The Worst Things For Sale

Don’t get me wrong. It’s important that medical professionals be able to study and practice all of the procedures of childbirth before they have to perform them for real. It’s just that you and I both know what people are going to use this thing for.

This man spent years, perhaps decades, crafting his body into a machine of physical strength and endurance. It’s a shame that the manufacturer used this picture of him to advertise their pogo stick, which clearly was the cause of the horrific accident that happened less than a second after it was taken.

Then again, it makes more sense than the picture of a hang-glider that some customer submitted with his review.

The actual “bone broth secret” isn’t that it’s a magical elixir that will fix everything in your life. The secret is that bone broth is gelatin.

The golden, hand-wringing, full-of-promises bone broth from a food truck or on the shelf at the precious upscale grocery is made from the very same gelatin as the little box of mango Jell-O you buy for seventy cents. It’s a solution of gelatin in water. One has sweetener and artificial flavors, and the other has salt and savory aromatic flavors from a combination of meat, vegetables and herbs. The infamous five-pound bag of sugar-free gummy bears? Also made mostly of gelatin.

Industrially, gelatin is made by boiling bones, tendons and skin, mostly from cows and pigs. The fat is separated, and it’s filtered, dried, and ground into powder. Apart from the steps that turn it into powder, this is exactly how you make bone broth. Or, as our ancestors called it, “stock.” In fact, the next time you’re cooking using regular chicken broth, toss in a packet’s worth of unflavored gelatin. You have now turned your chicken broth into BONE BROTH. No, it’s not as good as if you made stock from scratch, but it gets you most of the way there, and unless you’re drinking it straight, it’ll be indistinguishable.

Back to the book. Is stock a life-extending, weight-loss, and beauty miracle? Probably not, sort of, and kinda, respectively. If you replace high-calorie-density foods with cups of soup, leading to a lower daily calorie intake, yes, you’ll lose some weight. If you’re overweight, and you lose weight, yes, you have a chance of living longer. This all supposes that you are able to maintain a calorie deficit over time by drinking soup, which relies on self-control and an acceptance of the symptoms that accompany long-term calorie deficit, such as hunger and fatigue.

Collagen (the protein in bones and tendons that’s converted to gelatin when cooked) has been shown to improve skin elasticity, which we lose as we age. So this part might actually be true, if you define “beauty” solely as a function of skin elasticity and moisture. I was skeptical, but if you’re curious, you can dig up some double-blind studies showing this very thing.

What’s our conclusion here? Soup is not new, and it’s still okay to eat soup, and it probably won’t fix your entire life if you drink it out of a cup, or a bone broth K-Cup, instead of a bowl.

A waffle maker that makes Darth Vader-shaped waffles might, at first glance, employ the classic tactic of combining two things you like in order to take your money. But, if you check out the picture of the waffle it makes, it’s clear that it’s more of a Shitty Pancake Maker than anything else. The job of a waffle maker is to provide a high surface-area-to-volume ratio to give you a crisp waffle, not a soggy pancake.

Check out the cheaper (and best-selling) Presto Belgian Waffle Maker if you need a waffle maker, or a picture of how the inside of a waffle maker should look in order to function correctly. You can write “Star Wars” on the lid if you must. Of course, neither of these will allow you to “barbecue like a Jedi.”

Retailing for a not-at-all-insane price, the Coolest Cooler has a built-in battery-powered blender and Bluetooth speaker. After raising over $13,000,000 from Kickstarter backers, the Coolest Coolers shipped with defective batteries, broken blenders, and coolers that didn’t keep ice from melting.

What should you buy instead of this thing? A normal $20 cooler and an inexpensive Bluetooth speaker? NO. You need Crazy Cooler, the gas-powered all-terrain motorized cooler.

Remember back, long ago, in 2014, how Russia invaded Ukraine, seizing control of Crimea, killing ten thousand Ukrainians and displacing millions more? If you think that was really hilarious and cool, then Putin Riding A Bear might be the toy for you, an adult who’s into toys, and military-based mass murder. It’s even got FAKE ЯЦSSIAИ on the box. How can you go wrong?

No, you probably do need therapy. At least it’s not as impractical as this replacement for therapy.