Monday, November 13, 2023

Vine Flies When You're Having Fun

Multiple wars are raging, nuclear sabers are being rattled, Washington is awash in corruption, inflation is out of control, and the "new" Beatles song was a disappointment. But as the old saying goes, "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping." Or in my case, I go Vine-ing.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, the Amazon Vine program offers a huge array of free items to a select group of people (like me!) in return for our honest online reviews of the products. A lot of them are great products - but not all of them. Some are just bizarre, baffling, or in horrible taste. And since those are the ones I find amusing, those are the ones I'm going to share with you just for fun.

While browsing Vine today, I found too many odd items to cram in here so I've decided to make this a theme week with fresh posts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (which I haven't done in quite a while). Should other news be important enough or funny enough, I'll probably throw that in too. But for now, warm up your holiday shopping engines and join me for another edition of "Capitalism Gone Wild!"


23 comments:

  1. Wow. I actually had an invitation to join that program a while back but passed on it. I count that as a win.

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  2. I had five kids...do I qualify as a "Preg Pro"?

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  3. Just right for a sick Satanic sodomite sewerpipe abomination.

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  4. I also had an invite to the Vine program and went so far as to sign up just o see what they offered. You’re right, all I saw was cheap Chinese junk.

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  5. How curious that your post refers to one of my favorite wordplay repartee's...
    "Fun flies when you're doing time".

    Mike aka Proof, If you HAD five, you can't be a "false positive", so NO!

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  6. When I hear "Vine" I think of the former short video service from about 10 years ago that unleashed a burst of creativity until it was purchased by the old Twitter and put out to pasture. Every now and then I tweet ("post" in the current vernacular) at Elon to restore the service but I think he's too busy or doesn't give a fiddler's fig what some rando wants.

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  7. On the one hand, lots of creatives out there.
    On the other hand...GOOD LORD.

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  8. All curiously funny, but "Nascar garage"? Harf!!

    @MMM,
    On the other hand, he wore a white, sequined glove.
    Sorry... old joke from the past.

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  9. @Colby: Why isn't Michael Jackson allowed within 100 feet of an elementary school? BECAUSE HE'S DEAD!!! >:D

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  10. Pink Tulip Night Light reminds me of the film "The Little Shop of Horrors".
    Preg Pro Prank Positive may be onto something; but "Shark Tank" is probably out.
    What fun but I'll have to catch up with this week's Finds later.

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  11. I once visited a slaughter house where the workers wore armor sleeves and vests. Doing piece work they were so fast the armor kept then from stabbing themselves.

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  12. Or as one frog said to the other, "Time's fun when you're having flies!"

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  13. Cool.
    ! The 21st century Johnson & Smith catalogue.

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  14. I think the armor sleeves could come in handy for oyster shucking?

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  15. Someone I knew had an obese cat because it ate and ate and ate. He bought a feeding device that auto-portioned out food into the dish at certain scheduled times of the day. That cat learned when that time would come about and sat waiting/watching the dispenser.

    Bobo

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  16. Considering that we've long passed the parody inversion point, focusing on this sort of stuff is probably the saner option.

    Mock it if you will, but if only this couple had been prepared with the gender reveal fire extinguishers, their child wouldn't have to go through high school with their parents in prison.

    The "mysterious egg" ought to be bundled with the waterproof mattress pad.

    Remember "mattress girl"? I bet she could use that too for when it rained between classes.

    A "false positive" pregnancy test? That's a hoot.

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  17. The Deermon Red thing is for rock climbing. All you do is nail one of those spike thingies into a crack in the rock, clip that metal thing to it and put the red loop around your neck. In case you slip and fall, it will hold you upright so you can recover your grip. Brilliant.

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  18. My first thought when I saw the "Sot Stopper" was I'm sure they have some in the White House and Air Force 1 for the big guy. I'm sure it saves time on the clean up.

    If I forget I hope everyone has a truly Blessed Thanksgiving and remembers in spite of some of the junk going on in our lives, we really are Blessed even if it's hard to see sometimes.

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  19. I was invited to Vine near the end of 2022. It's been a good run for about a year, and I amassed about $3,000 ETV of nice items to report on my return this year. However, I'm going to be leaving the program before the end of this year for a couple of reasons.

    1) The level of items available has really gone downhill in the last few months. I'm no longer willing to scroll through pages and pages of sunglass lenses and iPhone cases in search of elusive worthwhile items. More and more of what is offered is just junk....and often many pages' worth of the same item repeated over and over to have to scroll through.

    2) IRS reporting regulations. I do my own returns, and even reviewing the information available on the irs.gov official website, the information about reporting Vine "income" is pretty nebulous as far as "hobby" vs "self-employment." And you really, REALLY don't want "self-employment" as that entails paying double-rate FICA and Medicare taxes on your Vine "income." To my reading I feel I could easily defend reporting Vine income as "hobby" income for two tax years (last year and this year), but beyond that, the way the regulations are written, it would be difficult for me to make the case for not being liable for those extra self-employment taxes. Hence, I'll be withdrawing rather than continuing to participate in Vine in 2024.

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  20. I too passed on the Vine invite...BUT! We have Stilton to the rescue to show all of us what we've missed out on! Thank you Stilton for your patience, diligence and lack of a real life for taking the time to sort through all these...gems. Or something. We've had a waterproof mattress cover for years. Because....well, you just never know. It came in handy when the hurricane spawned tornado sucked the roof off our house a few years ago. Saved the mattress but I still didn't like sleeping in a puddle. The arm sleeves would be even better if they also had soft body armor. Just the thing for big city subway riders. As for the gender reveal fire extinguishers, maybe you can get a selection of colors so your darling whatever can identify as anything it wants.

    BUT the REAL PRIZE!!!! Stilton returns three times this week! WOO HOO!

    I can hardly wait!

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  21. Hey, the false-positive pregnancy test is just the thing for trannies who want to "prove" that not only women can get pregnant!

    And if a tranny sot uses *red* wine on the sot-stopper, maybe he could point to the puddle as evidence of having had a period before getting pregnant.

    On another note, I actually kinda liked that tulip-nightlight thingy.

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  22. @Readers- Glad you enjoyed (or pretended to) the Vine items. For those of you who have been invited to Vine in the past, it really is a pretty good program that quite regularly offers nice products. At the top tier (which I'm no longer in) there's no dollar limit on what you can get, and I've received items valued as high as $1000. Currently, I'm limited to items $100 or under and I can only request three a day. First world problems.

    As @Mike points out above, in recent months Vine seems to have stumbled a bit, frequently making 20 listings for the same product or touting things like very specific auto parts ("Interior LED light replacements for 2007 Jeep Wrangler"). Still, I regularly find desirable items. I recently got an inflatable bear costume which will come in handy when...um...uh...well, I've got an inflatable bear costume anyway just in case.

    I think the "false pregnancy" test is the cruelest item in this list. No good can come of it. Apparently it's a powder that you mix with water, after which you can dip in a pregnancy test and PRESTO - instant panic and/or extortion! This can pretty much only be used by women to fool men and I just can't imagine it being part of a legitimate joke.

    As the TV pitch man says, "But WAIT! There's MORE!" See you on Wednesday!

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  23. I am happy at the return of Stilton humor, kudos!

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