A few years ago I went through a phase of buying and reading "Man Skills" books. There are an awful lot of these floating around, on the premise that all sorts of traditionally male-domain skills (putting up shelves, bleeding radiators, carrying out fireman's lifts, etc.) are conspcuously absent in an army of foppish errant manchildren milling around society in their twenties and early thirties.

Gender politics aside (most of the skills in question seem pretty unisex in their usefulness), I do wonder if there's some sort of common "completeness" aspiration they're tapping into, which the spirit of this post is also tapping. The entire list above seems to be the lowest of low-hanging fruit, and while it's certainly useful to be able to do all of the things on that list, progressive levels would probably have significantly diminishing returns.