Weird Stuff The NY Times Wants You To Buy

You need zero of these objects

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

Ye Ole Grey Lady Santa is at it again! The New York Times did a holiday gift guide, because consumerism is the reason for the season. While some of the items are useful, what is most important is to examine the goofiest things on their list.

Ass glasses — These are not cups for your butt, but glasses shaped like butts. For $91, you can drink out of a specially crafted booty. Sadly, the cheeks are not spread, which is a clear missed opportunity to have a gaping anus through which you can insert a straw, but whatever. Kudos to Tanner Curtis, Photo Editor, Styles, for getting something derriere-shaped on the list. You could also put pudding in these and call them your Eatin’ Ass Glasses, and that is what I would do. I’m going to buy these, and I’m not kidding.

Boring pajamas — For over $300, you, too, can buy these generic and dull pajamas from Amazon. For $75, okay, they’re fancy and not crappy fast fashion. But three hundo? If there’s not a vibrator sewn into the crotch, I cannot see the appeal. I do not know what Zoe Vanderweide, Staff Writer at Wirecutter, was thinking but I assume designer Julianna Rae Natalya is her best friend or maybe she was just bored and had to fill out her editor’s demands for pajamas on a gift guide. I respect you, Zoe, and your staff bio is very funny (“she has been wearing things for over three decades.”) I would have a pajama party with you any day but we need weird adult replicas of those American Girl Doll pajamas they used to sell. (I had the Molly ones, which were red and white striped, and was wearing them the day I got my period when I was 11, anyway, why are THEY not on the gift guide?!)

Bizarre hydroponic tower of terror — Miya Lee, Projects Editor at Modern Love (and a genuinely wonderful storyteller and podcast host), describes this $699 thing from Zooey Deschanel’s company as “potentially more of a burden than a gift.” This is exactly what if I would do if called on to contribute a gift suggestion to The Times annual gift guide: pick something weird and overpriced and start my blurb by roasting it. She’s disrupting the process from the inside and I hope she cackled as she did it.

A great fancy camping stove if you want to be the reason your whole group dies on Mount Everest — This is the type of stove you ask an underpaid, stressed Sherpa to haul up along with your espresso machine and your Smeg mini-fridge and your Louboutin stilettos because you can’t wait to take a cute fashion-forward Insta selfie on the summit. It is $390 and someday Kit Dillon, Senior Staff Writer at Wirecutter, will be invited to go “camping” with me and bring this but PLOT TWIST we are just doing a spa day and actually we don’t cook, we mostly just hang out in a sauna and maybe drink cucumber water and talk about our families.

This phallic and mostly useless vase — This thing is designed to hold only one stem, and it is $280. It was designed by Colin King for Audo Copenhagen and suggested by Tim McKeough, Contributor, Real Estate. It is $280 plus tax. It’s interesting-looking and all, but it is $280 plus tax and shipping. Have I mentioned how much it costs? What is happening? I would take this and turn the ass glass upside down and put it on top and call it a sculpture and sell it to MOMA for $100000.