Because brushing your teeth is just too hard.

[lemon_says]

I hate those commercials where they use ineptitude as justification for the existence of their product. Like when they try to sell the pasta pot with the holes in the lid, they show all these people dumping their spaghetti into the sink, or on the floor, or anywhere but into the colander.

It's not that hard to drain spaghetti.

There's one where the person is trying to cut a straight line to separate some photos, and the scissors veer off across one photo to show how she needs the straight-line-chopper. The can tops all drop into cans, contaminating tuna or splashing soup, because these people didn't have the magnetized can opener. People chopping vegetables cut their fingers and fling zucchini hither and yon. Eggs are burned, pancakes folded. I just now saw a commercial for a spinning toothbrush because brushing your teeth manually is "a lot of work." I don't personally consider brushing my teeth to be particularly taxing, but maybe it's just me.

The banana slicer is, I'm sure, one of the most necessary inventions known to man.

What is the least-necessary gadget that you own?

Comments

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

An egg-piercer.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

Why do you pierce eggs?

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

In theory it's to stop them from cracking when boiled. I've never used it as I boil eggs only around Easter time for the purposes of dying.

[jaysaint.livejournal.com]

That pasta cooker commercial kills me. I love how all the actors have this "Oh My God! Pasta! Help me!" thing going on.

I don't have room for any superfluous gadgets, but I can tell you one that I thought would be and it turned out to be fantastic -- my little metal lemon squeezer I bought in San Antonio.

I can squeeze a lemon. Hard. I know I can warm it and roll it to get more juice. And I've had a plastic lemon squeezer before. But this metal guy has a rough surface and it really grabs the peel. I swear I could lemonade a whole front porch worth of Southerners in five minutes with the amount of juice this thing extracts.

[pipistrella.livejournal.com]

Noted.

I love lemonade and I put lemon juice in everything. I'll have to get one of those.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

Yeah, she sold that one, didn't she?

[jaysaint.livejournal.com]

Me too! My husband thinks it's hilarious.

I'm going to Friend you now, based on our affinity for all things Lemon.

[pipistrella.livejournal.com]

Back at you. :)

Be warned: I am a total geek who works on video games for a living, and I've just discovered bitstrips.

[jaysaint.livejournal.com]

There are few people I enjoy more than total geeks. And since I don't know what a bitstrip is, I look forward to learning from you as well.

[pipistrella.livejournal.com]

I've actually had to curtail my bitstrip creativity. It was pointed out to me that I was doing a lot of strips about work, and that I can be traced back to the company I work for.

I'd love to write more about work, but I have this NDA, and although our game is not yet released we have a bunch of people on the forums who have been known to discover and stalk our blogs.

But yeah - I'm a geek. A geek who doesn't (I hope) look or act like a geek. I like to think that if you saw me in the street you'd have no idea that I do all kinds of role-playing games - including the supremely dorky live-action kind - and write video game dialogur for a living.

[jaysaint.livejournal.com]

You definitely don't want to be Dooced.

I try to practice a fair degree of discretion as well, since I'm a media person by profession.

Let me preface the rest: I have ZERO gaming cred. Really. None. But I love that stuff. The most I can claim is that I played Diablo through twice and may do it again some day. But I'm always looking for games I can play in that genre that don't require me to learn reams of new information. I just want to shoot things with arrows and solve (non-Mensa-level) puzzles.

Live action? Neat!

[pipistrella.livejournal.com]

Oh, live-action is supremely dorky! You can do these elaborate stage sets and create role-playing scenarios around moral dilemmas and to most of the world you will still be some nerd in chain mail. You sort of have to get over that to do it.

I love puzzle games. The one I work on is set to be an MMO, but I love those single-player games that are all about escaping the castle or whatever.

[jaysaint.livejournal.com]

What's "MMO"?

Do you have any of those single-player castle games to recommend? I have a computer and a Wii on which I can play. Because a new baby means lots of free time for epic quests.

[pipistrella.livejournal.com]

Um.

Here's where I have to admit something embarrassing. Because I work on an MMO, I've been focusing on playing MMOs lately and pretty much all the single-player games I know are for the PS2. However, my office is a wealth of gaming knowledge, and so it'll be easy to find out what's good.

But you DID say epic quests - does that mean WoW is an option?

After writing this, I noticed your initial question.

MMO or MMORPG = massive multiplayer online role-playing game, e.g. World of Warcraft or Everquest.

The one I work on is not yet released, but the job does allow me to, when people ask what I do at work, say, "I'm in charge of ninjas."

I noticed you said you were in media - what sort? I'm assuming it's something way less nerdy than gaming.

[jaysaint.livejournal.com]

I think WoW, from my limited exposure, proved to be too complicated for me. With a new baby in the house I really need a game I can just jump in and play. Annoying, I know.

I would love to be in charge of ninjas, there's no way my job is as cool as that. I run a web site. Right now it's Redbookmag.com but soon it will be another one, as I've just taken a new job. I can't reveal that one yet, but will very soon. That makes it sound glamorous, and it shouldn't.

[blakdove.livejournal.com]

My mom loves useless gadgets. This Christmas, we got two! One was a lighted magnifying eyebrow tweezer. Now, the light and the magnifyer are great, but the actual tweezers don't tweeze.

The second one was a plastic tube for cooking spaghetti. You put spaghetti into it, add boiling water, and add ten minutes. How that saves us any time or energy over boiling water in a pot and adding the pasta to that and waiting 7 minutes, I'm still not sure. But, here we are.

I break spinning toothbrushes because I brush too vigorously anyway. They're for wimps.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

We saw the commercial for the pasta tube, and P said, "Why is that easier?" We tried to think of a reason, but came up with none.

[blakdove.livejournal.com]

It'd be great for a dorm, where all you have is an electric kettle and no stove (or a heavily-shared stove). But in a house?

[heathrow.livejournal.com]

The apple slicer. It takes me more time than just getting a knife and slicing it.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

Is that the one that cores and slices?

[heathrow.livejournal.com]

Yeah - however, the core always gets stuck at the bottom, so I have to pry it out at the end by slamming it against the counter. At that point, I regret not getting out the cutting board and a knife. I can do it with a knife in about 30 seconds.

[pipistrella.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to think. I like gadgets, but my taste doesn't generally run to kitchen gadgets unless you count my tea infuser and maybe those little silicon egg-poaching cups. I also have this Japanese tomato knife that could slice a hair lengthwise. I love that knife.

The banana slicer is stupid. I'd like, however, to officially exclude bagel slicers from this list because slicing a bagel really can be a pain.

Unnecessary, yet cool? I have a wireless speaker with a built-in woofer in an 800 sq. foot apartment. I could blow out the walls with this thing. I realize that's a different theme - I can't think of anything I own to keep me from screwing something up like the people in the commercials.

I am so getting you an Octodog for Christmas.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

If you get me an Octodog, I'll serve you one next time you're here.

Bagel slicers prevent emergency room visits. That excludes it from the useless category.

There is a whole "As Seen On TV" store. I figure we ought to keep Daddy out of there.

[baeyear.livejournal.com]

http://www.octodog.net/

I had to look that up... that scares me. I mean, is it so hard to get kids to eat a hotdog that you have to make it look like a squid? Is a squid a more appealing food for kids?

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, it was actually invented because of the fear of kids choking on hot dogs that hadn't been sliced lengthwise.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

We not only ate them unsliced, we sometimes ate them raw, right out of the fridge. It's amazing none of us died of listeria.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

I can't remember where it is--Mall of Georgia, maybe, or Discover Mills? I'll see if I can remember.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

eshayden says it is at Discover Mills.

[raving-liberal.livejournal.com]

I swear by bagel slicers.

[travellight.livejournal.com]

Shrimp deveiner. Because the chances of me buying shrimp that aren't already deveined? So slim as to be neglible.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

Yup, same here.

[travellight.livejournal.com]

They're good for poking at things, though.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

You could use it to separate your eyelashes.

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

Huh. I use my shrimp deveiner.

[wolfmare.livejournal.com]

Gods, this is a tough one. I'm an artist, name it. I actually just finished tossing about half of my paintbrushes because I had so many of the exact same thing.

Dip pen, useless since I get better control with a brush.

Garlic press, since we started buying the pre-minced jars of the stuff.

Not one, but TWO blenders, which we never actually use.

Um... Yeah, the list goes on.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

I also started buying the minced garlic too because I hated chopping it or pressing it. I think I still have two garlic presses, though. When I was little we used to put play-doh through my mom's. She would get so annoyed because she'd find it and have to use a toothpick to poke the dried play-doh out of it.

[raving-liberal.livejournal.com]

My mom actually bought the makin bacon (http://www.makinbacon.com/welcome.htm) thing. The bacon came out dry and tasteless.

ETA: I have to add that my Cook's Essentials pasta pot has a strainer lid and it's the best damn thing ever. Delicate pasta like tortellini fall apart sometimes when you pour them into a colander, but the strainer lid means you don't have to transfer them. Plus, you only have to wash one thing.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

It's not the pot that bothers me; it's the commercial.

[raving-liberal.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think my pots have a commercial, so I'm fine with that. ;)

[pearl-and-rose.livejournal.com]

I LIKE my egg slicer, thank you very much.

And I think we're all familiar with my avacado masher.

[martina-d.livejournal.com]

Well, my (idiot) mother-in-law actually gave me one of those pair of battery-operated scissors. Now, how much cutting would one have to do to make it worthwhile to use scissors that require batteries? For one thing, they are much heavier than a pair of regular scissors. For another thing, it takes about as much energy to squeeze the trigger than to squeeze blades open and shut. But I can see why they appealed to her...

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

I gave my mother some Black&Decker electric scissors, but that was partly a joke because she rails against packaging. You know how everything comes in that impenetrable clamshell packaging? Those just cut through all of it.

[martina-d.livejournal.com]

These were not Black and Decker. She buys all of my presents at the Dollar store, so these were the dollar version of the As Seen on TV scissors. Not quite in the same category!

[aspira.livejournal.com]

Well we do use our stupid gadgets - I have the pot with holes, the apple corer - and the veggie chopper. I would say the pot is rarely used anymore.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

I have a vegetable chopper and I like it. I always forget I have it, though.

[1smart1.livejournal.com]

All of the above? But then again, you've never seen me in the kitchen . . . or in the bathroom. Some of us actually need this stuff. Some of us are actually THAT inept.

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could be in a commercial.