TOO POUR
Over the last two decades I've acquired many kettles and tea pots. I've had stove-top kettles and electric kettle, whistling and non-whistling, auto-shut-off and temperature control ones too. I've had teapots made of stainless steel, cast iron, ceramic, and glass ranging in cost from $100 to free. Not one of these things ever poured water reliably without sloshing, splashing, dribbling, or drooling. The pair I currently use are the best yet. (And by "best", of course, I mean the very worst.)
I acquired a new, stainless steel, Hamilton Beach electric kettle when I was staying with some friends. I made fun of it, and how ridiculously appalling it was in its inability to pour, so much so that they bought a new one and tossed out the old. (But the owner wanted me and no one else to have it so she drew a portrait of my cat and emblazoned it with his name in Sharpie on its side. So I had to take it. I had no choice.) It's a truly amazing specimen. The kettle is just what you'd expect. It's a clean, double-walled steel cylinder that heats the water inside it when sitting in its black plastic footing, which remains plugged into the wall. This is pretty standard these days. Only, every piece of this thing fails badly enough to elicit a significant amount of shock and awe when one considers that it is not a one-off early prototype but was actually manufactured and has countless twins identically produced, marketed, and sold across the globe. I mean, even giving these things away would be a terrible embarrassment. That's how bad it is.
Weirdly, the kettle has no real spout to speak of, there's only a slight depression requiring you to pour scalding water too fast and in too great a volume for most purposes to avoid lots of water running down its side and onto the counter (and/or your foot). That flaw alone should have sent the designer back to the digital drawing board but there are all kinds of other flaws, too. I personally love the lid. The lid is a stainless steel circle attached and hinged to the inside of the body of kettle, about two centimetres down from the rim. Keeping the lid closed are a pair of plastic prongs that catch into two little holes in the interior wall of the kettle. A button at the top of the handle pulls back the two prongs and releases the lid, allowing for better pouring. What's great about it is that not only can you not close the lid without holding down the button at the same time, which is needless and silly, but, as you might expect, when the kettle is filled to the "max-fill" line and allowed to boil the churning fluid can't help but splash down into these two little holes. But, in doing so, the water doesn't just fill the space between the inner and outer walls of the kettle (which would be bad); instead, it runs down the inside of the handle and out the handle's base where the on/off switch and its LED indicator are housed. So brilliant. As well, though new, the inside floor of the kettle is scorched black as though it sat on a stove-top for an hour or two after the water had boiled away – which is curious because it's an electric kettle, yet it's all doubly confusing because the kettle has an auto-shutoff feature and the thing can't ever stay hot beyond boiling the water. The kettle does heat up water though, and perhaps this was the creator's only design goal.
In similar style, my teapot is also fundamentally broken. Not only is it incapable of pouring water without making a mess, like it's kettle cousin, but it has a receptory hole too small to accept scalding water from my hard-to-pour and very drippy kettle. It's a match made in heaven, really.
All of this does cause one (perhaps only myself) to wonder how is it that with eons of experience pouring liquids from receptacles, and with 10,000 years or so of pottery production, we've not yet standardized the dripless spout? The teapot itself came about during the Yuan Dynasty in China, in the late 13th century. So we've had no less than 750 years to sort out this simplest and most minor of design problems. So how is it that driplessness isn't yet ubiquitous? How is it even possible that I can buy a teapot that drips?
(But then I recall that we've been sewing pockets on pants pretty regularly since the 1500s or so and I still manage to buy pants that don't hold coins or even large cell phones when in the seated position – as though holding things is a radical use for pockets and their contents not winding up on the floor is a totally unreasonable expectation. Alas.)
