Today’s Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon done with common kitchen appliances: a tea kettle and a coffee percolator sit on a couch in couples therapy, with a toaster therapist:
(#1) Wayno’s title, “Mutual Irritation Society”, takes appliancehood for granted and focuses on the relationship issues (the annoying noises the two partners make); if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page
The cartoon identifies the percolator as male (presumably on the basis of its phallicity); if we stick to symbolic values, then the mammillary kettle is female (though it could be that the kettle is a pocket bear — a smaller, more compact man-oriented man who’s burly and hairy; the world of gender and sexuality is huge and diverse, full of surprises).
The appliances. I was aware that I hadn’t posted on (electric) coffee percolators on this blog, but I thought that I’d posted about tea kettles and toasters. Apparently I was wrong. So now it’s kitchen appliance time here on AZBlog.
Percolators. From Wikipedia, about the devices, with a little bit about their history (with the passage especially relevant to the cartoon underlined):
A coffee percolator is a type of pot used for the brewing of coffee by continually cycling the boiling or nearly boiling brew through the grounds using gravity until the required strength is reached. The grounds are held in a perforated metal filter basket.
Coffee percolators once enjoyed great popularity but were supplanted in the early 1970s by automatic drip-brew coffeemakers.
… This [boiling] cycle repeats continuously, making the characteristic intermittent “perking” sound of the hot water hitting the underside of the lid.
As the brewing coffee nears the boiling point, the “perking” sound becomes a continuous gurgle, signaling that the coffee is ready to drink.
… The first modern percolator incorporating the rising of boiling water through a tube to form a continuous cycle and capable of being heated on a kitchen stove was invented in 1819 by the Parisian tinsmith Joseph-Henry-Marie Laurens.
… Electric percolators have been in production since at least the first decade of the 20th century with General Electric publishing a pamphlet titled “Coffee Making By Electricity” in 1905. Automatic percolators have been available since the 1940s or earlier.
Tea kettles. But first, teapots. Which are containers, not devices of any kind. (I am instantly taken back to the days when I had lots of foreign students, and one of my responsibilities was helping them negotiate the language of daily life in my country. More than one of them ran aground on the teapot / tea kettle distinction.) So, from NOAD:
noun teapot: a pot with a handle, spout, and lid, in which tea is brewed and from which it is poured. [AZ: crucially, the water is boiled somewhere else — probably in a tea kettle, but a saucepan will do — and then poured into the tea pot, over tea leaves]
noun tea kettle: a container or device in which water is boiled, having a lid, spout, and handle.
An elegant teapot:
(#2) An Acopa bright white porcelain teapot with sunken lid
On to tea kettles. The one in #1 is a metal (almost surely steel) container with a handle and with a whistle on its spout (to let you know the water is briskly boiling). The metal is important because the standard tea kettle is a stovetop kettle, heated over a gas flame or electric coil. As here:
(#3) A Cuisenart classic brushed stainless whistling tea kettle
For some time, I had an electric version of #3, with an internal coil and a power cord; mine was stainless steel (and looked very much like #3), but it could have been made of any material capable of withstanding high heat. It seems that since electric tea kettles have no reason to mimic stovetop kettles, these days they come in many forms.
Toasters. Finally, the therapist toaster, a two-slice model that will treat each patient equally. On toasters, with a few notes on their history, from Wikipedia:
A toaster is a small electric appliance that uses radiant heat to brown sliced bread into toast, the color caused by the Maillard reaction. It typically consists of one or more slots into which bread is inserted, and heating elements, often made of nichrome wire, to generate heat and toast the bread to the desired level of crispiness.
… In a pop-up or automatic toaster, a single vertical piece of bread is dropped into a slot on the top of the toaster. A lever on the side of the toaster is pressed down, lowering the bread into the toaster and activating the heating elements. The length of the toasting cycle (and therefore the degree of toasting) is adjustable via a lever, knob, or series of pushbuttons, and when an internal device determines that the toasting cycle is complete, the toaster turns off and the toast pops up out of the slots
… The first stand-alone electric toaster, the Eclipse, was made in 1893 by Crompton & Company of Chelmsford, Essex. Its bare wires toasted bread on one side at a time
… In 1925, … the Waters Genter Company introduced the Model 1-A-1 Toastmaster, the first automatic, pop-up, household toaster that could brown bread on both sides simultaneously, set the heating element on a timer, and eject the toast when finished