I disagree with Alton Brown on the following point:

Alton Brown has said that the only uni-tasker in his kitchen is the fire extinguisher, but I actually have a number of uni-taskers in my kitchen which I find genuinely useful.

The most obvious two, the two that everyone I know evangelizes about, the two that I got BECAUSE everyone else evangelizes about them, and they were RIGHT -- electric kettle, and rice cooker. If a person eats rice more than, oh, a couple times a month, it is SO worth it. And, of course, if a person eats rice a couple times a month, then gets a rice cooker, the person will start eating rice a couple times a week. It changes making rice from a cooking task, if not a particularly difficult one, into something that doesn't even count as cooking -- just something else that you do WHILE you're cooking.

Alton Brown has tried to claim that a rice cooker isn't ACTUALLY a multi-tasker, because you can make any type of porridge in it, and that some of them can also steam vegetables, but I think that's a bit of pilpul.

An electric kettle is a uni-tasker, too -- the only thing it does is boil water. Which it does better than anything else does. And since boiling water is one of the most common things one does in a kitchen, it's quite reasonable to have a specialized tool to do it.

Then there's my ice cream maker. It's one of the cheap ones, where you leave the bowl in the freezer overnight, and the bowl is made with that stuff that gets really, really cold and stays cold for a long time in it. Which is the cheaper kind. And I don't make ice cream all THAT often, but I do make it sometimes. I don't think it's possible to make ice cream without an ice cream maker, so there's a uni-tasker, necessary for the task.

I use my waffle iron fairly rarely, but that's because it's SUCH a pain to clean, and the waffles it makes aren't even that good. When I was growing up, my parents had a waffle iron that was much sturdier, easier to clean, and which had interchangeable plates so that it could be used as a sandwich press, or opened flat and used as a griddle, too. THAT'S a tool I'd buy. I've not seen it in my parents' house in the past, oh, twenty years or so, so I suspect it died somewhere along the way. So I guess I'm not going to count the waffle iron as a useful uni-tasker, since my ideal waffle iron wouldn't be one.

Any favorite uni-taskers you guys have?

Your bizarre news story for the day:

Spontaneous combustion killed Irish pensioner, inquest rules.

Now, this case has a lot of the hallmarks of the typical "spontaneous human combustion" case: given that the victim had Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, I feel comfortable speculating that he was overweight; he was elderly, and he was sitting next to an open fire. The one typical symptom that is not reported in the story is that the typical victim is also passed out from alcohol. But I'm willing to speculate that the victim was deeply unconscious from some cause or another.

We're taught that the human body is about 60% water, but that's for younger people. In the elderly, it's more often closer to 50%, and the water percentage in the obese is even lower.

The most likely explanation for "spontaneous human combustion" is ( gross enough to go behind a cut tag, now that I think of it )