The 6 Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #3 (MiniBest)

When I am rich -- that's a when, not an if-- I will not only follow through on my longstanding but rarely discussed plan to teach myself the Weapon of Choice dance and then recreate it, but also I will have even more gadgets than I do already in my kitchen, and I might even use them.

In our kitchen, somewhere, we have (I'm going off memory here and might miss some) numerous gadgets, like the toaster, which is a kitchen gadget but nobody thinks of it as such. We just take for granted that a toaster is a regular ol' kitchen tool that everybody has and not some unique kitchen-y thing that nobody really needs but which we find useful, but a toaster is a kitchen gadget, and if toast, itself, didn't date back to Roman times -- if not farther back -- and if toasters, themselves, hadn't been first invented in maybe 1893, according to The Toaster Museum, which used to be a real place but now, sadly, exists only in cyberspace at least until the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, gets the permanent (500+ toasters) collection ready for display.

Everything I said in that last sentence is absolutely true.

Where was I? Oh, yeah: If toast wasn't 6,000+ years old, and if toasters weren't older than your grandma, we'd not accept them as regular appliances in our kitchens, but instead would think of them as some wacky, late-night TV gimmickry:

"Tired of eating floppy soft bread? Does this [picture of person struggling to spread butter but the bread is tearing badly] happen to you? Maybe you need the Electro-Matic Bread Browning Toaster! Turn your saggy old slices of boring bread into stand-alone solid wedges of delicious golden-brown toast! Spread jelly, peanut butter, even cheese, onto your bread without worrying about tearing a hole in the slice. No more of this: [Scene: Kids picking up sandwiches only to have fixing slide out the back because the lower slice of bread is sagging]: Save those sandwiches by firming up the bread! The Electro-Matic Bread Browning Toaster can fit any size slice of bread and can even brown two slices at the same time! Set it darker for a more bold flavor, or just lightly heat your bread to keep it looking like bread but tasting like toast. [SCENE: Two women in a bright kitchen. One woman says "Oh, no, Shelly, I can't eat a sandwich -- this is my new dress." But Shelly hands over the toasted sandwich, which holds up firm, and New Dress Lady bites it and says "This bread is kind of crunchy," as Shelly smiles towards her Electro-Matic Bread Browning Toaster.] You can put bagels and English muffins in there, and they'll come out perfect every time...

You get the point. So don't laugh at me for my love of kitchen gadgets. Your microwave, toaster, coffee maker and mixer were once "gimmicky gadgets" that people thought other people were suckers for buying, which is why I proudly own (and sometimes use) all those things plus my George Foreman grill, my supergriddle, my food processor, my Crock Pot, my coffee grinder, my deep fryer, and my Rachael Ray (TM) Food Processor.

Yet even with all those gadgets I'm not complete, and it was my desire for the newest entry on this list that got me thinking about how I would defend, to Sweetie, my purchase of the Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball:



Do you think Sweetie'll buy the "Hey, people once thought toasters were crazy, too?" argument? Because I really want this.

I don't often talk about this, but there was a time when I set out to make ice cream, and that time was 1994, when I lived in Shorewood, Wisconsin, on my own, and I didn't have a TV because I had only recently returned from Morocco and the TV that I'd had before going to Morocco was lost after I'd let my brother store my stuff. (He had also forgotten to return my rented guitar to the music store, which is how I came to own a guitar and also how I first began to have bad credit.)

Not having a TV left me with only limited entertainment options at home, but an abundance of free time while I finished up my senior year of college, and I opted to fill some of that free time by taking back the ice cream maker I'd given my brother (not that brother, a different brother. Stay with me, here. Focus!) and learn to make ice cream. I came up with a peppermint ice cream, and a chocolate-banana ice cream and some others before getting a TV and consequently giving up on some of my more interesting hobbies.

The lesson is: If you want to accomplish anything in life, turn off the TV. But if you want to find something that'll let you make ice cream while (sort of) playing soccer:




and if you're not turned off by the idea of first kicking your dessert around the backyard before eating it (I'm not.) Then watch TV long enough to find the Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball, which you can then buy, and send to me, so that I don't have to worry about whether Sweetie will buy my excuses, and I will then use to make new, fantastic brands of ice cream that will make the world a better place and me a richer man, which will then allow me to go back and learn that Christopher Walken dance, so you can see how there's a clear benefit to humanity here.



1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.