It's the Greatest Thing...
My wife likes the Spaghetti Factory restaurant chain. She always has and so we’ve gone a lot over the years. They have this good warm bread they serve (gratis, which is always nice), and serve it with both regular and garlic butter. I only mention that detail about the butter so I can ask rhetorically with condescending indignation, why would anyone, when offered garlic butter, ever choose regular butter for their bread?
But that’s not my point so let’s move on. The bread is good, but like most good things it comes at a price. Yes, I know I just said it is free, but I only meant you don’t have to pay separately for it. The price is not money, it is a crust so hard, so impenetrable that local SWAT teams have actually started covering themselves in this bread crust as improved protection from armor piercing rounds. They give you a serrated knife with which to cut the bread and then set the bread down on the table right in front of a small hidden camera. Then the servers rush back to the kitchen to watch you on camera try to cut the bread and get a good laugh.
There is an art to slicing this bread that requires great skill and patience. If you press too hard, not only does the knife not work, but if you do get a slice off it is mashed to tortilla-like thickness leaving you no visible bread surface to spread on your garlic butter. Instead you have to be gentle at first moving the knife over the top of the bread as if you only intended to scare the bread and not actually cut it. Then as the teeth of the knife take hold just a little you increase the speed and pressure just enough and eventually you get a slice of bread. Of course by then, the meal is not only over, but you have covered the table and yourself with tiny bread-crumbs. But oh well, at least you have garlic butter.
So, when you consider that it takes all that just to get a single slice of bread, it is no wonder that people were originally so enthralled by the notion of pre-sliced bread, that it became the standard of industrial and inventive genius, by which all other things would be judged for all time….until now. You see, I am writing now to petition everyone to retire the phrase “it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
Sliced bread is really nice. I do purchase and eat it on a regular basis. It is a wonderful time-saver when assembling nature’s perfect food, the sandwich. But, come on people, the reality is that at lest 5 or 6 things have been created since sliced bread that are in fact, better, more clever, and more worthy of recognition.
The other problem I have with this expression is that we are constantly declaring things the “greatest thing since sliced bread” but we never allow any of them to supplant bread. When we taste someone’s “world famous” clam chowder, we may declare, “wow, that’s the greatest thing since sliced bread” but we don’t then start saying, “man, that new wrench I got is the greatest thing since Uncle Roy’s Seafood Shack’s world famous clam chowder.” So, sliced bread gets to sit there on its untouchable perch above every other modern convenience and invention never to be replaced just as people will apparently always claim that Citizen Cane is the greatest movie ever made no matter how many better movies get made. It is time to put this to an end. We’ll work on Citizen Cane later.
So, out of fairness to all of the new things in life that we love, we need to come up with something more relevant than sliced bread. We can’t ask the public to simply update their list as suggested above by the clam chowder example, we have to come up with something that is universally recognized as a great new invention, or should be so recognized if people would just pay better attention when I’m ranting about how great something is as if I was the one who invented it in the first place. It also has to be a short word or phrase that doesn’t need a long explanation. I will offer some suggestions off the top of my head and then invite you, the reader, to offer your own and hopefully our combined intellect and effort will prevail and we will choose one of my suggestions.
Please fill in the blank: “Man oh man, that is the greatest thing since _______.”
1. Tivo (my personal favorite) – not DVRs, “Tivo.”
2. Viva – Please see previous posts
3. heated car seats
4. heated toilet seats (oh wait, we don’t have these. Why on earth not?)
5. ESPN.com
6. the shot clock
7. Blackberries
8. Directv on the plane
9. Lucky Charms
10. 24
But that’s not my point so let’s move on. The bread is good, but like most good things it comes at a price. Yes, I know I just said it is free, but I only meant you don’t have to pay separately for it. The price is not money, it is a crust so hard, so impenetrable that local SWAT teams have actually started covering themselves in this bread crust as improved protection from armor piercing rounds. They give you a serrated knife with which to cut the bread and then set the bread down on the table right in front of a small hidden camera. Then the servers rush back to the kitchen to watch you on camera try to cut the bread and get a good laugh.
There is an art to slicing this bread that requires great skill and patience. If you press too hard, not only does the knife not work, but if you do get a slice off it is mashed to tortilla-like thickness leaving you no visible bread surface to spread on your garlic butter. Instead you have to be gentle at first moving the knife over the top of the bread as if you only intended to scare the bread and not actually cut it. Then as the teeth of the knife take hold just a little you increase the speed and pressure just enough and eventually you get a slice of bread. Of course by then, the meal is not only over, but you have covered the table and yourself with tiny bread-crumbs. But oh well, at least you have garlic butter.
So, when you consider that it takes all that just to get a single slice of bread, it is no wonder that people were originally so enthralled by the notion of pre-sliced bread, that it became the standard of industrial and inventive genius, by which all other things would be judged for all time….until now. You see, I am writing now to petition everyone to retire the phrase “it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
Sliced bread is really nice. I do purchase and eat it on a regular basis. It is a wonderful time-saver when assembling nature’s perfect food, the sandwich. But, come on people, the reality is that at lest 5 or 6 things have been created since sliced bread that are in fact, better, more clever, and more worthy of recognition.
The other problem I have with this expression is that we are constantly declaring things the “greatest thing since sliced bread” but we never allow any of them to supplant bread. When we taste someone’s “world famous” clam chowder, we may declare, “wow, that’s the greatest thing since sliced bread” but we don’t then start saying, “man, that new wrench I got is the greatest thing since Uncle Roy’s Seafood Shack’s world famous clam chowder.” So, sliced bread gets to sit there on its untouchable perch above every other modern convenience and invention never to be replaced just as people will apparently always claim that Citizen Cane is the greatest movie ever made no matter how many better movies get made. It is time to put this to an end. We’ll work on Citizen Cane later.
So, out of fairness to all of the new things in life that we love, we need to come up with something more relevant than sliced bread. We can’t ask the public to simply update their list as suggested above by the clam chowder example, we have to come up with something that is universally recognized as a great new invention, or should be so recognized if people would just pay better attention when I’m ranting about how great something is as if I was the one who invented it in the first place. It also has to be a short word or phrase that doesn’t need a long explanation. I will offer some suggestions off the top of my head and then invite you, the reader, to offer your own and hopefully our combined intellect and effort will prevail and we will choose one of my suggestions.
Please fill in the blank: “Man oh man, that is the greatest thing since _______.”
1. Tivo (my personal favorite) – not DVRs, “Tivo.”
2. Viva – Please see previous posts
3. heated car seats
4. heated toilet seats (oh wait, we don’t have these. Why on earth not?)
5. ESPN.com
6. the shot clock
7. Blackberries
8. Directv on the plane
9. Lucky Charms
10. 24
Comments
I can identify with 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10. Out of those it’s a hard choice between #8 (Direct T.V. on planes) and #10 (24). I almost started an altercation on a Delta (I wish they were back) Song flight during an especially intense “Trivial game.” It seems the passenger in front of me didn’t take to my jabbing, poking, and hitting the back of his head rest in an attempt to log my answer in first.
“24” is just addicting and especially since Jack is back in the game. Can the guy take pain (and give it out) or what?