In the salt-and-pepper miniverse, it’s not only animals who wear human-type clothing. Other objects can do it also. Here, for instance, are a nattily dressed fork and spoon:
In addition to wearing aprons–certainly an appropriate garment for a pair of kitchen utensils–they have also grown arms and legs and even the barest beginnings of faces, thus, supposedly, humanizing them even more. In fact, however, those weirdly tubular, weirdly awry limbs emerging from the sides of inert forks or spoons, and those strangely primitive faces, seem to me more horrific than human. There’s something zombie-like about the wild arms and the blank stares. I can see in this case why it might be tempting to actually put salt and pepper in these objects, because it would be comforting to give them a good shake and thus confirm one’s authority over them, lest they continue to mutate in even stranger and more unsettling ways. Beware the devious fork, the frenzied spoon.
I do not, incidentally, know why they are sitting on bowling balls.
Perry Nodelman 