would the cow have had to jump over for the dish to run away with the spork and leave the spoon all alone at the salter?
• Will we ever invent measuring sporks?  These are a hard prerequisite for Recipe Randomization movement in the culinary arts that I plan to start.  (Oddly, measuring sporks also provide an endless source of entropy for your PC’s random number generator but that’s a blog post for another day.)
• What will specialty sporks look like?  I’m thinking of the tablespork, vs. the teaspork. Or the salad spork vs. the shrimp spork.  (And what would that shrimp look like, anyway?)

Now that I’ve given you some examples, try to incorporate the word “spork” into your daily life for those times when excellence is overkill and the situation calls for a healthy serving of mediocrity and a lack of functional tableware with which to serve it.

Still here?  You’re being a good spork about all this.