It's not a specialty kitchen item, which means you can cook almost anything in it. Because you never use soap on it, it'll enrich your eggs and burgers and grilled cheese and fish fillets and rib eyes with the earned flavors of a well-used grill. It's impossible to break and can go in the oven. And it will last longer than you

It's not that it's better than any of the seventeen individual implements it contains. It's that its seventeen implements are good enough that you don't have to carry any of them individually.

Because you need something to make firewood out of the tree that fell across your driveway.

Electric hand tools should be cordless. Eighteen volts — contractor grade — is all the power you'll ever need.

Without a good pair of work gloves, you blister in five minutes of picking up an ax or a chain saw. You need two pairs: rubber-coated for winter, leather for summer.

Boots for the Shop. Sneakers are not for the garage.

Cars come with inferior jacks. You need a better one.

An electric lantern makes your campsite look cold. This one makes it look warm.

This isn't the flimsy, feathery Frisbee you played with as a kid. It's the flying disc sanctioned by the Ultimate Players Association for its championship series.

No electric model has improved on the ease or reliability of a well-built, hand-powered floor pump. And you can't take an electric one tubing on the river.

Gas grills are nice. We like the gas grill. But the metal kettle is crucial. Not because charcoal makes food taste better than a gas grill (it probably does, a little) but because with a charcoal grill you can smoke things. And smoking things can kill two, three, four hours. Hours of drinking and basting. Beautiful.

One with a two-and-a-half-inch blade: big enough for most jobs, small enough not to weigh you down.

Because it gives the comfort of faith to the faithless — like when you really need the chain saw to start

LED flashlights are blindingly bright, shockproof, and, maybe best of all, run for a hundred hours on four AA batteries, which is at least seventy more hours than an incandescent bulb.

It's the Old Testament of cookbooks. Low on bombast. Heavy on information. Lots of lists. It begat all others. And if you want to cook it, it's in there, including possum.