The SteakChamp is a $59 thermometer you stab into your steak, and it flashes when you’ve cooked your steak to the desired doneness. You’ll need one per steak, making this a $200 investment if you’re serving four. It might cost you even more, since they’re not adjustible, so you’ll need a couple each of rare, medium-rare, medium, and medium-well SteakChamps if you’re planning on SteakChamping your steaks all four ways.

There’s an existing version of this concept that costs $9 for a four-pack (the Charcoal Companion Button Steak Thermometers.) Beyond that, learning to control the heat and timing of the food you’re cooking trumps any gadget you might buy. But this is a world whose economy is bolstered by convincing us that skills are too much work, and that the goods we consume are the one true way to a life well lived. Our ingenuity, we’re told, is just a way for us to cheap out on buying the good stuff. Our techniques and traditions are too time-consuming and cerebral to compete with a stock image of a smiling face next to a piece of trash we have to buy to live a complete life. Our time is stolen and sold back to us as convenience. Our health is stolen and sold back to us as pills. And at the end of it, we still fight with each other, endlessly, to the last moment. Not for truth, happiness, or love, but to get more crap.

SteakChamp.

What’s worse than the well-meaning-but-meaningless “Coexist” bumper stickers that have been around for two decades? The “Coexist Gun Bumper Sticker” where the letters in COEXIST are made up of gun logos, of course.

“Drugs make U high. Drugs make U cry.” So reads the poetry of Gregory P. Jones, in the masterpiece “Things U Could Of Said But U Didn’t!!!!” You may wonder why this man has chosen to constrain his powerful work to the written word, but fear not: he has an album out, called What A Woman Want, and his singing is exactly as good as his poetry.  

Finally, it’s summer, and you can bust out your asymmetrical nut-and-butt sling. (The unblurred image is available on the listing, if you’re hungry for pubes and sling-dick.)

I think they mean “protection”, but regardless, this $160 Ethernet/USB dongle supposedly protects your brain from radiation from your Wi-Fi router. Of course, if it actually did this, it would mean your wireless router would stop transmitting signals. But it doesn’t do this. So, if it didn’t cost $160, it wouldn’t be THAT terrible. But it does. So it is.

The truly paranoid can also purchase the $296 “Home Protection System for Smart Meters” from the same company, which protects your brain from your gas meter.

“Sneaky Shorts” are a way to smuggle 24 ounces of booze into work, or a baseball game, or wherever you want to secretly carry booze in a thin liquid bag strapped to your upper thighs. If Sneaky Shorts are the solution to the problem you think you have, you may find out, ultimately, that you actually have a different problem.