> When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s ‘The Thieving Ma

> When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s ‘The Thieving Magpie,’ which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta. Look I haven't seriously studied literature or anything, so maybe I'm being a philistine. But what in the world is the appeal of this? Doesn't balance clarity and curiosity - a lot of mundane details, not reason for me to care about their phone call. I guess it's weird in a meta sense, in how it bucks the trend for good openers? I don't doubt some people genuinely like that line, but that just says to me that this question is so subjective and so unimportant in the grand scheme of things (do people seriously stop reading after a single sentence?) that it sounds bizarre to go as far as teaching a class on the topic.