Gift Guide: The Year's Most "Rated" Stuff

Contrary to my plans for the week, I’ve been informed that The Daily Ostrich always prints a Holiday Gift Guide on Thanksgiving weekend. How do they think we can to that with no investigative reporters? There’s no one to find out what’s on sale, or what’s worth buying. Am I supposed to talk about my own personal stuff? Yes? (The news editor is nodding) Really? Well that gives me a naked feeling I don’t like at all. Anyone who’s ever found a receipt on the ground will know what I mean. It’s easy to read someone’s “issues” in their shopping list.

And yet needs must. For the sake of your holiday giving, I’ll tell on myself by rating some of the stuff I’ve acquired in the last year. (Since my memory is bad, “the last year” is defined as the last three years.) I’ll follow Chuck Klosterman’s lead and call out those things that aren’t overrated or underrated, but merely “rated.” These are the things that delivered exactly what I expected, or should have expected. And that’s the best stuff for a Gift Guide, because overrated things are bad gifts, and underrated things are bound to be underappreciated.

This Year’s Most “Rated” Stuff:

Pocket Hose Silver Bullet, as Seen on TV
When I saw the Pocket Hose Silver Bullet, I thought it was be too good to be true. A hose that’s 25’ long when the water’s running, but shrinks down to an unobtrusive snaky bundle? AND it has three useful spray modes! Count me in!

It felt a little chintzy when I set it up, but it worked at advertised for 3/4 of the summer. Then it sprung a titanic leak, and of course you can’t patch it, like you could a normal hose. It worked like I hoped it would, and broke like I thought it would. Mark it rated!

Contrast that with the underrated irrigation timer I tried out in the backyard. That thing cost $20, and just plain worked. I hardly had to think about that part of the yard. The plants were happy, even on the hottest days. When I walked by they called out “Thank you, Tom! We love you, Tom!” I really had them fooled.

Yeti SB115 Mountain Bike
It pains me that Dave Guettler, my employer at River City Bicycles and a DO subscriber, will see this bike listed as merely rated. Let me leap to explain that my Yeti SB115 is the most beautiful machine I’ve ever owned. (I got it in Anthracite—indisputably the best color.) I bought this Fancy Mountain Bike (FMTB) to answer the question “If I owned an FMTB, would I actually go mountain biking?” And the answer, as I should have known, is no. I’m too impatient to strap my bike to a car, drive to a parking spot in the woods, ride the bike, strap the bike back to the car, and drive home. Nor am I rugged enough for Dave’s typical outing, where he rides his bike 30 miles to the ride spot, does the 50 mile ride, and then hits a few extra hills on his way back.

For me, owning a Yeti is like keeping a unicorn chained in the basement. Hence, my FMTB is now in the hands of Northwest Pro Gear, who will set it free. When they do, I’ll buy a Specialized Creo 2, a Fancy Electric Gravel Bike (FEGB) designed for someone who wants to ride all over the place, but is also notably lazy. Me to a tee!

The Duck Tray
As is common for writers (and uncommon for tycoons) I suffer from a touch of imposter syndrome. That’s why, when Twitter was Twitter, I stalked a handful of my favorite writers, hoping to copy their walks. So it came to pass one evening that Magnificent Illustrator Shing Yin Khor announced in a tweet that “the duck tray is on sale!” with a link to West Elm’s online store. Seconds later, Illustrious Agent Dongwon Song responded with a screenshot of the duck tray in their virtual shopping cart. In another two heartbeats, Hugo-Winning Author Sarah Gailey tweeted that they “ordered the duck tray so hard I hurt my finger.” I had no idea what the duck tray was, but by the time Famed Novelist Max Gladstone tweeted that he, too, had bought the duck tray, my duck tray had been on order for a quarter-hour.

The duck tray is charming. It’s a gleaming brass bowl with adorably awkward webbed feet. As an object I like it very much. As a symbol, it was supposed to assure me that I, too, am a writer worthy of Club Duck Tray. Instead, it quietly tells me I’m a desperate pretender, who’d wear any foolish thing to school if the cool kids wore it yesterday. And that’s what you’d expect of a duck tray obtained in such a manner.

By contrast, my LAMY 2000 fountain pen gets a score of underrated, and this despite its functional similarity to a Bic ballpoint, which is 400% less expensive. A fountain pen turns your okay writing into pretty okay writing, and that’s worth far more than 6.25 duck trays, to me.

This Year’s Most Underrated Stuff

Cusinart ICE-21 Ice Cream maker - Our previous ice cream maker was among the most underused implements we ever had, and while we thought this new kind might be better, we didn’t want to kid ourselves. Boy howdy. Since September we’ve kept at least three dairymen fully employed. I think we’re on batch #13. It’s a genuine, actual problem.

Makita 1 1/4 HP Compact Router - This is the chihuahua of power tools. You want to pinch its little toes (but you don’t, because it bites.) All my other power tools laugh at it. But get this: it carves holes in things, and you can hold it one-handed. If you, like me, occasionally need to ruin your nice things by carving holes in them, you can see why this is a game changer.

This Year’s Most Overrated Stuff

Fender Stratocaster - Totally on me. I thought I’d play it more. I promise I’ll redeem myself in the New Year!

Bodum Plastic Wine Chiller - It’s a clear plastic tube with walls full of air. Supposedly it keeps chilled wine insulated. Maybe it does this; maybe it doesn’t, but I recently learned that Mrs. Tycoon does not like the Bodum Plastic Wine Chiller. The wine chiller is Mrs. Tycoon’s actual least favorite object. You can kind of see why. It is a bulky piece of plastic trash, marginally useful in one rare scenario—a scenario for which its defining cheapness makes it distinctly unfit. Perhaps I should not have bought the Bodum Plastic Wine Chiller.

We took a bunch of stuff to the secondhand store last week, and I thought the wine chiller had gone away with the group. Egads, I found it yesterday, lurking on a high shelf. No one tell Mrs. T.