TalkPick of the Week

Which came first, the Chicken McNugget or the Egg McMuffin?
Blatant thievery, that question; stolen directly from Little Jackie and her mega hit (as Wiki would say: citations needed. ) "The World Should Revolve Around Me".

Well, it doesn't.

The line she or some song(?)writer composed is definitely worthy of some discussion, though. It raises a philosophical and moral question that has been plaguing six year-olds for decades. It's a derivation of a riddle that is older than my favorite Ham Jam t-shirt depicting a pig's head being squeezed from the tap of a beer keg (1988), and older still than my brother's Mumpy (disgusting yellow security blanket which was sewn circa 1973 by a woman named Severance).

Its a McSong version of the age old question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" (Wiki says its Egg that evolved, in a landslide citations needed ). People have bantered on about the subject for Eons, and the revolving time-warp it puts your logical brain into is a classic dinner topic for farmers, The Duggars and most any family that owns the Little Jackie album (according to Wiki, there are seven such families You really need to find some citations, smartass. ).

Time honored traditions like a dinner topic are a lost art in today's world.

In my house alone it is possible, and not unlikely, for there to be dinner-time interference from 4 televisions, 3 Ipods, a computer, a Wii, a PS2, a Gameboy, two dogs and actual food chewing to get in the way of a family conversation. I am proud to say that we turn almost all electronic devices off during family meals unless the four of us agree that the episode of Drake and Josh that happens to be on is funny enough to warrant leaving the volume up in the family room loud enough for us to get the gist of what's actually happening on the screen. In these instances, we generally migrate one by one in toward the TV, salad bowls balanced on our heads and dinner rolls under our arms. We admit defeat to being TV slaves with barely a whimper as we crowd the couch.

Well not anymore America. My wife of 15 years has recently and proudly invented TalkPicks (Patent Pending, All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2009 anything you say will be held against you in a court of law...Citations needed), and the craze is coming to a disjointed dinner table near you.

TalkPicks is a play on words. Say is fast or without the aid of front teeth and it sounds like an already invented and patented word. Say it slow, and you have yourself a gold mine...and a really cool idea.

Every Sunday night becomes someone else's turn to pick the TalkPick. The first week she introduced it, I glared at her and tried to feign interest while listening to Drake argue with Josh about who would go and...never mind. She told us that, from now on, we would have a TalkPick every Sunday, and spend the rest of the week becoming fluent in that paticular subject for until it became retired on midnight of the Saturday hence (that's a fancy Olde English way for tossing it forward seven days, old school, yo).

Knowing that diving immediately into "Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory" would go directly over the heads of some of the members of our (Sam and Ben) family, she wisely chose Spongebob Squarepants as the innaugural TalkPick. And the ensuing conversation was absolutely glorious.

We talked as a family for 45 minutes. I was so engrossed, I forgot to eat my broccoli (citations propbably needed). We talked about our favorite characters, episodes, sayings and conspiracy theories. We talked about animation, the time it takes to make one episode (six months to a year), the reason the show enjoyed longevity and even how plausible it was that Spongebob would ever need to clean a restaurant floor using a bucket of water and mop when said restaurant happens to be resting at the bottom of the ocean floor. It was truly glorious.

The next week, we selected World Records as our TalkPick at Sunday dinner. There was some huffing and puffing at first because it seemed dull compared to Mr. Squarepants and company, but my eldest son rescued the day with his Herculean effort to right the ship. He came home from school on Monday afternoon having absconded (checked out from the library) the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records. It was a field day. Did you know that the record for most pushups by a 38 year old man is 56 in one day (held by yours truly (citations needed)) )?? Did you?

My point, however difficult to see, is that we now have a bonafide tradition in my house involving feeling, conversation and words as opposed to Megabytes, HTML and Wikipedia citations.

Because of this beautiful and soon-to-be-permanent tradition in our house, I can now explain to my boys how life used to be at the dinner table without sending a single text message.

BRB. ROTFLMAO.