Utensils
by Lore Sjöberg

Spatulas
Spatulas, I'm lead to understand, are the flexible things you use to scrape bowls. The things you use to turn pancakes are instead known as "turners." Just another one of the little tidbits you can use to "break the ice" at mass suicides. Everyone likes spatulas, because our first vague memories of them involve cake batter, back when life was bright and new, before our souls were embittered by disappointment and utensil-based pedantry. A

Egg Beaters
I'm speaking here of the classic hand-turned egg beater. I've always loved these, because they seemed like they were capable of so much more than stiffening egg whites. Sometimes I would just sit and spin the things in the air, watching them rotate into overlapping elliptical blurs. I'm not sure what I was expecting to happen, but I think it involves either space flight or time travel. A-

Ice Cream Scoop
Some day someone's going to invent for me a refrigerator with a special compartment for ice cream that keeps it at the precise temperature between melting and impenetrable. Until that day, ice cream scoops are both indispensable and useless. I've never met the scoop that can take on a stone-solid block of store-brand rocky road. Their only real virtue is that they keep me from bending all my spoons in half like some demented Dairy Geller. C+

Egg Slicers
Nearly everyone has one of these little beauties in their utensil drawer, and yet I've never been served sliced eggs in someone else's home. Devilled, scrambled, hard-boiled and decorated with bunny stickers, sure. But not sliced. I'd love to fuel my paranoid fantasies and imagine that all my friends just think I'm not good enough for sliced eggs, but I never use mine either. So I think it's just that we don't eat many salads. C-

Melon Ballers
The term "melon baller" is precisely the sort of thing that sends seventh-graders into peals -- or perhaps paroxysms -- of laughter. In hopes that any easily-amused adolescents reading this will at least learn the proper names for things, I will instead refer to them as "breast testiclers." Now, the important thing when making breast testicles is that they be perfectly round. Nobody likes a lopsided testicle in their fruit salad. However, as long as you select a high-quality breast testicler -- and a high-quality breast -- you should be just fine. B