Well, don’t fuckin’ use it then. You don’t have to write a book about it.

An indoor dog-piss pad teaches your dog to pee in the house. A yard can be expensive and hard to keep alive. Fresh Patch manages to be the worst of both worlds, enabling you to create a tiny inside-yard full of real grass for your dog’s urine. The manufacturers encourage buyers to “conveniently” replace the $19.99 + $10 shipping box with a new one when the urine smell gets too bad for you to handle. Personally, purchasing and receiving boxes of sod via UPS sounds like the least convenient thing that I could do with my life, but to each his own.

The KoolKarton is a bed-frame made out of corrugated cardboard. It claims to support 1000 pounds, although, obviously, if it’s not kept completely dry, or you sleep on it for longer than a few months, or you use it for anything other than sleeping, it’s going to collapse. Or, as one customer mentioned, if it’s damaged during shipping or packed incorrectly, it won’t be able to hold any weight at all.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no use for corrugated cardboard, though. This kit lets you make a cardboard playhouse for your kid, and they can draw all over it, and sit in there and talk to themselves and play Nintendo. And just like the bed frame, when it inevitably falls apart due to the inherent flimsiness of cardboard, you can throw it in the recycling bin, confident that it will be made into something useful. Like an Amazon Prime box, with a new cardboard playhouse inside. Ashes to ashes, box to box.

When will manufacturers learn that we like our phones for distracting us from bullshit, not “controlling” the bullshit? Whether it’s The Neato Botvac (above) or the Roomba 980, the simple task of cleaning the floor gets abstracted into a thousand-dollar nightmare. The Philips Hue system allows you to control your house’s lights with your phone, if you’re willing to spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars and wind up scrubbing your finger on a phone app for twice as long as it would take you to walk across a room and flip a switch. And the Koubachi is a $150+ gadget that tells you when to water a single houseplant, in case the concept of “pour a little water on your plant every day” seems too complex not to replace with a phone app and a piece of plastic.

In the vein of HTML For Babies comes “A is for Array,” a book that brings the drudgery of programming a computer to your child’s life like a turd in the night. At least neither of them are CSS For Babies, otherwise known as “Your Baby’s An Inch To The Left Of Where He Should Be And You Can’t Fix It.”

Shreddies are insanely expensive underwear that claim to filter your farts with activated carbon so they don’t smell bad. The reviews are mixed, but they seem to work better than Subtle Butt, a fart-filtering device whose name I like much better. And both of them seem to do better than the anti-flatulence chair pad, which one reviewer, presaging this very write-up, described as “it works, but not as well as the underwear pads.”

Neither of them hold a candle to this fart hat, though.

Fondue is more than melted cheese. It’s getting people together to have a group dining experience, laughing and forking bread and apples around a rickety metal pot. The Fondue Mug sidesteps this by allowing you to create fondue by yourself, on the couch. It comes as a set of 2, but let’s face it: this just lets you have fondue by yourself twice before washing the dishes.