The Worst Things For Sale

“What the fuck, dad?!” screams this child’s dubious face, as his father carries him on SaddleBaby, a contraption engineered to injure young fathers. Most of the reviews note that the device is incredibly uncomfortable to use, as you’d imagine, and turns the simple act of carrying a young child on your shoulders into an expensive hellride.

The only thing SaddleBaby has going for it is that it is not the Daddle, which is a device an adult wears on his back so a child may ride him like a horse.

If it were written as the title might initially lead you to believe, this book might be useful for the billions of people worldwide who have a dick. Unfortunately, it’s some variant on the “no-fap” movement, which, of course, has been around for thousands of years. One of the long-since-discredited anti-masturbation theses of the 1700s in still in print, as a matter of fact, and holds no more water than a forum of young men telling each other not to churn the butter. If you can’t figure out how to lead a life where you don’t crank off so many times per day that it ruins your body and mind, you might want to consider therapy, not a combination of ancient anti-onanism and Freudian pipe-puffery.

Well, don’t fuckin’ use it then. You don’t have to write a book about it.

An indoor dog-piss pad teaches your dog to pee in the house. A yard can be expensive and hard to keep alive. Fresh Patch manages to be the worst of both worlds, enabling you to create a tiny inside-yard full of real grass for your dog’s urine. The manufacturers encourage buyers to “conveniently” replace the $19.99 + $10 shipping box with a new one when the urine smell gets too bad for you to handle. Personally, purchasing and receiving boxes of sod via UPS sounds like the least convenient thing that I could do with my life, but to each his own.

The KoolKarton is a bed-frame made out of corrugated cardboard. It claims to support 1000 pounds, although, obviously, if it’s not kept completely dry, or you sleep on it for longer than a few months, or you use it for anything other than sleeping, it’s going to collapse. Or, as one customer mentioned, if it’s damaged during shipping or packed incorrectly, it won’t be able to hold any weight at all.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no use for corrugated cardboard, though. This kit lets you make a cardboard playhouse for your kid, and they can draw all over it, and sit in there and talk to themselves and play Nintendo. And just like the bed frame, when it inevitably falls apart due to the inherent flimsiness of cardboard, you can throw it in the recycling bin, confident that it will be made into something useful. Like an Amazon Prime box, with a new cardboard playhouse inside. Ashes to ashes, box to box.

When will manufacturers learn that we like our phones for distracting us from bullshit, not “controlling” the bullshit? Whether it’s The Neato Botvac (above) or the Roomba 980, the simple task of cleaning the floor gets abstracted into a thousand-dollar nightmare. The Philips Hue system allows you to control your house’s lights with your phone, if you’re willing to spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars and wind up scrubbing your finger on a phone app for twice as long as it would take you to walk across a room and flip a switch. And the Koubachi is a $150+ gadget that tells you when to water a single houseplant, in case the concept of “pour a little water on your plant every day” seems too complex not to replace with a phone app and a piece of plastic.

In the vein of HTML For Babies comes “A is for Array,” a book that brings the drudgery of programming a computer to your child’s life like a turd in the night. At least neither of them are CSS For Babies, otherwise known as “Your Baby’s An Inch To The Left Of Where He Should Be And You Can’t Fix It.”