It slices! It dices!

My wife invested in a gadget that was meant to be helpful for the watermelon lovers in this home. That would be primarily Junior Varsity Dog Nipper, me, Senior Varsity Dog Tralfaz, and her. She's likes watermelon of a summer day, but is mainly in it for the gizmos.

And here is that gizmo.

Watermelon Slicer!

First of all, if you or I found that thing in a shop without the words Watermelon Slicer floating above them, we would be hard pressed to know what it is supposed to be for. The handle has a channel in it and there's a whirligig at the end...? Second, "Your best solution for eating watermelon" makes it sound like some sort of fork or spoon.

What they mean, of course, is that it is your best solution for cutting up a watermelon. This remains to be seen.

The Chinglish on the other side of the box is not the worst I have seen by far.

It actually makes sense. You push the tool into the flesh of the fruit and the thing cuts it into chunks. It starts to seem plausible. The little windmill is meant to break the slices into cubes.

It isn't that hard to cut a watermelon to pieces with a knife, but takes skill to get it into uniform size chunks. Can this Watermelon Slicer make the job easy and fun, O Chef of the Future? Let's see!

Here's me pushing the slicer into the watermelon. Note that the device does as advertised; it cuts into the fruit easily and the wheel lops off pieces as it turns.

For the record, these are rectangular prisms, not cubes, but we will not be picky.

Here my lovely and talented wife demonstrates better technique as she turns a watermelon quarter into rectangular prisms with ease:

Here are our findings from the field test:

1) She loved it. It turned a small watermelon into two large bowls of watermelon pieces of roughly uniform size without undue difficulty or time.

2) But I say a knife is twice as fast, if you're not concerned about your watermelon looking sloppy or your dogs choking on a large piece of fruit.

3) While the pieces are neat, the job is still sloppy, as the juice gets everywhere. Still not as messy as using my previous tool to break up a watermelon, the cellar stairs.

4) It's kind of a fun thing, but it would lose a lot of its appeal if it were not machine washable. That little windmill deal would be annoying to clean, and the edges of the channel are a bit sharp.

My wife has bought a few other oddball kitchen tools over the years, which I may showcase on this page if you're interested. Some have performed as advertised; some have exceeded expectations; some have been kind of sad. None, I think, were invented by Ron Popeil.

🍉🍉🍉

P.S.: I tried to find out where this slicer came from by searching the patents, but my quick turn through the system turned up nothing. Since the United States is a signatory to the International Patent System, it isn't generally necessary for devices patented overseas to receive a U.S. patent. China is also a signatory to the system, but I think they believe it means they get to steal everyone else's patents. If the Watermelon Slicer is a Chinese invention, then they finally invented something on their own that's useful.

P.P.S.: To put at ease any who are unsure: Yes, watermelon is okay for dogs, but get rid of the seeds and don't let them at the rind. The Slicer makes it easier to do both, actually, even for the few seeds in a seedless watermelon. Watermelon helps our hairy guys stay hydrated in hot weather. We don't let them have too much, maybe a cup or so a couple of times a week.