The Worst Things For Sale

“Surely, this is a joke,” you say, having read about the wi-fi crockpot and the wi-fi scale that tweets your weight every time you step on it. But it’s not a joke. It’s a two-hundred-dollar basketball that connects with your phone, and plays sounds from a speaker inside the basketball.

There is also a Bluetooth soccer ball and a “Connected Football”, because we have been cursed with enough collective intelligence to miniaturize and insert wireless technology into everything we own, but rather than use it to bring people together and improve the world, we make it easier to play basketball with ourselves, alone.

Too expensive to give as a gag gift and too cumbersome to heat on a stovetop when you want the occasional waffle, the Keyboard Waffle Iron exists for only one reason: the manufacturers thought of the pun “Ctrl-Alt-Delicious” and thought it was so good they had to go ahead and make the waffle iron.

There are pictures of the resulting keyboard-waffles on the listing, if you can’t deduce from the iron itself what they would look like.

The only upside to the Keyboard Waffle Iron is that it does actually make a waffle, as opposed to the Darth Vader Waffle Maker, which seems to make some sort of shitty pancake instead.

BabySaver is what I would have called this box intended to collect your child’s body parts as they fall off. Instead, the manufacturer went with “Baby Teeth Box Wooden Tooth Album Keepsake Souvenir Box Organizer for Boy.” Their instructions include boiling the teeth before sticking them in the box, because there’s nothing that fills you with the joy of human existence like boiling teeth.

There is an even creepier version of this product, made by a different company, and I’ll let you see for yourself what makes it so creepy.

Now your face looks like balls. Good job.

This magnetic propane-tank cover allows you to put Dale Earnhardt Jr. on your propane tank. It’s like GarbagePantz, but for propane tanks instead of trash cans.

Is there a Rasta Lion propane tank cover? You know it. And a pig in sunglasses smoking a cigar? Obviously. Whichever design you pick, though, the Dale Earnhardt Spatula With Bottle Opener is an obvious match.

Say goodbye to the daily kitchen-labor of molding your own. For just $14.99, you can buy a pre-made aluminum-foil hat. Say what you will, but if you’ve got a mental problem that gets better with a placebo, you may as well go with the cheap placebo, instead of the $649 “Sensor V Pendant” that claims to be, with their capitalization, “Just Like Wearing A Pyramid Over Your Body.”

Why pyramids? The delusional 1985 book Pyramid Power, which claims to be the “#1 Bestseller On Pyramid Energies”, could tell you why, if it made any sense. You’ll be buying a Six Foot Buddha Maitreya the Christ Copper Meditation Pyramid System For Healing ($652.00) before you know it.

It’s entirely possible, as the manufacturer claims, that this “electronic dictionary bookmark” was the Gift Of The Year in 2011, even though it doesn’t say who awarded the title, or what other gifts were considered. That also doesn’t explain why people are still buying it in 2021 and leaving reviews. It’s not inherently bad, except for being expensive, not containing many words, and being another piece of disposable electronic trash that will go to the landfill when it breaks. It’ll have company there with its distant cousins Password Safe (a battery-powered device that loses your passwords,) the preloaded Library Of Classics (a $99 mp3 player you can’t load with new material once you’ve listened to it,) and iPad Calculator, an iPad-shaped calculator whose buttons are styled to look like iPad apps.