So I’m watching this commercial for a wondrous new cooking gadget and a few things strike me. First of all, why do allthe cooking gadgets for our generation suck so hard? Does anybody remember seeing cooking gadget ads in the earlyEighties? There was nothing they couldn’t do! No commercial was complete without a list of “it slices! It dices! Itgrates! It files! It sorts socks! It eats your children!” There are yellowing reams of comedy writing devoted entirelyto making fun of this phenomenon, and now it’s gone. What do we get instead? Vacuum-sealers–which were stupid before Iwas born–and that “Egg Fucker” or whatever it’s called, the thing that takes delicious, ordinary fried eggs and makesthem into perfect little circles of horror. I hate that thing.

Also! Have you ever noticed that every cable commercial trying to sell a new and purportedly brilliant gadget has thesame guy doing the voice-over? How old is he? I remember hearing his voice in the late Eighties, and it hasn’t changeda whit. Maybe there are actually dozens of guys who all grew up listening to the original, and they have formed a corpsdevoted entirely to sounding exactly like him, renting themselves out for cheap commercial voice-overs. What would theycall themselves? How would you know where to find them? What kind of horrible things must they do to themselves, orhave done to them, to be able to get that enthused about (I am not making this up) a batter dispenser?