I don’t think I have ever encountered a visual joke in a supermarket display before but I came across one yesterday in the Whole Foods Market in the Bowery in New York.

In the middle of the vegetable section, amid the onions and shallots, there was a basket full of quails’ eggs. They were the sort of same shape and colour as the items around them but they were also weirdly out of place. It felt like an absurdist work of art.

I don’t know who was responsible, but congratulations. Would that all shopping were this intriguing.

The topic of the falling burglary rate in western countries has always interested me. It seems a fair bet that burglary has been in decline because there is less point to stealing stuff such as televisions and DVD players.

I wrote a column about it in 2004, which included this paragraph: 

Blue-collar crime has suffered a similar fate to blue-collar work over the past two decades. Just as changes in technology and globalisation have reduced the number of well-paid jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled workers in industrialised countries, the financial returns to burglary have fallen. Televisions are now made in China so cheaply that they are hardly worth stealing.

Anyway, the topic has just been taken up again by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and Felix Salmon. Felix posits that burglary may be about to rise again as a result of the credit crunch.

On the other hand, one positive for burglary was the rising price of gold - it was worth more to break into people’s houses for their jewellery. So it is further bad news for burglars that gold has been plummeting this week.

Driving through Red Hook, the old docks district of Brooklyn, last weekend, I saw a very evocative sign on a building by the harbour: Waterfront Office.

Red Hook has a fair claim to be the setting for Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On The Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando, about racketeering in the New York docks. The original script, which Kazan commissioned from Arthur Miller, was called The Hook. That script was later taken over after a dispute with the studio and renamed.

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