The Worst Things For Sale

Reiki is the name of a faux-medical scam that involves the practitioner touching your body with their hands, and then imagining that healing energy is coming through their hands into your body to heal it. (I’m not joking or exaggerating – that’s actually what Reiki is.) Since it’s alternative medicine, and therefore not able to be subjected to the scientific method, its practitioners can do whatever they want with their imaginary healing powers without being subject to regulation.

Bringing alt-medicine to the world of animals has to be lucrative, then, because unlike a human, a dog or rabbit won’t know you’re a lunatic when they see you approach them, adorned in crystals, crazy look in your eyes, murmuring, “I have healing energy in my hands.”

I’m not sure quite what this is supposed to mean, but this company has printed it on a “garden flag,” presumably to hang outside in your yard.

You may never have run across one of these, but the premise of a “recipe in a jar” is that someone sifts together dry ingredients for a recipe and gives it to you as a “gift.” Your duty, as the recipient, is to add milk, eggs, butter, and other perishable ingredients, and then cook it, and then clean up after yourself, and then, purportedly, eat the recipe of unknown origin. Adding to the mystery of this book in particular is the fact that it has a ton of 5-star reviews that just say “Love it!” and are not suspicious at all.

I will gladly eat almost anyone’s home cooking, but I will never, ever cook someone’s weird recipe they found somewhere and put in a fucking jar.

“Liquid Trust” is a tiny, expensive bottle of body spray that contains oxytocin, designed to make other people trust you when they smell you. It doesn’t work in this way, since oxytocin is not very volatile (i.e. it doesn’t go from liquid to gaseous phase and disperse in the air.) You won’t experience any effects from the oxytocin yourself, either, since it doesn’t readily absorb through skin and wouldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier even if it did.

If you’re looking for a way for people to like you and trust you more, I’d suggest you try to be less of an asshole.

What house doesn’t need an almost-$500 taxidermied raccoon, immortalized in the act of eating Cracker Jacks? (The Cracker Jacks are included.)

Do you need a way to combine your hobby of riding an expensive bike with drinking expensive beer? Now you can do it in a more meaningful way than loading your gut up with Crazy John’s Double Dick India Pale Ale and cruising through a gentrified neighborhood on your fixie. The absurdly expensive Fyxation Bicycle Carrier lets you carry six bottles of beer on your bike, for whatever reason it occurs to you to do that.

(The same company makes a leather bike-holster for a bottle of wine, if you’re low-carbing.)

The Whistle Activity Monitor For Dogs is a bluetooth collar that pairs with your phone, allowing you to track your dog’s food intake and exercise habits. If you’ve been struggling to micro-manage your dog’s carefree, happy life of treats and running around the yard to sniff things, this is the e-dingle for you. Plug your dog’s stats into the app and hitch them to your hell-existence of daily data entry.

At least it’s not as expensive as the Tractive GPS Pet Tracker, whose apparent use is to enable you to let your dog wander around freely all day, coming back only at night for device syncing and data transfer.