As birthday gifts go, in exchange for a nearly two year old credit from the MOCA Store on Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, Marc Newson's Dish Doctor probably takes some beating.

Had it first appeared on Wife X's birthday, in 2006, perhaps it may not have been quite so keenly loved. Yet all I can remember hearing at MOCA last week was "I have always wanted one." I wondered, "And not the Jeff Koons china tank vase?"

Dish drainers. They drain me. Grandiose pedigreed dish drainers no less so.  Designed for Magis, the Dish Doctor might be positively space age with it's Sputnik-like spikes emanating from everywhere and easily as I can imagine Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin draining their first post moonwalk dishes in the kitchen of Apollo Eleven's Lunar Module, it is a dish drainer and I don't like them.

Marc Newson is well known for his faux futuristic designs and these days has swapped dr dish drainers for space plane plans. Newson's seem far prettier than Don Rutan's Virgin Galactic Space Liner. Too many moving parts on the outside of that one. In Space, that is scary.  Newson's also retrofitted the cabins for Quantas, his national flag airline. So he knows something about comfort in the air.

But the dish drainer. To be discouraged altogether I think.  All I see over there is a pretty plastic blob, absorbing the radiation from the granite countertop, stacked with dishes where they once drained happily out of sight in the dishwasher and it becomes sort of eternal, self-filling, self-perpetuating. It's where some items just end up living. You know, the coffee cup you use every morning... why ever put it away again when it has a marc newson dish doctor to drain on for 24 hours.

But. It Drains. So how does it stack up against other of the ilk? Ikea's Magasin and Ordning come to mind as two other drainers I didn't like and well. In comparison, no splinters and no rust are risked when working with the Dish Doctor. But you know, whatever. My song remains the same. It Drains.