The Worst Things For Sale

“Think you’ve bated to the good stuff?” the man asked me, taking a drag off his cigarette. The butt glowed orange, illuminating the dark alley. I nodded, and he laughed. “You haven’t even scratched the surface, kid.” He reached into his briefcase and handed me a copy of Mating With The Raptor. “This lady fucks a raptor. A dinosaur raptor. A real one, that’s alive.”

Shaking off my disbelief, I walked away, hurriedly tucking the dinoporn into my jacket pocket. “Wait,” he called after me. “You forgot something.” As I approached him once more, he handed me Mounted By The Gryphon, Ravished By The Triceratops, and Taken By The Pterodactyl. “Now get home before that boner of yours explodes and takes out a pedestrian.”

Combine Polaroid nostalgia with an iPhone, and what do you have? The popular social-photo site Instagram? Think again! It’s an over-$100 “printer” which amounts to a black plastic box. You put the iphone in the top, put some polaroid film in the bottom, open the shutter, and the film is exposed to the light from your iPhone. You’ll need some new-issue Polaroid film ($$$$ for 8 sheets) as well, if you can find it.

The Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream lock is a cute idea, but seriously… if you don’t want to share a pint of ice cream, you can eat the whole thing. It’s only 1,400 calories. For shit’s sake, this is America. If you can’t put away 1,400 calories of ice cream in one sitting, you’re not even in the 50th-percentile of ice-cream eaters in this country.

Now, you can live your dreams of being a star. As the manufacturer of Beams By Flo says in their infomercial (below), “Why spend thousands of dollars on frustrating music lessons?” Watch it only if you want to see the rapper Flo Rida try to sell people a laser-theremin that plays country music.

The Rollie Eggmaster is a “vertical grill”. What this means is that you crack an egg down into this thing and put a stick in the liquid egg, and then you pull it out and it’s an egg popsicle. Which doesn’t sound that delicious, but boy, when you look at that egg popsicle, it…

…hmm, okay.

A bag of potato chips costs about three bucks. The potatoes you’d need to make a bag’s worth of potato chips cost about three bucks. The math doesn’t seem to be working out for me, as far as saving money by making your own potato chips.

But maybe there’s a land where you get potatoes and vegetable oil for free, and you can heat them on a stove that gets hot for free, and it doesn’t take all fucking night to cut potatoes up into thin slices, and then your greasy kitchen cleans itself. In that land, you’re definitely doing the right thing by making your own potato chips.

The joke, never quite funny, and already taken too far, now takes on a more sinister edge. We are now trapped in our bacon future. Everything smells dead, salty, crispy. Nothing is untainted by the scent, the texture, the colors of hog-drippings. The animals eat our trash, and we eat them, and we are the trash. “Throw us away,” we shout in unison, and history obliges.