The Worst Things For Sale

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.

You might think this “Pecker Polisher” soap is, if nothing else, a unique product. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. It’s also sold as Dick Soap, Willy Washer, Cock Soap, Hose Cleaner, Naughty Soap, and Plumbers’ Soap. I can’t tell whether the manufacturer is trying to target different demographics by packaging it so many different ways, or if they’ve all been failures so far, and they truly believe you can make a fortune selling a ten-dollar piece of soap with a hole in it, so they persist.

“Please do not buy this wheel if you are not willing to train your cat,” warns the manufacturer of One Fast Cat Exercise Wheel. But even if you can train your cat, and even if your cat would like running on a wheel, the long list of one-star reviews say that this cat exercise wheel comes apart during use and tips over easily.

The GoPet, a different pet exercise wheel which clocks in at over five hundred dollars, seems to work more reliably. Though, as one reviewer notes, “it’s a torture for me, to keep my cat in there.”