The Worst Things For Sale

Do you need a book on how to exist as an alive person in the world? Then you might as well get one “written” by a fictional lizard invented by GEICO, an insurance company, to convince people to buy their insurance. People who have watched paid advertising involving this computer-animated talking lizard love the ads so much that they bought the book. It has 10 customer reviews, all of which have four or five stars.

For every one of us who enjoys novel, visceral tales of human accomplishment and emotion, there are a hundred living, breathing bipeds that keep the coal plants running so they can watch advertising late into the night.

You sure about that, shirt?

Contrary to the manufacturer’s claim, Flipper, a foot lever hooked to a string that Rube-Goldbergs your toilet lid up and down, won’t “save your marriage.” You’ll need communication skills and two fewer kids to do that.

Having a sticky pad on your car’s dashboard to hold your keys would be really handy… IF THEY DIDN’T HAVE TO BE IN THE IGNITION TO MAKE THE CAR DRIVE. 

The author of this book describes herself as a “health and beauty researcher.” I won’t deny you the pleasure of clicking thru to the book preview and reading some of her 101 Kick Ass Things To Do Instead Of Eating, but I will say that telling someone to go on a jog instead of eating doesn’t require that much of an investment in health and beauty research.

It’s fucked-up enough to write a book encouraging women to develop or deepen their eating disorders by telling them they “deserve a flat belly” and that they should clean their house instead of eating. What pushes this one over the edge is that the first book was so successful the author wrote a sequel.

“Hold on,” I said, waving the rest of the group back. “I’m getting a reading on my $60 K-II EMF Reader For Ghost Hunting.” The lights on the plastic wand flickered red, yellow, and green. “Is there someone here who lost a relative… Their name starts with… S?”

“ME!” cried an old lady. “My mother. Sally. It’s my mother, isn’t it?! Oh, please, say, it’s my mother!”

I laughed. “Ghost hunting is fake, and when you die, you are gone forever,” I told her. “I owned you, you thought this thing was real, and you got owned.” As she sobbed quietly, I pointed to the others on the ghost hunting tour. “Owned,” I said to each one, as I pointed. “Owned, owned, owned.”

“Miracle Noodles” are imitation pasta made with shirataki, which is gel made of glucomannan, an indigestible fiber. They have no calories, no fat, no starch, and no sugar. And they taste mild, so any sauce you cook them in will overwhelm the slightly-off taste of the shirataki. Some dieters love these as a way to fill their stomach with very few calories. (The 450 customer reviews are overwhelmingly positive.)

They sound great, right? I wrote about them here because, not to mince words, if you eat indigestible noodles, you shit indigestible noodles. They don’t get digested. Depending on how much you chew these weird strings, you either shit clumps of tiny little white bits that look like maggots, or clumps of long, entangled white buttworms. Bon appetit!