This is the book.
The book that I wrote.
It does not rhyme.
Unlike this note.
You need to eat or you’ll die. I know, it’s sad.
Your friends will also need to eat. Or they’ll die. It’s really terrible.
So, here’s a lot of snacks. It’s a snack club, actually, like, they send you snacks every month, because you can’t go a month without eating our, as I already pointed out, you’ll die.
Save yourself. Eat snacks.
$10 for the first month. (You’ll be auto-renewed unless you cancel, of course, but that’s okay because you’ll get snacks if you don’t cancel. And snacks are good.)
The Magic 8-ball is Magic. It helps you make decisions using Magic. Magic isn’t real (sorry) so the Magic 8-ball is a dirty, dirty liar.
The Magnetic Decision Making Pendulum (not its real name) isn’t Magic. It’s Science. Science is real so the MDMP (the abbreviation of the not-real name) is not a dirty, dirty liar.
These are meat claws. You put them on your hands and attack some cooked meat. You shred that meat. It becomes awesome shredded meat. And you get to do it WITH YOUR HANDS. Like people were meant to.
Besides, these are awesome claws, and the site’s name is AwesomeClaus, so, okay, yeah, this one was a gimmie.
$12 bucks or so, meat not included.
Vulcans don’t celebrate Christmas and they certainly would never wish you a “merry” anything or “joy” to the world (and really, “world” is such a narrow way to think of things, especially if you’re Spock and aren’t from the same world as Kirk who isn’t from the same world as Worf or Quark or even the same quadrant as Neelix). Leonard Nimoy was Jewish, so, this makes even less sense. And “Trek,” in this case, is a proper noun, not a verb, so one wouldn’t “Trek the Halls!”
And yet, in spite of — or perhaps in part because of — all these flaws, this is perfect. Like Spock himself.
That looks like a GameBoy, right? RIGHT?
It’s not. It’s a refrigerator. With a freezer on top. With a set of refrigerator magnets. Bad news: You can’t play Tetris on it, unless you really want to get creative with how you stack leftovers, produce, and that weird thing in the back of the fridge which is growing hair and dates back to uh… holy cow that was long ago. (Gross!) Good news: The “screen” is a dry-erase board.
Really, I have no idea what this is.
It’s an ad. It’s different for everyone. That’s how ads on the Internet work a lot of the time.
It may be more than $20. It may not even be a product. I HAVE NO IDEA.
But I’m not apologizing.
Okay, I’ll apologize. Sorry.
The worst five parts about making sand castles: sand in your shoes, in your shorts, in your lunch, in your hair, and the endless trips to the water to get the sand wet so you can make a sand castle which, let’s face it, looks nothing like a sand castle.
Enter Sand, with a little circle-y thing over the a. It’s soft but not sticky, at least not to you. It’s kind of stretchy. And it’s apparently non-toxic, but we’d not suggest eating it.
You probably don’t want your number ones and number two to glow in the dark. On the other hand, sometimes you ahve to go when it’s dark, and you probably don’t want to miss. This motion-detecting toilet night light prevents that — well, hopefully — and as a bonus (?), it makes your toilet glow bright red. Or green, if you’re into that.
Awesome: Water ballon fights.
Not awesome: Filling up 100 water balloons.
Awesome: Bunch o Balloons, a pack of 100 water balloons which all fill up at once, in about a minute.
(Not awesome: cleaning up all those busted balloons. But whatever, close enough.)
I also wrote this!
This still doesn’t rhyme.
But please read both.
If you have the time.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Or in this case a fake ring. If you’re Sauron, that works too. I mean, you’re basically a disembodied eye anyway, it’s not like you even have a finger to put it on.
In all seriousness, this is going to be the next classic children’s book. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s a video of the author (actor B.J. Novak) reading the book.
It’s brilliant.
Bonus feature: It’s pretty light because it doesn’t have all that extra ink that pictures take up.
Say it with me now: acc-cel-o-rom-eter. That’s the thingamabob that lets your phone know when you are tilting it. And that can be used to make really neat games like the one above.
But there’s a really neat other thing that can do that, too! It’s call gravity plus momentum plus inertia. And get this: it’s 3-D! And has awesome tactile feedback!
Yeah, so, that’s Tilt. It’s a game which is probably also a $0.99 cent app somewhere, but only cheapskates give digital versions of awesome games. This one is great and kid-tested, kid-approved (trust me on that one).
As a famous poet once said:
Well, I’d like to visit the moon
On a rocket ship high in the air
Yes, I’d like to visit the moon
But I don’t think I’d like to live there
Though I’d like to look down at the earth from above
I would miss all the places and people I love
So although I might like it for one afternoon
I don’t want to live on the moon
Words to live by. And, words to sleep by. It’s a night light! It looks like the moon! It has an “authentically detailed 3-D lunar landscape!” And it comes with a remote control. Of course.
Okay, okay, the thing above looks dumb. Hella dumb, if you use the word “hella” (which is, itself, hella dumb). But you know what else looks dumb? Coffee stains on your pants and shirts and carpets and ye gods it burns too! What infernal torture is this!
Anyway.
There’s a solution. It’s called physics and you don’t need to understand it. All you need to know is that if you put your coffee-filled mug in this dumb-looking doohickey, you the coffee often (more often than before, at least) remains in the mug and off your clothes and stuff. And that’s important. Hella important.
$15, give or take. Mug not included, but who cares, because it makes all of your normal mugs into awesome mugs.
It’s called Gallium.
NOT Gollum.
Just to be clear on that. If you’re still confused:
1) Gollum is forever linked to the One Ring, whicb can only be melted in the bowels of Mount Doom, behind the Black Gate of Mordor, as it was originally forged there.
2) Gallium is metal which melts at about 85 degrees Fahrenheit, and therefore does not need a hobbit (let alone two hobbits) or a fiery volcano to melt. You can just squeeze it a bit and let your body heat do the rest.
You’re at work and stressed out because something something, something something something — oh, and something something something something! Every day, right? It’d be incredible if you could just break out the GameBoy, pop in that Tetris cartridge, and doo doo doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo your worries away, right there in the office. But then your boss would be … yeah, that. So no GameBoy, sorry.
Instead? Stress balls. They suck, though.
But if they were shaped like Tetris blocks? Not only could you squeeze them when the something something happen, but you can also build neat things and be the envy of the other people in your cubical farm.
The best part about building sand castles isn’t the building the sand castle part, unless you’re one of those super-sculpture types (and really, who is?). No, no. The best part about building sand castles is the AWESOME MOATS.
Usually, digging an AWESOME MOAT (it really needs to be in all caps, all the time) means scooping out piles and piles of sand with your hands. That’s fun and all, but it’s slow going. Handtrux allow you to supercharge (SUPERCHARGE) construction of your AWESOME MOAT, turning your hands into massive shoves which can dig dig dig dig dig until the tide comes in and ruins all your fun.
Stupid tide.
Let’s make this one simple:
1) Fire.
2) Pointy sticks.
3) Food.
4) In a mug-shaped container.
5) Seriously? You’re not convinced already?
If you scroll up a bit, you’ll see that I have an ad. I apologized for that ad. I guess it was an empty apology because I’m doing it again.
Every once in a while you need to let off a little steam, and threatening to sacrifice some dude is a great way to do it.
Wait, that sounded wrong, let’s try again.
Everyone once in a while, while you’re cooking, you need to let off a little steam. You know, so your pasta doesn’t boil over and create that really gross mess that you can never clean up. So some company came up with “Lid Sid,” a dangling little dude who you can prop over the lip of the pot. He holds up the lid and looks like he’s about to go for a swim in boiling hot water (with oil if you are any sort of decent cook) which would suck, but he’s not alive.
At least not any more.
There’s a website called “Who Buys This Stuff?” which asks, as you may have guessed, who buys this stuff? In most cases, we agree with them, but not when it comes to the awesome power of a motorized ice cream cone. It SPINS YOUR CONE FOR YOU. That’s amazing! Equal distribution of ice cream lickery, guaranteed! And you don’t have to go all Exorcist and turn your wrist in a full circle! Because that’s impossible unless you’re possessed by some demon!
AwesomeClaus approved.
Especially if you’re lazy.
There was once this kid, we’ll call him Carl, who liked skateboarding. Carl had a girlfriend named Monique, but he could never remember how to spell her name. But she liked rainbows. Carl wanted to show Monique that he’d love her forever, so he got a tattoo of a rainbow, skateboarding, on his right arm. It hurt like a youknowwhat.
The next day, Carl caught Monique sleeping with his best friend, Waldo.
Don’t be a Carl. Make sure your tattoos of skateboarding rainbows are temporary.
The web comic XKCD dude decided, hey, wouldn’t it be really cool to draw the oceans? And how deep they are? Because the oceans, they’re deep. Really deep. Like if Buddha and some non-Buddha philosopher had a conversation deep, except not in that sense of the word “deep.”
You can see the whole drawing here but that would be hard to put on your wall, so Mr. XKCD made it into a poster. It’s 36″x24″ and on high-quality paper, which means it isn’t all that deep itself.