Dear friends,
Is it a fitting tribute to Labor Day that I kicked off my Labor Day weekend by ranting about LuthorCorp? It may very well be, but today I'm going to give it a rest, or at least interrupt it with a palate cleanser as it were. I work for a company that has plenty of its own problems, in an industry that has veritable tablets full of problems and challenges, but today I come not to rage at working for The Man, but to breathe a sigh of relief. I come not to bury LuthorCorp, but to thank them.
It is another topic for another time, but after a summer of hectic deskmonkeying, bad moods and broken hearts, I have relaunched into the egg book research with a vengeance. (Those of you who have known me from the start of this book, rest assured that I can hear you falling to your knees, clasping your hands, sobbing and thanking Jesus that this is another topic for another time. Those of you who are new to this space, trust me: eventually you will suffer for my art. 
This morning I emerged from my candy-scented bubble bath and made straight for the Big Box of Notecards, which included my notes from The Chicken Book by Page Smith and Charles Daniel (a really magnificent book that deserves a post all its own). I opened the book to page 348, the midst of a chapter about the culinary uses of chickens and eggs, and found a passage that reminded me, once again, why I am glad that I am not a manageress in the Roman Empire (for this would indeed be included in the food preparation/chicken tending/egg gathering duties of the manageress):
In case an honored visitor caught a host without a milk-fed capon or hen, according to Horace, it was only necessary to dip a tough old bird into a basin of Falernum wine and water while still alive to soften it. The same purpose, we are told, could be served "with a fig placed in the creature's anus."*
While my job is not as difficult, dangerous or low-paying as, say, stevedoring, I am often charged with unpleasant, soul-draining tasks on LuthorCorp's behalf, such as compiling time-consuming reports, letting customers yell at us for the mistakes they've made, and enough filing to kill a stoat. But I can say with all honesty that they have never asked me to place figs in a chicken's anus, and for that, I salute them. Thank you, LuthorCorp!
* I am still trying to figure out what it means that when I read this, my first thought was not "Euuuuuwwwww!", but rather, "Well, figs *do* have tenderizing enzymes, and that's why they were so often paired with hams, because ham meat tends to be tough, so it kind of makes sense that...euuuuuwwwww!"
A postscript: I shared this observation with the lovely bunni, who is blogging side-by-side with me today. I showed her the passage in The Chicken Book; she mentioned that she actually preferred the preceding paragraph: "The poet and physician Battista Spagnoli (Mantuanus) wrote in praise of the capon: 'The greatest glory to you, cock, when you have lost your testicles, for then you are pleasing to sleep, to the stomach, to Venus, to Cybele.'" We are now looking forward to dropping Spagnoli's quote into as many conversations as possible.
Well...at present “Rome“‘s stock in trade is bloody violent death and prone naked men being ridden by lithe naked women (who all have breasts so round as to make me question their historical accuracy), so the odds of such chicken tenderizing showing up are probably slim. Then again, I once thought that the odds of seeing John Gielgud fisted on screen were pretty slim, too (yes, yes, I know it was simulated!), so I guess anything is possible.