Soup's on

Over the past three months, my son, Grant, has acquired a few things most 19-year-old college sophomores would never dream of possessing. If e-Bay has it, chances are he's in on the bidding.

He’s not your typical shopper. He loves oddball stuff. He recently bought an ant farm, a piece of the Berlin Wall and a seat from the old Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium.

I saw him for a few minutes on Tuesday, and he couldn’t wait to take me upstairs to his apartment. He had a gift for me.

It was a soup ladle he had ordered off the Internet. But not just any soup ladle.

It had been autographed by “The Soup Nazi.’’

You have to be a Seinfeld fan to fully appreciate this. We are all huge Seinfeld fans at our house, and this was one of the classic episodes.

The sitcom character was based on a real New York City soup vendor named Al Yeganheh. His Manhattan restaurant is called Soup Kitchen International.

Yeganheh was immortalized by the Seinfeld series because of his strict rules for ordering soup. Patrons must be prepared to order, have their money ready, move directly to the left after ordering, stay in single file line, order other items (bread, crackers) when placing the soup order and no talking or public displays of affection in line.

The spoon was signed by Larry Thomas, who was cast as the Soup Nazi on the show.

He signed it for me: “Ed: No Soup For You!”

I’m going to add my ladle to my own collection. I have a piece of piece of the original hedges from Sanford Stadium in Athens, part of brick fireplace from the sharecropper’s house where Jackie Robinson was born in Cairo and a pen Tennessee Williams once used to sign an autograph.