Every Sunday morning, my wife separates the newspaper for our individual, breakfastime reading enjoyment. She takes the Arts and Entertainment section (for the crossword puzzle), the sales papers, and the coupons. I get the comics, the Best Buy insert, any ads/coupon pages for fast food restaurants (Even though I have enacted a self-imposed ban on personal fast food consumption, I like to keep up with what's new and hip in the industry. And sometimes the pictures satiate my need to feed my facehole.), and Parade magazine. For those of you unfamiliar with Parade, it is a 15-page periodical chock full of celebrity profiles, recipes from well-known people (This Sunday, Lamb Korma with Salman Rushdie!), questions for the world's smartest woman, feel-good stories of personal triumph, poll questions (This Sunday, "Are You on Facebook?" SPOILER ALERT: 48% of poll participants are NOT!), and advertisements for products no one with a functioning brain in their head would ever even consider buying. It is this last one--the unquestionably shitty products--that I intend to focus on in this piece.
There I was, enjoying a blueberry bagel in our tastefully decorated breakfast nook, giving Parade the cursory glance it deserves, when I came to an advertisement that screamed this in my face:
An Amazing Sight At Night!
Solar Powered Birds of the Jungle -- or Charming Meerkats!
"Solar-powered birds," I thought. "I believe that I will read on and learn more about these futuristic wonders!" The ad went on:
Bring a tropical touch to your garden--all year round!
That's just what my garden has been missing--a tropical touch!
A magical...
Well, solar power isn't magic per se, but go on...
...and fun delight at night and sure to turn heads in the daylight!
Especially the heads of your neighbors who will, if they have any pride in their neighborhood's appearance, request that you take down your goofy, glowing birds immediately.
The Jungle Birds have a solar panel that uses sunlight to charge the solar lights by day. Each bird has a built-in solar light that turns on automatically at dusk and gives approximately 7 hours of light from a full charge.
Because there is nothing more lifelike than a glow-in-the-dark toucan sitting on perch in, say, South Bend, Indiana.
The solar-glowing meerkats are pretty much the same thing, only way more gross somehow.
Maybe you're unconvinced. Maybe my words and the product description offered by Four Corners, the company selling these dumb birds and whose slogan reads "The best ideas and offers, directly to you!", have intrigued you. If that is the case, allow me to show you the product:
Before
After
Holy crow! Someone spilled toxic waste on those poor jungle birds! Somebody call animal rescue!
Ugh.
