I once claimed that there was only a need for three fonts in life: Tahoma, SAS Monospace and Kristin. I've since changed my tune. You only need two - SAS Monospace and Verdana. Kristin is a hand-writing-type font, which I included as I must have been going through a phase. Tahoma was a little too rounded after all, and Verdana is a much more suitable font for documents, emails etc. (For the record, SAS Monospace is by far the nicest fixed-width font I've come across, which is even more special as it only comes with SAS, a wonderful piece of statistical analysis software.)
On a similar theme, there's only a certain number of pastas that you ever need. Again, I think the number is three, but it could be trimmed to two. You need your spaghetti, and some may argue that you need a linguine to go along with it. In addition, you need a smaller pasta of your choosing (bows, spirals, whatever).
The problem with pasta is that each type has a different cooking time. So if you buy different types, when you go from packet to packet, you have a bit of a problem. Even different types of what seems to be the same pasta-style have different cooking times.
Fortunately, Ronzoni (our chosen brand) has a number designated to each pasta type. And I've now settled on my three pasta types to avoid the above problem - thin spaghetti, thin linguine and rigatoni, conveniently numbered 9, 18 and 27 respectively. Given this numerical order, I'll never buy the wrong type of spaghetti again.
