The dumbest thing since sliced bread

Well not actually, but the phrase is relevant. I was stumbling around on stumbleupon and found this site, where I was struck by the silliness of someone patenting sliced bread. First of all, bread has been around for millennia, so slicing it shouldn't have taken that long, and it sounded like a simple thing to patent, add to that the fact that the man who patented with a jeweler with a Jewish sounding name just sounded completely implausible.

Immediately doubting the credibility of the page, I hopped over to wikipedia to look up sliced bread. Sure enough, it had been patented by that guy, however, the specific detail of being machine sliced pretty much explained why Caesar didn't have "sliced bread". But then I saw something interesting. Sliced bread was first commercially manufactured in 1928 (according to the manufacturer, not exactly the most reliable of sources), but in 1943, sliced bread was banned by the US government. Here is the section of the wikipedia article if you want to look into it more yourself, but the gist of it was, with the war and all, the cost of flour was going up and sliced bread would dry out easier so it needed heavier wrappings, and this could unbalance the economy or something ridiculous. So they banned sliced bread. This ban lasted only a few months, from January 18th, to march 8th of the same year. It turned out that the economy could probably handle sliced bread.

This served as a little reminder to me that, not only is the government fully capable of moronic decisions now, but past governments have made their fair share of dumb decisions as well. It's not like there was really a good old days where politicians weren't retarded. Just remember, next time you think something is the greatest thing since sliced bread, sliced bread was once illegal.

thought for tomorrow: banning cigarettes sounds downright sane compared to that.