Yesterday's New York Times arrived with a trend piece so ridiculous that even its own author acknowledged its weightlessness with the aside "don't wear yourself out looking for statistical surveys on this one." The story concerns ice obsessives, those folks who "forego refrigerator ice altogether in favor of the commercially produced kind" and "set out on a kind of gourmet ice hegira (Safeway to Gristedes to Fairway) whenever friends come to drink." Well, sure, who doesn't have a few friends like that in their lives? But then there was this:

CAROLYN POLK did not start out as "an ice snob." For most of her life, Ms. Polk, a 41-year-old St. Louis native, staved off the blistering heat of Midwestern summers with the generic cubes that clunk into a freezer bin like clockwork or drop down a mysterious chute in the refrigerator door.

A couple years back, though, Ms. Polk noted a change in the habits of her guests, who casually started bringing their own ice, she said. Her ice, as it eventually turned out, was apparently not to her friends' liking.

"Maybe the cubes were the wrong shape or they didn't taste that good, I'm not sure," Ms. Polk said last week. "But it got to the point where people came for cocktails, and they were bringing different bags of ice."

Look, setting aside how ethereal the entire story is, this is heartbreaking. If your friends are the kind of people who make you feel bad about the ice you serve, there is something wrong with them. I imagine poor Carolyn Polk closing the door on her final guests as they depart for the night and then bursting into a series of sobs which wrack her body as she tries to figure out what's so awful about her ice. Maybe it's not even the ice at all; maybe her friends are just a bunch of shallow pricks who like to signal their superiority by accepting someone's hospitality and then demonstrating just how wanting it is. The idea of poor Carolyn trying to choke back the wails of shame she must have felt as she tasted the ice in her freezer in a panicked attempt to determine where she had gone so wrong is almost too much to bear.

On the other hand, the story reports that she "now buys all the ice intended for consumption at Ladue Market, where a 10-pound bag ($1.75) is dispensed from a Kold-Draft machine," so what do I know, maybe she's hanging out with the exact crowd she deserves.