Modern Life: Nothing But a Funny, Funny Riddle

Let’s take a moment to appreciate “generous sidewalls” (and the back wall, too.) Dead last on the list of features, but number one in our hearts!

We’ve scootched eggs and bacon around on a few different flat cooking surfaces that could rightfully be called griddles. They varied. Some were electric, for use in making pancakes in the kitchen on a weekend morning, and in no obvious way superior to a frying pan. Others were big, purpose-built, outdoor propane monstrosities for administering toxic doses of fat and salt to large groups, fulfilling, over many years, the slow-speed suicide pact known as “deer camp”.

How is it possible that they didn’t all have “generous sidewalls”? Why did we put up, for so many years, with the infuriating experience of rolling sausages back and forth on that electric kitchen griddle, ineffectually trying to lift them? Where was our there’s-gotta-be-a-better-way moment?

But you know what? We’re not mad. We’re filled with joy and hope. Because the benefit of “generous sidewalls”, so plain it makes us feel stupid for ever tolerating a griddle without them, gives us hope there’s still room in modern life for other low-tech, obvious-in-retrospect improvement.

What great news! The cleverest humans among us aren’t finished figuring out how to improve our living conditions — and plenty of the undiscovered ideas are still a lot less technical than self-driving cars, or the Geostorm satellite network. Who knows? Maybe we’ll figure out we’ve all been wearing shoes wrong next, or there’s something fundamentally wrongheaded about the way we clean our ears. Thanks, “generous sidewalls”, for inspiring us to hope!

P.S. Years ago, when we sold a different Little Griddle model at Woot, I coerced @slydon, my then-colleague, and an extremely good sport, into appearing on camera as a nudist product reviewer to talk about it. It’s still one of my favorite Woot videos ever, but for some reason the “Nudeman Reviews” video series did not continue after I left. Look it up! He’s so great in it.