The Worst Things For Sale

The manufacturers of Noke, the padlock you unlock with your phone via Bluetooth, brag that you’ll save yourself from the “hassle” of keys by using your phone to unlock their $70 padlock. They then sell a separate $25 remote, which you attach to your keychain, to allow you to unlock your lock without a phone.

The battery inside is estimated to last a year, which is handy if you’re planning on using it over a longer period of time. Of course, it could stop working sooner, if the app fails due to an OS update on your phone. Or, as several reviewers note, if it quits working one of the first times you try it, sealing your clothes inside your gym locker (or your bike to a pole) for eternity.

This small tin contains an even-smaller bottle with a tiny amount of bitters, along with a spoon and two packets of sugar. It sells for an inordinate amount of money, considering that it doesn’t include the bourbon or rye that constitutes most of the drink. After all, a regular-sized bottle of bitters is about twelve bucks, and sugar, spoons, and napkins are usually free anywhere you’d be ordering a drink.

The only good takeaway from all this is that you can buy bitters online (this one is particularly good, FYI) since it’s not considered an alcoholic beverage, despite being full of alcohol. It’s the gentleman’s vanilla extract.

Like a marine whose first order of business at chow is to stir all of his meal’s components into a homogeneous stew on his tray, the instinct to combine separately-edible components into a murky displeasure continues to defy our growing culinary culture. Oreos, chocolate, and bacon are all relatively cheap and delightful pleasures on their own, but together, they somehow cost five dollars per cookie. Not per package. Per cookie.

For sheer cultural grossness, though, you can’t beat “Chanukah Bundle,” an eighty-dollar assortment of bacon products seemingly aiming to corner the anti-semitic bacon market.  

The HyperChiller lets you cool a cup of hot coffee so you can drink it cold, which its manufacturers claim is “perfect iced coffee.” This is, of course, untrue. It will taste like coffeemaker coffee which you’ve neglected.

The reason that real iced coffee tastes good is because it’s brewed as toddy – cold water is used, and the flavors are extracted from the coffee grounds over 24 hours, yielding a coffee that tastes better and has a lower acid content. (You can use an actual “toddy maker” to do this if you want, but you can also mix the grounds and water into a plastic pitcher, and filter them into a second pitcher the next day with a regular coffee filter.)

If you’re wondering why regular brewed coffee tastes okay when it’s hot, but not cold, it’s because the bitter compounds extracted in the brewing process are less detectable by your taste buds when the coffee’s hot. Coffee also releases more aromatic compounds when it’s hot, causing the pleasant smell of the coffee to become proportionally stronger in comparison to its bitterness. The HyperChiller, in other words, has been specifically designed to ruin coffee.

“Pocket Pets” sounds like a line of toys, but it’s actually a plastic tube that you use to carry a cockroach around with you. The manufacturer helpfully includes a picture of a smiling child with a cockroach, to imply that it’s not actually disgusting to have a child carry around an agent of pestilence, unleashing the rapidly-multiplying germ-carrier wherever he or she pleases.

I’d seen these beard-hats online before, and didn’t write them up here because I thought, “well, those are just gifts, no one would actually wear one.” Then I saw someone yesterday walking down High Street wearing one, and realized that some people actually do. Unsurprisingly, people who bought this fucking hat also bought this axe and this sword.

The manufacturer describes this as “Interest Sharing Anus Bolt,” and I guess they’re right, in the same way that a volcano is a “mountain fountain,” or a compass is a “magnet arrow.”