Yeats Rolls

Sometimes, God gives you a wink...I was at a local Chinese buffet place Saturday, pretty good selection (it's telling that many such buffets offer a lot of stuff besides your usual Chinese-buffet mainstays like fried rice and General Tso's chicken; they're having to expand their range to accomodate all us foodies out here), when I looked at a sign for one of the items, yeast rolls. Only the way it was spelled was "yeats rolls."

Now, I love good puns based on the names of long-dead Anglo-Irish poets because I grew up loving Monty Python (once described as "a terrible waste of an OxBridge [Oxford and Cambridge, the two universities where most of the troupe went to college] education"). MP excelled at taking people you'd only hear about in history or literature classes and turning them into punchlines for their bizarre, absurdist humor. So when I saw "yeats rolls," I went to W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet whose work I'm passingly familiar with (I read some of his stuff in a poetry class I took at Clemson, where the professor was trying to tell us about all the rules in poetry. I don't like rules when I'm writing, so needless to say I won't be challenging Dylan Thomas' status as a poet anytime soon). Yeats exists in my mind as a slightly befuddled-looking old schoolteacher type, based on the photographs of him on collections of his works. Apparently he was a baker as well (not really, but come on...English majors, back me up on how funny this is! No, just me?).

If W.B. Yeats was responsible for the rolls, I wondered, did that mean that Lord Byron was the brains behind shrimp fried rice? Was John Keats too busy perfecting sesame chicken to take his TB medication? Did I have too much time on my hands to ponder these irrelevant and uttler baseless ideas?

Yes indeed, but give me credit: I didn't point out to the staff the error of their sign. I'm simply snickering about it now behind their backs (and not revealing the name of the place, as I'd like to go back. Did I mention how good their Yeats rolls are?).