On one foray to Philadelphia, I came across the food world equivalent of the most famous six-word story ever. This was the sad sign in the window of a vacant space off Rittenhouse Square: “Restaurant equipment for sale. Bought brand-new. Used for seven months.” Of course, not even Hemingway would have opened a hummus joint so close to Dizengoff.

I panicked and captured a huge bug in the kitchen by slapping a plastic “glass” over it and — cuz I know how those suckers can push back — weighting that with a tin of salt and a mango until Bob could get home and kill it. Then I put on my glasses. And saw it was a piece of crust from the Maison Kayser olive bread.

No link, cuz the hometown paper refuses to keep me logged in, but I got sucked into “daughters of Nigella” and staggered out wondering how “healthful” and blow-up dolls wound up connected. Shorter, though? They’re quacks. Hometown-paper-validated quacks but quacks nonetheless.

A friend emailed me with a funny of a food site’s Tweet noting that “the lifespan of a human hair is three to seven years on average.” What the hell would that have to do with food? The more I thought about it the more I realized the memory of a hair in your food is forever. And not on average.

A bit more in the same vein: My consort and I still subscribe to two daily print editions. I look at everything but the five pounds of glossy magazines that seem to arrive with one or the other every single week. Luckily, or unfortunately, Bob will flip through and rip out the fud stuff. And so I now know there is actually a chef who can get ink by touting the woods she uses for cooking. She lost me at carpaccio, but the whole exercise struck me as “the Escoffier is wearing no apron” of the first order. Really? It’s hard enough to keep the sel gris separate from the Maldon, but to throw wood into the walk-in? Whoever the publicist is deserves a long trip to a faraway country, too, because when I Googled the joint I actually turned up the line “If Brooklyn and Louisville had a baby, it would be . . .” I’m all for marriage equality, but do we really want boroughs screwing cities to create bogus trend babies?

Back story on my Tweet that you should always take your camera to the bathroom in Philadelphia: I made the mistake of leaving mine at the table in a ramen bar where a sign over the toilet advised pressing the small flush button for broth and the big button for noodles. Which of course reads funnier in the original handwriting. Elsewhere a sign warned the closet-sized water closet was for patrons only, “no newspapers or magazines allowed.” Take your balky colon elsewhere, I guess. I did tote my camera into nearly every bathroom in Buffalo last trip but only made crappy (so to speak) pics of a revelatory sign everywhere. Usually the rule over the sink says “employees must wash hands.” There the word “their” is included. Which makes all the difference. Not just any hands handle food.

Also, too: The first rule of food writing really should be: Do not make the reader want to punch your own mom. WASPs serve “en famille,” my derriere.

Throughout the whole Rudy-wouldna-taken-it mayoral vacation, every time I wanted to mock the over-coverage of our socialist leader in Italy, I remembered I read every word, mostly to see what he was eating (and whether the reporters could transcribe and the copy editors could clean up behind them). Of course everyone went right for investigations of the pizza and whether it was tackled like a dollar slice. Having wrestled so many pizzas over so many trips, though, I know the stuff should be eaten not with a knife and fork but a spoon. It ain’t pie. In Italy, it’s soup.

Consider this a confession of what a sloppy journalist I can be — I saw on my FB feed a hosanna for a new book devoted to cooking in your dishwasher and am now just going to trash it without delving deeper. My first thought was that the “pitch” was derriere- backward: “You can clean your dishes and cook dinner at the same time.” My second was that I really hoped author/agent/editor/fact-checker all understand food science at a very deep level, with “canning jars and vacuum-seal bags” involved. (Shall I mention one of the great lessons of restaurant school, that sautéed onions left overnight under a cover on a griddle can kill with botulism?) My third, saddest reaction was the reading the excitement that “it’s with a major publisher.” How long till we get “Mix Your Margarita With a Cat on a Roomba, in a Super-Lucha Cape”?

Apropos of nothing, or maybe everything, I just remembered a gracious friend who excused me and my consort (bad grammar because I caused the screwup) for showing up on the wrong night for a party. She recounted how she and her husband showed up on the wrong night at a hotel in Alaska, threw a fit to get a room and then, at the cook-your-own-breakfast buffet next morning, mistook the sausage and gravy for waffle batter. “I’m sure there’s a warrant out for us in Anchorage.”  At least we left before stinking up the joint. . . .

It’s hard to compare a close-enough-to-get-spattered experience with a blurry video, but it did seem as a chicken slaughtered to make a mad point was sacrificed on the altar of machismo. Real chefs learn a calm bird makes a better roast bird. It’s a good thing technology is so transitory, unlike in Mayan times. A thousand years from now, no one will know the feathers flew for stagecraft and not stew.