The Worst Things For Sale

The seven billion people who share our planet have seven billion different answers to the question “why are we here?” My answer, personally, is “to transform, bit-by-bit, any source of human happiness into a product to be purchased.”

Enter the Snowball Maker. Someone found a niche that was unexploited (the two hours people spend outside every winter before returning inside til March) and created a plastic gadget to fill that niche. Those were two hours we spent with our family and friends, buying nothing, enjoying each others’ company, creating memories. Now we can buy a gadget for that fun.

This is why I think that if aliens know there’s life on Earth, they’re not landing here, on purpose.

This power strip is cute enough, but…. if you spend extra money for something to be cutesy, do you want to throw it behind your desk or TV stand to collect dust and hair? Or are you going to set it out on the floor so you can see it, creating a tangle of power cords hanging out from behind your furniture? Either way you lose. Just get something like this 16-outlet behemoth power strip, hide it like a normal person, and put a Pikachu out on your desk if you need something cute.

Wrapping a fake vinyl label around your beer can so you can drink a can of beer in public isn’t a bad idea at heart. It’s just that those of us who do this on a regular basis know to get some empty 20 oz. cups from the coffeeshop, the kind with the cardboard insulator and plastic lid, and pour your nice bottled craft beer in there before leaving home. I’m just out here drinking some Starbucks, y’all.

Sure, you could load your photos into a digital picture frame. Or hang them on the wall. But why not print them all out and hook them onto a freestanding “photo tree”? Then they would be harder to look at, and it would take up an enormous amount of room in your house, and you wouldn’t be able to look at the photos in the back, and your cat would definitely not try to fuck with it the whole time you’re asleep.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a training kit for fish. It’s just the loss of possibility in your life. If you sit down in front of your fish tank and spend hours training your fish to swim through hoops and bump an underwater ball into an underwater soccer goal, you are implicitly saying, “I am not capable of more than this. I hereby decline my life’s utility.”

When your friends come over and you show them your trained fish, they will congratulate you. But not for training the fish. They are congratulating you for learning about yourself something that I (and many others) have learned ourselves: we will never do anything important in our lives, we will never move humanity forward as a species or culture, so it’s best if we just stay out of the way of the people who are.

Pretty much anything cuts a banana, but a banana cutter exists, and this one has (at the time of this post) 421 customer reviews.

Everyone is good at different things, but today I learned that I am good at cutting bananas by myself. Maybe you are too. Think of all the things you do in your life that don’t require a special tool that’s also shaped like the task you’re attempting. We’re prodigies, you and me, cutting our bananas with nothing more than a butter knife, punching the microwave buttons with our human fingers, walking across the kitchen floor in nothing but socks.

Sure, you could get a three-story $550 treehouse for your cat. Or, if you want to waste money on something that doesn’t notice, and might hate you, you could have a kid.