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Jewish World Review Dec. 24, 2010 / 17 Teves, 5771 Here Are Some Good Gifts for People You Hate By A. Barton Hinkle
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Christmas, one suspects, must be a communist plot. Because if anything is calculated to turn even Ayn-Rand-worshipping, free-market ideologues into bearded, tree-hugging Marxists, it must be the crush of holiday catalogs peddling ridiculous junk.
Take Brookstone, purveyor of high-end and hard-to-find gadgets such as towel warmers and wine aerators. Like its competitor, the Sharper Image, Brookstone apparently caters to people who have run out of both needs and wants, but have not quite reached the point at which they are ready to heat the house by throwing bricks of cash into the fireplace.
Three years ago the satirical newspaper The Onion ran a piece about a new Brookstone "product" in development, the towel alarm clock. See if you can guess which of the following Brookstone items come from that fake news story and which ones are real:
Answers ready? Okay then: The toothbrush, pie tin, travel pillow, and hammock came from The Onion. The rest are real Brookstone items.
The CleanCut paper-towel dispenser, for instance, uses two infrared sensor beams to let you cut paper towels to the precise size you need. Instantly!
This is brilliant. Who among us has not tried to wipe up a spill with a paper towel only to discover, almost always too late, that said towel is tragically either slightly too big for the job, or slightly too small? For a mere $149.95, the CleanCut guarantees you will never have that annoying problem again.
The self-winding watch winder also is a stroke of genius. The idea behind a self-winding watch, of course, is that you never have to wind it. A small weight inside the watch swings back and forth to wind the watchspring whenever you are walking, gesticulating, or punching someone repeatedly in the face.
But there is an obvious problem: What if you are in a coma? After a few days or weeks, your watch will run down. Then how will you know what time it is, smart guy? Clearly, you need a device to wind your self-winding watch for you. Fortunately, Brookstone offers one for only $99. Its "omnidirectional motor and timer keep the watch accurate and prevent accidental overwinding," which is not only great for people in comas, but also swell for those with Tourette's syndrome.
For those on a somewhat tighter budget, the Miles Kimball catalog offers a host of gifts that the Food Network's Alton Brown would call "unitaskers" - such as a stainless steel butter slicer.
You might hear the words "stainless steel butter slicer" and think "knife." Wrong! The Miles Kimball version is a specially designed rectangular thingummy with equidistantly spaced wires that you position over a stick of butter and press down upon to produce multiple, uniform pats in one swell foop. (Theoretically it also could slice straight bananas in a pinch.) This space-age labor-saving device has rescued Today's Woman from the endless drudgery of cutting butter pats one at a time, so she can devote more of her energy to Pleasing Her Man. The Women's Libber in your household will be tickled pink when she opens this gift on Christmas morning!
Miles Kimball also offers personalized garage mats, an astonishingly large selection of plastic geese in funny costumes ("Motorcycle Geese," "Cowgirl and Cowboy Geese," "Beach Vacation Geese") and a spray-can holster that fits neatly on the side of your toilet tank so Uncle Joe Bob can find the air freshener when he's done, er, reading the newspaper. (And wouldn't Uncle Joe Bob love an infrared sensor-beam toilet-paper dispenser to dispense just the right amount of toilet paper! If only Brookstone made one of those, too.) If your Uncle Joe Bob happens to be follicularly impaired, then he might appreciate item No. 86422 from the Gifts You Never Knew Existed catalog: A bandanna with fake brown hair. (If he used to be blond, get him the blond version, item No. 86423.) While you're ordering, you might as well pick him up a flatulating stuffed elephant, a Terminator T-600 bobblehead statue, and an inflatable moose head. Heck, get him two.
Gifts You Never Knew Existed also offers, for $119, a desk- or wall-mounted clock that doubles as a motion-activated four-gigabyte covert surveillance camera. The folks at Brookstone must be kicking themselves for not thinking of it first.
BROOKSTONE BINGO
Have you always wanted to create Brookstone products yourself? Well, now you can! Here's how. Roll three six-sided dice, one for each of the three mix-and-match categories below:
A
(1) Talking B
(1) Ionic C
(1) Massage chair Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. A. Barton Hinkle is Deputy Editor of the Editorial Pages at Richmond Times-Dispatch Comment by clicking here.
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© 2010, A. Barton Hinkle |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
