Wonderfully Awful: SkyMall Love

My fiancé and I have this fun ritual every time we fly somewhere. As soon as we get on the plane, we grab the latest SkyMall catalog out of the seat pocket and start perusing to find out what new and ridiculous items they’ve added since we last flew somewhere. For those who aren’t familiar, SkyMall is a company that mostly markets mostly to air travelers, and sells a wide variety of overpriced items that often straddle the line between futuristic cool and truly baffling. On one flight years before my fiancé proposed, he and I were thumbing through the catalog to giggle once again about the cat litter box shaped like a plant, and the idea came up that when we decided to get married, we should create a registry at SkyMall. I don’t know whether or not he was joking at the time, but I took the idea pretty seriously. Considering our senses of humor, it pretty much made perfect sense.

We haven’t flown anywhere for quite a while, so the fella and I hadn’t really discussed the SkyMall registry idea since we got engaged. Then last Friday, my fiancé received news that he had been laid off from his job. Since that meant that we would be both be unemployed for the first time since we’ve known each other, it would have been easy to immediately switch over to panic mode. But he had a better idea: instead of panicking, let’s go on to the SkyMall website and register for the most extravagant, outrageous and insanely expensive stuff we could possibly find. So on our first day of mutual unemployment, we spent the afternoon creating a high end, mostly useless wedding wishlist (since SkyMall doesn’t technically have a registry). And I must say – the experience was rather therapeutic.

So what’s on there? For starters, not one, but FOUR Tiffany lamps – two featuring our respective alma maters, one featuring my fiance’s beloved Green Bay Packers, and one Bud Light…light. We also added the Garden Yeti (as a tribute to my obsession with Sasquatch), night vision goggles (which will definitely come in handy in case we can’t afford to pay to keep the lights on) and a trombone (which neither of us know how to play, but if we get it, we promise to learn the Price is Right sad trombone – see below), among many other outlandish items. We wanted to create a wishlist that would be so totally out there that people would clearly understand it was a joke, but if anyone felt compelled to actually buy us something off of it, we’d end up with something hilariously amazing that we couldn’t help but love. And maybe it would even be something useful, like the fun and freaky (yet self cleaning!) Litter-Robot. I can’t say it enough, but there is some incredible litter box-related stuff on SkyMall.

In one of those strange cosmic coincidences, Buzzfeed just published a list of the 35 Most Ridiculous SkyMall Items. And our beloved Garden Yeti came in at #29, there are a whole slew of other items on this list that I now know I can no longer live without. Because really, why do we need sheets, towels and dishes when we could have a Booze Belt, a Toilet Roll iPod Docking Station, and Roswell, the Alien Butler?

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