I was wasting time doing some really important searching on Amazon the other day, when I discovered that they have a button dedicated solely to “interesting finds.” Click on the icon, and heaven knows where you’ll end up.
Some items are quite elegant and useful like this $39.95 canvas and leather rucksack. I also found many lovely pieces of retro accent furniture.
But mostly? Well … I give you:
The Gummi Bear Skeleton Anatomy Kit;
The entire line of Cats in Space products (I like the tee-shirt with cat, taco, and pizza slice, but the entire line is … different);
And the book How to Traumatize Your Children: 7 Proven Methods to Help You Screw Up Your Kids Deliberately and with Skill (no doubt a huge hit as a baby shower gift).
Selection changes daily. Hit Explore and … well, it might lead you to a pair of pirate sunglasses with mustache attached, a very 1950s armchair, or toilet paper printed with $100 bills.
You could waste a shocking amount of time find many unique gift or household items on Amazon’s interesting daily finds.
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I haven’t been promoting Amazon since they nerfed the Associates program on March 1. Initially, commissions didn’t take too enormous a hit. Oh, they got hit for sure, but not fatally. It just happened to happen that most of the large-item sales in March were in the handful of categories where the commissions actually went up. Those counterbalanced the otherwise dismal prospect. Since then, dismalness has been the order of the day, since commissions on most categories didn’t merely drop; they plummeted. I still didn’t intend to promote Amazon anytime soon; I’m mad at them and being petulant. But I thought the “finds” function was, and is, a fascinating way to waste time find cool, unusual items. Like when somebody’s birthday is coming up or you have to get a gift for a bachelor party or a Halloween costume you can be confident nobody else will duplicate.
Oh, that’s funny. 🙂 Have to check it out.
I have not looked at Amazon for some time, and canceled my “subscription” order for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. The whole website has gone crazy, with prices having little or no basis in reality much of the time, with product descriptions that seriously defy understanding and do not inspire much trust. Most of the product reviews seem to be paid or subsidized… and so much more. It seems to have been taken over by a bunch of crazy Chinese who only THINK they understand English – or marketing to Americans.
I was interested in Jet.com for a while, but they have now been absorbed into the WalMart borg… sigh
I have the original “How to traumatize your children” book. Perhaps I need the updated version. Emily isn’t sufficiently traumatized yet.
(It’s part of the “self hurt” series- I’ve never looked to see what other titles they offer.)
Yeah, they haven’t been cool since they started collecting sales taxes.
RE: How to Traumatize Your Children: 7 Proven Methods to Help You Screw Up Your Kids Deliberately and with Skill. Some decades back there was adult discussion around the house about plans to utilize none, some, many, or all, of the features provided by the local version of the government education industrial complex.
I suggested that, as a reasonably closed unit for early-year development purposes, the family could create some levity, and encourage independence, by teaching the kids all the wrong names for things and then, after the standard five years or so, sending them to the government drone factory. Initially ridiculed, I pointed out this was no different from the mass arrival of non-English-speaking immigrants with which we were then contending, and could potentially be financially lucrative by claiming emmigration from Zoltonia (early SNL reference) and availing ourselves of the plethora of benefits afforded immigrants. Since the drone factory operatives were totally unschooled in dealing with Things Out of the Ordinary, we could seek shelter in the lack of a Zoltonian-English dictionary, probably for years (Plan B was to provide them the correct names for things, but in Mandarin, since that was a language available to us; the weak point was that it would be possible for Mandarin to be recognized, and a translator procured. No such risk existed with Zoltonian).
In the end, we selected English-based home schooling with, as the years progressed, selected use of advanced facilities such as science labs (the resulting cross pollination always caused them more problems than we experienced). Occasionally, however (usually somewhere near the dregs of the second bottle of wine) we’ve expressed slight regret over missing an opportunity.
i look forward to checking out How to Traumatize Your Children (it’s too late for me, but maybe with grandchildren?), but for those so inclined i would highly recommend some of the old Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. Calvin’s father didn’t make a lot of appearances, but when he did he frequently was doing something creative to mess with Calvin’s head (such as telling him that color wasn’t invented until the 1950s, etc.). He was always my hero! http://calvinhobbesdaily.tumblr.com/image/154645505829
Just saw a short take on YouTube with Bob Hope. After hearing a description about zombies, Hope quipped “Oh, you mean like Democrats”.