Cow Tools: Difference between revisions

** The addition of Anoia, goddess of things that get stuck in drawers, to the [[Discworld]] pantheon has provided excuses for many kitchenware Cow Tools to have their inexplicable and/or useless presence in everyone's cupboards lampshaded.

* The "offog" from Eric Frank Russells' science fiction short story [https://web.archive.org/web/20080124051440/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/russell/russell1.html "Allamagoosa."] Many purposes, as well as descriptions, are put forward for this essential item of a starship's inventory....unfortunately, all of them are wrong. The ship is being inspected by Admiral Beancounter, so the pressing concern for most of the story is not what it actually is, but that they have to have one.

* Subverted in the Niven and Pournelle work ''[[The Mote in God's Eye]]'' when the Moties present the humans with a room filled with what appear to be Cow Tools but are not. The tool room is actually an "IQ" test of sorts. The humans are expected to determine the flaw in each tool which renders it useless. Naturally the person who figures this out is the ship's engineer.

* In ''[[The Voyage of the Dawn Treader]]'', we see some stuff like this in Coriakin's lair. The most prominent example is the Bearded Glass, which is...well...[[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|a mirror with a beard attached]]. When someone passes, their reflected face looks like that of a bearded weirdo jumping out of the shadows. It may serve some purpose, or Coriakin may have simply put it there to prank what few visitors he gets. Even [[C. S. Lewis]] says he doesn't know its purpose.