With a wind chill alert in most of Canada, (quite normal for this time of year) I got thinking about cold.
Ice cream is warmer than I am right now. That’s because I holed up in front of the computer learning some technical things and sorting them into English in my head. I get the exact same headache with technical language and symbols that I do with ice cream. I prefer ice cream. The Toque thinks about these things too.

BASKIN ROBBINS– Scientists are still baffled in their efforts to find a cure for ice cream headaches, despite millions of dollars and years of research. The ice cream headache is an affliction that affects roughly 15,000,000 daily in North America. The disorder causes an immediate cold, sharp pain to rush up to the brain, causing numbness and other related symptoms. There is no cure in sight.

This is not good.

Many other researchers scoff at these wildly imaginative theories, including Dr. Turnacoat. “I won’t dismiss it out of hand,” said Dr. Turnacoat. “Obviously any theory is worth a second sorbet, er, sober glance, but it seems pretty clear to me that a snow cone lacks the richness and velvety smoothness I would expect from a fine ‘Traditional Vanilla’. It stands to reason the headache will be different too.” While most ice cream headaches are benign, others fear that they may cause more serious problems, such as temporal displacement, similar to the effects of suspended animation.

It looks like the medical and research scientists can’t come up with a consensus.

“The ice cream headache sufferer could possibly lose time,” explained Dr. Tse Ling-Phan, a temporal neurologist for the Kensington University Health Sciences Center. “Although an ice cream headache seldom lasts more than 30 seconds, it could effectively prolong that person’s lifespan by 30 seconds. I call it Frozen Food-Induced Temporary Cryogenics, or FFITC for short.”Dr. Ling-Phan believes that with enough research the time-displacement power of the ice cream headache could become a reality, but warns that it should not be fooled with by amateur scientists or evil geniuses-in training.

Brrrr. Parse. Scoop. Scrape. Ouch!