When you’re flying 37,000 feet above Kay Jewelers and Neiman-Marcus, it’s easy to forget to do your part to stimulate the economy by buying useless Christmas presents. The airlines have remedied this situation by placing a copy of “Sky Mall” in every seat pocket of every airplane, giving the flying public the opportunity to buy heaps of products that prove rather convincingly that American consumers will buy anything – anything – with the possible exception of an infectious disease. And they’d probably buy that if you convinced them it would melt fat off their thighs.
Evidence: Enough people buy laser helmets and full-sized Bigfoot statues to justify expensive, splashy ads for the products. But I can’t imagine who’d want to show their “red neck class in a long-stem glass” – i.e., a Mason jar on a wine-glass base.
Did you know that the plastic Diamond Jubilee Solar Queen, honoring Elizabeth II, has “a solar battery in her purse that ensures a steady royal wave”? Why would you ever leave the house?
And deciding how to make envious neighbors “do a double-take” with all the choices available in Sky Mall is a little overwhelming. There’s the adorable full-sized dog skeleton with a basket of flowers dangling from its muzzle, the “peeing boy” fountain, and the six-foot Easter Island stone god statue to help demonstrate that you have much more money than you actually need. And for only $2,250, what could make you feel closer to nature than a realistic 10-foot-long Velociraptor baring its flesh-shredding teeth? A wind chime can only tinkle, but this Jurassic beauty can make a toddler tinkle AND scream bloody murder. 
There’s a lot of emphasis on practical solutions to common problems, so whole pages are devoted to sorcery. For only $35 you can buy a big piece of genuine paper showing the exact mountains and rivers and castles where Harry Potter and his friends would have gone if they and the place they were supposed to be had ever existed. Or you can get “authentic replicas” of three wands used by the characters, also $35 each. These will delight children until one of them realizes their genuine plastic rod has precisely the same supernatural powers as a spatula, trimming the delight arc to about eight seconds and magically initiating the two-year, pre-Yard Sale junk-box storage period.
You’d think that a catalogue offering oversized plastic eyelashes for your car’s headlights wouldn’t also be a healthcare provider, but you’ll find products that will cure edema and snoring, whiten teeth, zap zits, remove skin tags and treat plantar fasciitis, among other medical ailments.
I’ve got my fingers crossed that the Home Shoulder-Replacement Kit is in the next issue. Then again, if they’d guarantee the wand, I could avoid rehab altogether.
Mack Dryden is a comedian and motivational speaker with enough frequent flyer miles to go to the space station. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .