The Five Spot: The Time Has Come To Discuss The Great Pennsylvania Egg Heist

ALSO: A Piña Colada rom-com and the only Super Bowl commercial I am actually excited to see

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: 100,000 eggs is honestly so many eggs

Eggs are in the news. Eggs have been in the news for a while, actually. Too much, some would say. There are a bunch of very serious reasons for this, ranging from inflation to a new strain of bird flu to loud idiots who shout into cameras about whatever they think will make their viewers angriest. I’m not here to talk to you about any of that, though. I would rather get hit with the skillet you use to cook eggs in. What I am here to talk to you about is something far more important: Someone in Pennsylvania stole 100,000 eggs from a distribution center.

That is… I mean, it’s a lot of eggs, man. Like, it’s so many eggs. I think I would consider about 50 eggs to be “a lot of eggs.” This would be 2,000 piles of 50 eggs. And it raises a lot of questions about what exactly you do with 100,000 black market eggs. But we’ll get to those questions shortly. First, we need the full story on this egg heist, which we can get from the very many news outlets that covered it this week, almost all of which opened their articles with a delightfully terrible pun.

Here’s NBC News:

Thieves poached about 100,000 eggs from the back of a distribution trailer, authorities in Pennsylvania said.

Here’s the Associated Press:

The heist of 100,000 eggs from the back of a trailer in Pennsylvania has become a whodunit that police have yet to crack.

Here’s ABC News:

Police in Pennsylvania are trying to crack the case after 100,000 organic eggs worth upwards of $40,000 were stolen from the back of a trailer over the weekend.

Wow, it sounds like police are really scrambling. Guess the case won’t be over easy for them to solve. Maybe they need to bring in a hard-boiled private investigator. They wouldn’t want to whisk away the wrong suspect and get battered in court by the defense attorney, or even an entire defense team if the suspect has an oeuf money to afford one. They better act quickly, though, in case the suspect flees the country and they need to worry about eggstradition. Especially if the illicit funds are getting filtered through various shell corporations. What a bedeviling situation that would be. Omelette you have a minute to think about it all.

Anyway, yes, this is fascinating. The most likely scenarios here are the same ones we always see when large amounts of produce or deli meats are stolen:

• The thieves already have a buyer or syndicate of buyers and they plan to move these very quickly to smaller chains of stores that are getting crushed by wholesale prices and are willing to purchase black-market goods to expand their razor-thin margins a little

• The thieves just straight-up stole a truck without knowing what was on it and hoped for the best

It turns out there is also a third possibility, at least if you believe the State Trooper who was asked about the case at a news conference this week.

“The thieves could sell them or even use them for vandalizing purposes,” Trooper Megan Frazer, a State Police spokeswoman, said in an email on Wednesday. “We don’t know what purpose of stealing 100,000 would be for at this time. With the extreme increased price of eggs, someone may have thought they could sell them.”

Did you see it in there? The phrase “vandalizing purposes”? Is… is Trooper Megan implying that she thinks a bunch of rascal teens stole 100,000 eggs for the express purpose of whipping them at stuff around town? Because that would be… awesome. I mean, it would be bad. Obviously. You should not steal eggs during a national egg crisis and cause further scarcity and additional price hikes just so you and your goon buddies can rocket them at houses and stop sighs in your development. Let me be clear about that just in case a bunch of teens in my neighborhood read this newsletter. But it would be kind of awesome. But bad. But also undeniably awesome. It would be the best weekend in those idiots’ lives.

Two notes in conclusion:

• Please imagine the kinds of things Trooper Megan has seen in her career that resulted in her assuming someone might have stolen 100,000 eggs for the purpose of vandalism

• I really tried to work in a quiche pun but I couldn’t crack it

Sorry.

FOUR: There is a wild legal battle brewing over Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune