“Pocket Pets” sounds like a line of toys, but it’s actually a plastic tube that you use to carry a cockroach around with you. The manufacturer helpfully includes a picture of a smiling child with a cockroach, to imply that it’s not actually disgusting to have a child carry around an agent of pestilence, unleashing the rapidly-multiplying germ-carrier wherever he or she pleases.

I guess some people still use compact discs, because CD STOPLIGHT, one of the audiophile-hoax products introduced decades ago, is still being sold. It’s a marker that you use to color the edges of your CDs, to make them sound better. (How does it work? It doesn’t, obviously.) At least it’s not the Wireworld 6-meter speaker cable, a pair of which sells for a bit more money. (Okay, a lot more money.)  

The HyperChiller lets you cool a cup of hot coffee so you can drink it cold, which its manufacturers claim is “perfect iced coffee.” This is, of course, untrue. It will taste like coffeemaker coffee which you’ve neglected.

The reason that real iced coffee tastes good is because it’s brewed as toddy – cold water is used, and the flavors are extracted from the coffee grounds over 24 hours, yielding a coffee that tastes better and has a lower acid content. (You can use an actual “toddy maker” to do this if you want, but you can also mix the grounds and water into a plastic pitcher, and filter them into a second pitcher the next day with a regular coffee filter.)

If you’re wondering why regular brewed coffee tastes okay when it’s hot, but not cold, it’s because the bitter compounds extracted in the brewing process are less detectable by your taste buds when the coffee’s hot. Coffee also releases more aromatic compounds when it’s hot, causing the pleasant smell of the coffee to become proportionally stronger in comparison to its bitterness. The HyperChiller, in other words, has been specifically designed to ruin coffee.

Like a marine whose first order of business at chow is to stir all of his meal’s components into a homogeneous stew on his tray, the instinct to combine separately-edible components into a murky displeasure continues to defy our growing culinary culture. Oreos, chocolate, and bacon are all relatively cheap and delightful pleasures on their own, but together, they somehow cost five dollars per cookie. Not per package. Per cookie.

For sheer cultural grossness, though, you can’t beat “Chanukah Bundle,” an eighty-dollar assortment of bacon products seemingly aiming to corner the anti-semitic bacon market.  

I sweat into my shitty clothes for about 16 hours a day, does that count as earning a shower? Do I only have to sweat into them for 12.3 hours to earn a Canadian shower? And what are the requirements for a hippie to earn his shower?

The Amazon Tap is the latest in Amazon’s line of voice-powered black boxes that order things on Amazon when you ask them to. Unlike the Echo, which is meant to sit in the corner of your room, with an active microphone, listening to you talk, the Tap is a portable device. The ad copy and imagery suggests you’ll take it to the beach, or (as the pictures show) careening through the city streets on a bike, hooked to your backpack. Now, if they could just combine voice recognition and streaming music with a telephone, an app store, and a mobile browser, they’d be onto something.

A toy skeleton isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. It’s the toilet accessory set that lets you pretend the skeleton is taking a dump that pushes this one over the edge.