The Worst Things For Sale

Nope.

Sorry, nope.

That’s not it. Maybe you should just give up.

There ya go.

If you didn’t get enough zit-popping from last week’s Pop It Pal, here’s a multipack of zits, this time marketed to children.

This Toblerone bar weighs 9.9 pounds, or, for our metric friends, 4.5 kilos. It’s not that the chocolate is bad, and the manufacturer does their best to convince you to share it, but we all know the fate of these 4,500 grams of chocolate. They’re all going inside a single person. You, if you buy it.

Can you control your insatiable urge for sugar, salt, and fat? Is it your fault that you ate the whole thing? Technically, yes, but realistically, this behavioral pathway is encoded in your genes. Find sugar, eat sugar. It kept the prokaryotes alive, and if you’re reading this, it’s worked well enough that you’re still here too. At least it’s not the five-pound Hershey bar, whose makers process the chocolate in such a way that leaves it smelling faintly of vomit due to its butyric acid content. (It’s not noticeable if you grew up eating it, but if you’ve ever heard someone referring to Hershey as “pukey,” that’s why.)

You have to feel a little bad for Atari, because they just can’t get the traction that Nintendo got with the NES Classic and SNES Classic. This is because Atari games were never very fun, and Nintendo games were. But feel free to get The Atari Flashback, if you don’t believe me, or the customer reviews that say it’s somehow worse than the original.

Although the title would have you believe this is a well-organized and well-written book, a trip through the “Look Inside” link on the book’s listing will tell you otherwise. I’m not sure what’s going on here at all. (If you are, maybe you can @ me on Twitter at @TWTFSale to let me know?)

The HipShotDot is a suction-cup-attached LED that affixes to the center of your TV so you can cheat at video games, shooting other players with higher accuracy than you’d be able to naturally. The only upside is that it only works on first-person-shooter games, a genre I personally never touch, since the children screaming slurs over the headset at me can usually shoot me a dozen times before I find the trigger button on the controller.

The SteakChamp is a $59 thermometer you stab into your steak, and it flashes when you’ve cooked your steak to the desired doneness. You’ll need one per steak, making this a $200 investment if you’re serving four. It might cost you even more, since they’re not adjustible, so you’ll need a couple each of rare, medium-rare, medium, and medium-well SteakChamps if you’re planning on SteakChamping your steaks all four ways.

There’s an existing version of this concept that costs $9 for a four-pack (the Charcoal Companion Button Steak Thermometers.) Beyond that, learning to control the heat and timing of the food you’re cooking trumps any gadget you might buy. But this is a world whose economy is bolstered by convincing us that skills are too much work, and that the goods we consume are the one true way to a life well lived. Our ingenuity, we’re told, is just a way for us to cheap out on buying the good stuff. Our techniques and traditions are too time-consuming and cerebral to compete with a stock image of a smiling face next to a piece of trash we have to buy to live a complete life. Our time is stolen and sold back to us as convenience. Our health is stolen and sold back to us as pills. And at the end of it, we still fight with each other, endlessly, to the last moment. Not for truth, happiness, or love, but to get more crap.

SteakChamp.