Bagels

Reviewing toasters led to conversation with some people about non-standard loaf items that utilise the dreaded cremation machine and this led to bagels. Bagels have always confused me. Confusion is not, admittedly, difficult to illicit from me as many things confuse me, like why anyone listens to anything that’s been released in the last 5 years when clearly everything before it is better, or parsnips. That said, bagels are definitely in the set of things that exist, subset things that exist and confuse me. Not a complicated Venn diagram, I’ll grant you, but I said they were confusing, not complicated.

Yes this does leave some things that don’t exist and confuse me. Like leprechauns, God and zebras.

First of all, it’s part boiled. Confusing. I’m not going to discuss this anymore and I suggest you don’t either.

Secondly, it has a hole. Why? Doughnuts have a hole as well (the ones with holes that is, the ones that don’t have holes don’t) but you don’t cut doughnuts in half and try to butter them, with the inevitable irritation of the butter going through the hole all over your kitchen counter (the butter then automatically being assigned a rating of 0kevin) or possibly all over your kitten, though only if you’re buttering your bagel on a kitten, in which case you deserve a buttery mini-cat. A number of theories spring to mind about the hole. It’s possible that the original bagels were only cooked on one side of a river, and only eaten on the other side of the river and were transported across the river by being slid over a javelin which was then thrown over the river to the awaiting hungry person. This practice may have stopped when someone got bagel poisoning from a bit of bagel getting into the javelin wound of someone who wasn’t expecting a delivery. It’s also possible that bakers in olden times (pre 1987) used unicorns to deliver the bagels. I’m willing to bet you’re all imagining a unicorn with bagels on their horn (is that right? Unicorn horn? Really?) which is ridiculous. They just carry the javelin.

One use that bagels have that is rarely taken advantage of is that they can be used as edible glasses for people who don’t need glasses. They can be used for people who do need glasses as well, but then you need to add lenses and when I googled bagel lenses they didn’t appear to exists, though I wasn’t wearing my reading bagels at the time, so I might have missed them.