I found this one too funny not to post....

This came from here

A plague on all your houses’ hated kitchen gadgets

A recent survey, by the hitherto unheard-of company “Comfy Quilts”, has identified the most loathed kitchen gadgets. Although beating off stiff competition from the waffle iron, at the end of the day, it was the electric can-opener that carried off the prize. Although the survey didn’t explain just why their surveyees had nominated any particular item – perhaps, one suspects, because Comfy Quilts’ corporate reservoir of imagination ran dry on the day it decided to call itself Comfy Quilts, instead of Fatal Quilts – I think we all know why.

It’s because the electric can-opener is the most loathsome kitchen gadget. That’s just a fact. Watching one in action – a lopsidedly clamped tin being sporadically punctured by something that operates with effortful whirring – is a grievously vexatious act. No one can witness a can-opener in slow, wonky action without murderous black fury raging in their impatient heart. To be near an operating electric can-opener is to clench your fists, grind your teeth and imagine how much quicker and easier it would be to grab the can, scream and smite its top section off with an axe.

While, obviously, pleased that the provoking nature of waffle irons and electric can-openers are finally making the international news agenda, I can’t help but feel ultimately disappointed by how cursory Comfy Quilts’ investigation has been. Electric can-openers? Is that it? You’re going to leave it there? What about the other 9,000 wholly loathsome kitchen gadgets, which, even as we speak, are pointlessly filling people’s kitchens and making their lives almost inexpressibly worse?

Even now, just thinking of them makes my blood pressure rise. So many things have been unnecessarily invented. The electric popcorn-maker? You could just USE A PAN WITH A LID! Breville Rice Cooker? USE A PAN WITH A LID! Micromark Ome-lette Express? USE A PAN – WITHOUT A LID! Electric bread-maker? USE THE OVEN! Brita Aqua Filter Water Cooler? USE THE TAP! The Smoothie Maker? Ggnkkkk! Gnaghk! Gnar!

The Smoothie Maker, to be honest, I consider to be the last straw. A Smoothie Maker is just a blender – IT’S JUST A BLENDER! – but with a tap on the bottom. A small, useless tap which will, on the first day of use, become clogged by a single strawberry seed, leaving you flossing the tiny nozzle with a pin until 4am, weeping. A Smoothie Maker basically marks the UNINVENTING of the blender. It is a negation of progress. It’s like having sex with monkeys. It will do humankind no good.

Of course, a kitchen gadget doesn’t need to be £29.99 and electrical to be useless and hateful. As any long-term habitué of car-boot sales will tell you, ever since mankind became the master of smelting, he has made baffling, essentially useless metallic kitchen gadgets. The Victorians were frankly deranged by the possibility of filling the average kitchen drawer with culinary knickknackery. And do you know which foodstuff most regularly inspired their inventions? The egg. The egg, it seems, inspires some manner of jealousy in the heart of Man. We look upon its perfect packaging and serene ovoid form – a masterclass in engineering and design – and wish, in some way, to interfere with it. Improve it. Become the master of the egg.

And so, over the millennia, it is egg-taming, egg-primping and egg-torturing implements that have cluttered the kitchen drawer. I have “egg baths”, “egg rings”, “egg-yolk keepers”, and at least half-a-dozen egg poachers of varying construct, methodology and insanity. My favourite item – now, sadly, lost – was a pair of “boiled egg scissors” which promised the ability to: “Cut a hard-boiled egg. . . like scissors.” This is perhaps second only, in terms of special powers, to being able to climb buildings and ejaculate wrist-web.

Of course, there is only one place where an unhealthy fascination with kitchen ephemera will lead you – and that is the Lakeland catalogue. Ah, the Lakeland catalogue. For anyone enthralled by culinary tat, it exudes the same inescapable allure that the assassination of JFK offers the paranoid. It is at Lakeland that mankind’s destructive jealousy towards the perfection of the egg reaches its apogee. Only Lakeland vends Cracking Eggs – a curious plastic jaw that promises to “crack eggs perfectly every time!”, the Egg Separator, the Egg Slicer – JUST USE A KNIFE! – and the threatening Egg Piercer. On the online version, every entry is accompanied by a one-click option to “Tell a friend!”.

However useless and borderline terrifying these items might be, however, none of them inspires in me the fury of something seemingly both innocuous and ostensibly useful. Since the age of 11, I have been convinced of the parasitic malignancy of the oven glove. Grrrrrk, oven glove! If you use an oven glove, I judge you, in the same way that other people make judgments about 4x4 drivers, or Nazis. Why would any right-thinking person have an oven glove? An oven glove is an abomination on the face of the earth – like the fat, overpampered cat of the kitchen. If you want to get something hot out of the oven, you should use a folded tea-towel. That’s what Indiana Jones would do, if his casserole was on the verge of catching.

The idea of fussing around in a drawer for a special glove is the act of a nervous, niminy-piminy bachelor like Timothy Lumsden in Sorry, and that counts for the ladies, too. Oven gloves are leeching off us. Oven gloves are taking us all for a ride. Oven gloves are laughing at us.

That the Lakeland catalogue has seven different types – including a “Revolutionary Gauntlet” – doesn’t surprise me at all