It’s become a tradition here on this site to write about New Years’ Glasses, and this year does not disappoint. My favorite, above, is a set of “2010″ glasses where they’ve added an 8 above the last digit. You could have used one of the TWO circles in the numeral 8 to look through, but, no. The eight goes above the 2010. Goodbye 20179 A.D., welcome 20180 A.D.

These glasses miss the mark as well, inserting a hole into the 1 in 2018, seemingly unaware of the context of utilizing an existing hole in a number to look through.

And these glasses, bizarrely, dispense with the whole number-lense thing, floating “2018″ over a 3d-glasses template, and then covering the whole thing in glitter.

I posted these on New Year’s Eve, so you couldn’t buy them in time. I know some of you guys are out there buying the stuff I post. Don’t.

Happy New Year.

Let’s go down the smart-product checklist for Ember, The Smart Coffee Mug:

• Heated and insulated coffee mugs already exist
• Controlling a coffee mug with your phone is unnecessary
• Costs 15 times as much as a normal mug
• Reviews say the battery drains quickly and won’t connect to Bluetooth

Staring out the window as snow falls, your hands curled around a hot mug, you might idly muse to yourself, in the post-Christmas silence, “I wonder if the free and simple children’s game of flipping a bottle and landing it on its bottom has been converted into a product.” I’m happy to report that it has, and it’s called Flip Challenge, and the bottle is not included.

As I predicted last year, in my short essay about why “2016 Sucked” and other lazy language is nothing more than cowardice, 2017 was not better than 2016.

It is also unlikely that, as this shirt insists, 2018 will be better than 2017.

Surprise! This cheap little cockroach toy isn’t really particularly bad. It’s only here for contrast to RoboRoach, the kit that lets you insert electrodes into the brain of a real, live cockroach, zapping its nervous system from afar using Bluetooth to control its movements.

I may be drawing artificial lines here, but it’s humane to kill a cockroach quickly to prevent the spread of disease. It’s okay to eat one for food, even though I wouldn’t. It’s also morally okay to keep a cockroach as a pet, if you take good care of it, and you don’t keep it in a tiny tube. But it crosses a moral line, to me, to stun-gun a bug’s mind for entertainment.

If you’ve been looking for a twenty-pound bronze sculpture of two women having sex, you may now utter the dreaded phrase “more like the best thing for sale.” Merry Christmas.

While it’s true that aerating your wine usually improves its flavor, a wine decanter is probably your best bet. It’s an inexpensive piece of glassware that doesn’t require batteries. The eparé, on the other hand, is a battery-operated piece of plastic that, according to the detailed, non-suspicious reviews (as opposed to the cheerfully vague five-stars,) doesn’t work, or breaks soon after arriving.

It’s the cousin of Sonic Foamer, the ultrasonic beer-coaster that causes your beer to fizz, a process usually undertaken by pouring beer into a glass. Precipitate too much of the gas out of your beer, and you’re worse off than when you started.