On Saturday, I grilled in the back yard for a few old friends. Just ahead of the event, I bought a remarkable bit of fire-starting technology. Simple, but effective. It’s a device that ignites charcoal without the need for lighter fluid or even kindling wood. Naturally, it took me a while to find the damn thing, because I didn’t know what it was called (hardware stores are a marvel, but that’s a problem with them).

It’s a charcoal chimney starter. No doubt something along these lines was known to people as soon as metallurgy was discovered and the burning properties of wood charcoal were appreciated. Long ago, that is. For only about $15, I acquired a stainless steel cylinder, about a foot high and 7½ inches in diameter, with a row of inch-high slots around the bottom of the cylinder. Let’s see: the volume of a cylinder is V = hπr², so that would be nearly 400 cubic inches. Enough space, as it turned out, to light enough charcoal to cook the evening meal.

Inside is a simple array of rods that divide the cylinder into a larger upper chamber and a smaller lower one, but air (and importantly, heat) can pass between the chambers easily. There are no covers or lids to it, but the cylinder does have a handle attached to its outside.

First, line the lower chamber with paper – newspaper in my case. Next, fill the upper chamber with charcoal. Then light the paper through the slots at the bottom. After the paper starts burning, leave it alone. The remarkable thing is that the paper will ignite the lower charcoal, with which in turn ignite the charcoal above it, until all of the charcoal is glowing hot. I suppose it works because the heat is contained and, since heat rises, it ignites the fuel above it. All together, the process takes about 30 minutes. Once the charcoal is hot, pick the cylinder up by the handle and turn it over to put the coals in the grill.

The hard part in all this was finding out what it’s called. I’d seen one used a few years ago, but that wasn’t much help, and I looked in vain in the grilling equipment sector of a big box store among many MeatMan 2000 UberGrills large enough to cook for a small army; say the Swiss Guard. So I did things the modern way, Googling “grill without lighter fluid” and the like, and before long, found a lot of videos like this.

Since I did this on Friday, it was then a matter of ordering one online for pickup in a store on Saturday morning. For mysterious reasons, the store cancelled my order right after I made it, and I didn’t notice the email telling me that, so it wasn’t waiting for me when I got there. But they had them in stock, so after some delay, the staff found one for me.

The surprise wasn’t that some high-tech system failed me in a minor way. The remarkable thing is that when I got the charcoal chimney starter home, it worked exactly as expected.  No inscrutable instructions; no auxiliary parts that you need to make it work but which you don’t have; no important steps in the operation of the device that everyone assumes you already know, and so no one tells you about. Life might be dull if everything were this easy, but some things should be this easy.

This year for my birthday I had curry duck at a northwest suburban Thai restaurant. Or, as the menu put it: “Boneless roast duck simmered in Thai spices, red curry, coconut milk, red peppers, green peppers, onions, grapes and fresh basil leaves.” Excellent choice, it was. I didn’t do the modern thing and point a camera at the savory concoction. I did the old-fashioned thing and ate it.

The cake this year was German Chocolate Cake. According to this list, at least, June 11 – close enough – is German Chocolate Cake Day, which I never knew until I looked into the question of just where German Chocolate Cake was created.

As luck would have it, Snopes weighs in on that subject, asserting that it’s in fact an American creation, and popularized only since the 1950s. Something like chop suey not really being Chinese, but who eats chop suey anyway? Or chili con carne in fact being norteamericano.

We picked up the cake at a local bakery, and it proved as sweet and gooey as it needed to be. Note the candles. Lilly put them on, using all those we had handy. No one seriously suggested we load the thing with 53 little candles.

Good things to eat for your birthday, but still not as good as when I turned 21. My college friend Dan was taking a class that summer called Economy Botany, taught by one Dr. Channel, which I should have taken myself, but didn’t. Dr. Channel had invited Dan, and a girl named Rona, to his large house near campus for dinner. Dan asked me to come along, or maybe asked a number of us to come, but only I could. It was a coincidence that it was my birthday; I don’t think Dan knew till I mentioned it late in the evening.

“Dr. Channel served a multi-course, skillfully made meal,” I wrote. “We ate hors d’oeuvre – shrimp, vegetables, various dips – a special Georgia onion, baked, and a massive cheesy meaty spicy thick pizza, made from scratch by the professor, including herbs on top fresh from his sprawling garden, a part of his lush back yard that runs off in all directions. We ate under a bower near the garden, and finished off the meal with a wonderful pistachio pie.”

What did I do to deserve that meal? Right place, right time, I guess. The special Georgia onion, I know now, was a Vidalia. Dr. Channel had baked it in aluminum foil, I think. I never knew an onion could be so sweet.