not a step

Pouring Salt In Your Wounds

Instead of building a better mousetrap, David Holcomb has built a more complicated salt shaker.

Apparently people have grown tired of simply shaking salt on their food, and public clamor for a harder-to-use salt delivery system has reached a fevered pitch. To meet this need, Holcomb has invented the "Salt Ball," a ridiculously involved device that "lets" you grind your own salt.

Though it looks like a glass baseball with legs, the Salt Ball operates pretty much like a standard pepper mill. It involves a slightly different motion, more of a squeezing than the customary twisting for pepper, but the basic concept of putting a big piece in and getting a bunch of small pieces out remains intact.

Nevertheless, Holcomb has become a "famous inventor" for his efforts to complicate mealtime. I know this because the back of every Salt Ball box contains his picture on top of the words "David A. Holcomb, Famous Inventor."

Much like the third-rate restaurants that boast "world famous roast beef," Holcomb's claim seems a mite hollow. Normally, actual famous people have no need to point out their prominence.

Bruce Springsteen does not put "famous rock star" on the back of every album, and Vice President Al Gore has no plans to add an "as seen in the White House" graphic to his stationery.

But, despite his lack of real fame, Holcomb has managed to tap into the huge market for upscale items that convey status through difficulty of use. This phenomenon has done irreparable damage to formerly simple tasks like putting grated cheese on your pasta or making a cup of coffee.

Simply buying better ground coffee used to mark you as elite. Now, the bar has been raised. Today's connoisseur must not only purchase a more expensive bean, but also grind that bean himself before percolating it in a French press or some other device that requires reading instructions. If this continues, coffee snobs will have to head to the fields to pick their own beans before visiting the farm to get milk direct from the source.

Most of these attempts to raise status through gadgetry are harmless. But the latest scheme cooked up on the Internet, the creation of a new system of telling time, takes it beyond absurdity.

The "Internet clock" abandons the 24-hour system used throughout the world, in favor of one in which each day consists of 1,000 beats. Instead of adding and subtracting from 24, adopters of this system must remember that 3,332 beats in London means it's morning in Detroit. The best method for doing that conversion is, of course, translating back to the 24-hour scale.

Unfortunately for Internet clock fans, the logical progression of this trend involves the continued complication of everyday life. Soon the true elite will live without computers or any other modern conveniences. Perhaps they'll live in caves, hunting and gathering for their meals, while those not cultured enough for these levels of sophistication will have to make do with their dingy abandoned mansions and meals seasoned with pedestrian, pre-ground salt.

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