Hot town, summer in the city! As the mercury rises so does tension and desperation. Hungry for a story, the New York Times dispatched a reporter to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Fun, right? No! Blogs are crying foul.

Yesterday, intrepid City Room blogger nerd Andy Newman was sent to 43rd and Broadway to try and cook an egg on the sidewalk (also a piece of tuna, for some reason — a shameless ploy to appeal to pescatarians, perhaps). It's a cute story featuring a wonderful old lady. Ho hum, silly City Room blog post, right? WRONG.

The ever-nagging NYTPicker blog is outraged that Newman used a frying pan. Because the whole point is that the egg needs to fry on the sidewalk. So this whole thing stinks, it's bullshit, the whole system's outta order. Needle-nosed blog Young Manhattanite agrees, directing us to the apoplectic comments on the City Room story. "[G]ermophobic yuppie experiment" cries one commenter. "I thought the whole point was that you do it ON the actual sidewalk!" says our own Katie Bakes. Why does the New York Times suck so hard every time it tries to do something fun?

It's like the annoying uncle who micromanages a trip to the beach or draws up a careful itinerary that gets handed out as you bounder through the gates of the Magic Kingdom. Of course the Times would bring a stupid frying pan to its whimsical and embarrassingly dated funperiment. Otherwise egg might get on the sidewalk and they'd get in trouble! Oh New York Times, why even try anymore. Just roll over and die, because you are old and never fun anymore.

Stupid frying pan.

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