The Worst Things For Sale

The BugZooka is a $50 vacuum-based device that lets you “humanely” capture bugs from inside your house and release them outdoors. Unfortunately, in the case of many house-invading bugs, you’re screwing everyone else in your city by not squashing the sons of bitches.

The most persistently-invasive bug in the American midwest is the brown marmorated stink bug (below) which crawls through vents and crevices, dozens at a time, spraying a characteristic hell-cilantro odor throughout your house. It was accidentally introduced into this area from its native Asia, where it immediately began overpowering local species and destroying crops.

So if I see you vacuum up a brown marmorated stink bug and whoosh it back outside with your humane-tube, I’m going to collect a thousand alive ones and dump them down your chimney every night until you cry.

PetAlive Better-Bladder Control are granules that you give your dog to make him stop pissing. The only saving grace on this product is that most homeopathic “remedies” are water, which would make your dog piss more, but these are dry granules, which might bind up some of your dog’s water and cause him to crap it out rather than pee it on your carpet. Of course, that’s a pretty flimsy justification for selling 20 grams of fake dog pills for $27.

At least it’s not “C-Caps: Promote Complete Cellular Health”, a $44 bottle of  homeopathic pet pills from the same company. What is cellular health, you ask? I’m glad  I pretended you asked, because there’s a crazy-ass book about it, and the cover image has a tape measure wrapped around a strand of DNA as a metaphor for its nonsensical ideas about “toxins” and weight-loss.

You could buy $2 bars of soap that allow you to smoosh the previous bar into the next bar, or you could buy regular soap and accept that you won’t use the last 10% of the soap. Or you could buy regular soap and save the slivers and mush them together when you have like four of them.

Or you could compare the soap issue to the fact that a billion people worldwide don’t have clean drinking water, or that thousands of Haitians are still living in tents after the 2010 earthquake, or that North Koreans have so little food that they eat each other out of necessity. Look in the mirror, look yourself square in the eyes, and ask yourself why we have sacrificed our humanity for convenience.

Drop an effervescent bacon tablet into a glass of water, and now you’ve got a slightly fizzy, artificial-bacon-flavored glass of water. As you might imagine, the customer reviews describe the result as “disgusting,” though it’s hard to believe they thought it might taste good.

The Cuchini is a plastic insert you put in your underwear to keep your clothing from forming what the manufacturer describes as a “frontal wedgie.” Unfortunately, customers seem to hate it. The free market has yielded alternatives such as Camel-Not and CamelAmmo Waging War On The Front Lines, though as with many products I write about, the product is an afterthought to the name.

The bootlegged image of Calvin pissing on car company logos, Bill Clinton, Osama Bin Laden, Nascar numbers, and every other social, political, and economic event of the past 20 years has culminated in this: a toilet decal of Calvin pissing, which you can put on your toilet. Finally, Calvin’s piss has a home, and it’s in the toilet where it belongs. Our long national nightmare is finally over.

The author of this book has combined two of my least favorite things with “William Shakespeare’s Star Wars.” It may be that you look at this and your pulse speeds up, your mouth dries out, and you whisper “Damn Gina, this is some epic win.” For you, there are two sequels, “The Empire Striketh Back” and “The Jedi Doth Return.” Read them while you eat your shrimp covered in glitter, or while you wear tighty-whiteys emblazoned with the Dave Matthews Band logo, or any other two things I don’t like, put together.