News You Can Bruise for 2002 June 23

One thing I enjoy is exploring the neglected underbelly of mass production. Until the Internet came along I saw only the endpoint of the process, the ninety-nine-cent store or (for the more upscale items) dollar store which purchase wholesale the hopeful monsters of capitalism and try to sell them to you. But now the scales have been lifted from my eyes, and I can get a glimpse of the process by which cast-off merchandise gets from its warehouse on the edge of town to your local flea market. Some examples from Ioffer, a site I just discovered. The "Business and Commercial" section is the one I'm mainly interested in.

• Either this is some ingenious scheme to dodge a tax on diamonds, or there is some merchandise so unsellable (eg. Knickerbocker Debbie Webbie Dolls by Richard Simmons) that only the promise of cool, cool ice can soothe the pain of obtaining it.

• As with the 'One Ring' my mother once found for sale in a SkyMall catalog (she hypothesized that Saruman Ring-Maker had created a bunch of knockoffs to flood the market and prevent Sauron from finding the One), you can now own the Keychain of the Nazgûl! "Silver finish with Eye of Sauron".

• Former hippie? Now concerned, responsible liberal? You'll love these combination Jerry Garcia/Special Olympics T-shirts!

• 10,000 old MS-DOS games. I'm speechless. I'd be less speechless if I could comprehend the fact that there are probably only about 20 distinct games.

• Oh, to peek inside this warehouse... It's like a grab bag... FOR LESS!

• Sometimes having a 'girl version' of a product doesn't make the 'boy version' any less effeminate.

• As with any online community, there are always those who want to play by their own rules. Here, the evil Drew Kaplan flogs the Archive of Completely Useless Ebooks. It looks like he participated in a bunch of 'reports' variants of the chain letter scam and somehow got the impression that, since he was paying money for the reports, they must have been worth something.

• As an antidote to the cynicism this entry is no doubt engendering, an awesome trilobite fossil from St. Petersburg.

I'm tempted to make inquiries and obtain insider information and wholesaler catalogs, but since I'm not an insider I fear the 'buy something or get out' vibe, and if it's in a catalog it seems too respectable, somehow, to be worth my time.

PS: Both Ioffer and Ebay have a section called "Dolls and Bears". What, are stuffed bears not a type of doll? Also, "Dolls and Bears" would be an interesting title for a musical.