The 3 Most Useless Things You Can Buy on a Plane When You Are Trapped

For years now we have been frequent fliers of Continental airlines, mostly because of all the big US airlines they have the most non stops out of New York and fly out of Newark which is fairly easy to get to from our house. One of my pet peeves with Continental is that when you fly with them to the coast they fly really shitty planes that don't have lap top plugs or private televisions or really anything...it's very retro. It's a joke really that they charge so much extra for business class (I flew in coach no upgrade for me), I mean why would you pay to fly business class when you can't even plug in your computer and do business? You don't even get your own TV with channels, you might as well fly Jet Blue. And they wonder why they're losing money? Even when you fly one of their newer jets (the new 739s have direct TV for a charge of $5.99 and you might as well not bother as the programing is so bad).

Anyway the point of today's post isn't to bitch about the inability for a legacy carrier in the US to figure out how to run an airline, the subject of today's post is, given you are stuck on a plane to the coast for nearly 6 hours with no entertainment system to distract you: what do you do to occupy yourself? Given that you are not interested in trying to watch Did You Hear About the Morgans on the drop down impossible to see because everyone has their windows open, mini screens with your $3 useless head sets, you decide, like I did, to browse through the in flight magazines. Normally I don't look at Sky Mall (the in-flight shopping magazine), but I was bored and figured maybe Sky Mall would work as well as an Ambien.

It actually had the opposite effect on me, with each page I was more and more horrified and oddly fascinated by the incredible amount of junk that people have come up with to sell. First off can I just say I've never seen so many adds for hair growing gadgets and potions in my entire life, seriously there must be a half dozen. The second runner up would be ramps for dogs so that they can get into bed with you or out of the back of high trucks. Is this because the dogs have gotten as fat and lazy as their owners?

I digress. What really caught my eye were all the ludicrous kitchen gadgets, several of which came under the page heading: "products that make life easier".

So without further adieu here are my top 3 things that will be cluttering our land fills in the years, well maybe months, to come:

Personal branding irons for steaks and hamburgers.
Here's the text that accompanied the picture:

"Personalize Your Barbecue! Create a personalized meal by branding your steaks, chicken and burgers! Every man needs this BBQ Branding Iron. Specify up to 3 initials."

Every man needs? Needs? Um, I don't think so....

Next up, an at home soft serve ice cream dispenser that has separate compartments for toppings and a cone holder. This Cusinart machine actually does make ice cream (at first I just thought it dispensed store bought): "Pour in the ingredients and turn the dial". And when you dispense the ice cream you can add your favorite sprinkles directly by just pulling a tab. Now this is convenience I can believe in? Really? You need a cone holder, three plastic sprinkler boxes attached to your soft serve ice cream maker? You do? Really? That makes the BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico so much more reasonable now that I know all that oil was going to be used for something so essential and meaningful, like a sprinkles container....

And lastly, but by no means least, the bakers edge brownie and lasagna pan, because, well, because...we can all use more edge? If you really want to know more check out their video.