The 12 Most Insane Things You Can Buy on the Internet
Many people feel compelled to waste their money on lame things like clothing, food and baby formula. Fortunately, besides allowing us to download porn at the speed of masturbation, the Internet has made it possible for us to buy virtually anything we can imagine, regardless of how ludicrous it may be.
A Mech
We've always been under the impression that world domination was one of those things, like family and good health, that you can't put a price tag on. Well, a Japanese company called Sakakibara-Kikai has developed a commercial battle-mech called the Land Walker, which you can buy from their website for a paltry $350,000. So quit your praying: For less than you'd pay for a shitty Studio Apartment in New York City, that global reign of terror can be yours.
There is literally no other possible application for this machine.
The Land Walker is nearly 10-feet tall, weighs over two tons and has two guns mounted on either side of the cockpit, officially making it the greatest vehicle that has ever been built. We would seriously stomp around the neighborhood asking people if they had any errands we could run, just so we could run them in a giant robot.
"Bed Bath and Beyond? No problem."
Sadly it only moves about a mile an hour, so don't take the Land Walker if you need to get where you're going in less than two weeks. Also, the guns only shoot squishy pink balls, which is a confusing tactical choice to say the least.
"We checked, sir. These balls actually cost more than bullets."
It also can't walk on anything less than a completely flat surface, so try not to wage any battles unless they take place on an indoor basketball court.
A Celebrity
If you have obscene amounts of disposable income, and a propensity for mistaking your peers' disdain for admiration, the Millionare's Concierge will rent you celebrities like Pamela Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio for your private events. The website is the online face of the "private party circuit," a shadow industry that celebrities use to pad their pockets after particularly damaging coke benders.
Did the bitchy girl nobody likes bail on your wedding at the last minute? You can replace her with Paris Hilton for a ball-shriveling $100,000 plus air fare in a private jet. Did you know that the guy who plays a celebrity on Entourage is in a band? Find out just how depressingly serious they take themselves first hand, with a "$35,000 private performance." However, in the category of misjudging the market of your own appeal, nobody can top Donald Trump, who rents himself out for private parties for $300,000 a fucking hour.
If those sound like deals that could possibly seem worth it to anyone, ever, keep in mind that the celebrity doesn't even have to pretend to like you, or even be nice to you if it's not spelled out in the contract. The good news is that if you keep a close enough eye on the market, there are deals to be had. Back in 2007, Tara Reid's private appearance fee dropped from $35,000 to $3,500 in the span of a single week. Still not worth it obviously, but market forecasters predict that it won't be long before Tara Reid will pay you $20 to drink wine coolers at your Fourth of July barbecue.
The Man-Lifting War Kite
Why bother paying off your car insurance this month when you could spend the money on a giant kite from 1902?
Really, why would you buy anything except this?
The people behind Kite and Wind evidently found themselves asking the very same question, and in response are heroically offering the Cody Box Kite on their website for a mere $50. Named for Sam Cody, the bona fide cowboy who invented it, the kite was originally designed to lift a fully-armed soldier more than twice the height of the Empire State Building, presumably to teach turn of the century schoolchildren about the dangers of impractical technology.
Or to teach them how to fucking rule .
Cody took his kite to England and sold it to the British military after a breathtaking display in which he hopped inside the kite and flew across the English Channel. He was given the title of Chief Kite Instructor (holding office alongside such colleagues as the Volleyball Kaiser and the Chancellor of Freeze Tag), and his inventions were used as observation decks in the first World War, allowing British soldiers to monitor enemy troops from a distance.
Because if you're going to spy on the enemy, you want to be inconspicuous.
Kite and Wind claims their product is "replicated to original design specs," so we assume it can only be operated by white male landowners seeking a better vantage point for shooting at Indians. They go on to assure us that the kite will "thrill not only the pilot, but everyone that's within eyesight," which of course refers to the spectacular crash that will result from anyone actually trying to fly in the damn thing and getting slammed into municipal power lines by a gust of wind.
The Mercenary Autonomous Paintball Turret
Essentially a computer with a paintball gun mounted on top of it, The Mercenary could very well be the future of backyard warfare. Even if you don't play paintball, the applications for a fully-automated robotic turret are enormous.
For example, the potential here defies description.
Using a sophisticated targeting system, The Mercenary can be programmed to fire based on parameters such as movement and color, and even has an adjustable aggression setting, making it ideal for home defense and only slightly less awesome on nights you set it up to patrol for burglars and forget that your girlfriend is coming over later after work.
If this gives you paranoid visions of a future in which thousands of Tickle-Me-Elmo's march past your house, outfitted with self aiming Mercenaries equipped with live ammo, rest assured that Zero-Ops' won't sell it to any supervillains ...
Also, a note from your mother saying it's cool.
Well, at least no supervillains who feel compelled to give a detailed outline to the teenage paintball enthusiasts who unwittingly designed their super weapon.
The Ability to Walk on Water
Developed by the aptly named company Water Walking Ball, the water walking ball allows you to walk on water... in a ball. For $500.
"Our parents spent our college money and we're going to drown! Hooray!"
Of course, that price tag is to buy your own ball. If you go to Water Walking Ball's main location in Myrtle Beach, you can spend $10 to ride inside one for three minutes, which seems a little short until you read a little further on their webpage and realize that the balls can only hold about 30 minutes of breathable air, which effectively ruins our plan to have a Cracked editorial team footrace across the Atlantic Ocean.
Also, this could be a problem.
Still, despite the steep price tag and limited oxygen supply, "poor and suffocated" is how most of us are going to die anyway. Might as well do it in a giant hamster ball.
Someone to Stand in Line for You
Further solidifying Americans as the laziest people in the history of the planet, Linestanding.com allows you to pay someone an hourly rate to go to a location and stand in line for you until you show up to switch places, at which point your rented person will return home contented with the fact that he or she has just been paid to literally do nothing but occupy space.
Like this guy.
While the service is intended primarily for congressional hearings, the website does say that it will provide a line stander at any location in the greater D.C. area, which last we checked includes both Fuddrucker's and countless irony-deprived soup kitchens. They also bafflingly offer "same day delivery" and claim to be the leader in line standing since 1985, which leads us to wonder who, precisely, is competing with them.
Tara Reid is once again fooled by a job description's use of the phrase "lines stretching around the block."
Powerskips
For anywhere between $400 and $2000, the Internet dares us to buy gas-cylindered, three-foot tall titanium devices called powerskips. Why would you want them? Because they let you run at incredible speeds and jump over cars, that's fucking why:
These cyborg kangaroo feet will turn you into a superhero, and most of us would throw an orphan into a volcano to earn that distinction. This website inexplicably offers both a standard and a pro version, because evidently there is a large enough market for robot speedboots to divide into amateur and professional classifications.
The only real drawback we can see is that if you slip or misstep, you're going to crack your head open at roughly the speed of sound, which isn't even that bad when you consider that the resulting obituary would be the single most entertaining thing ever published.
Wingsuits
Between $600 and $1500 will buy you a Phoenix-Fly polyester bodysuit that allows you to glide through the air at incredible speeds, provided you can locate an airplane or cliff you're willing to fling yourself from and you have absolutely no reason whatsoever to live:
The suit basically turns your body into a giant birth defect complete with webbed armpits and a webbed crotch, so we figure anyone who willingly spends over a grand on one was probably going to jump off a mountain anyway.
Still, sort-of flying is seriously cool, despite the fact that to actually utilize your wingsuit you'd have to charter an airplane, which could wind up costing you just as much as the suit every single time you want to use it. So really, you might as well just send Phoenix-Fly your bank account information and throw yourself out of a helicopter. The end result will be the same and you'll save everyone some time.
And speaking of saving time, most of the suits can be put on in just three minutes, putting an end to those embarrassing emergency skydiving gaffes we all know too well.
The Levitating Hover Scooter
It's clunky, it's expensive and it looks completely stupid, but fuck it. It's a hoverboard.
Nothing says "fuck it, it's a hoverboard" quite like this picture.
The Levitating Hover Scooter rides around on a cushion of air created by using a rubber skirt to make an airtight seal against the ground. While it's possible to build your own using a few leaf blowers and garbage bags, you can always buy a preassembled one for $17,000 from Hammacher Schlemmer if you just can't wait to start looking like a douchebag from the future.
On the plus side, the Hover Scooter can travel up to 15-mph, which is slower than a bike but faster than walking, and completely free of any pesky exercise. It's essentially the Jetsons version of a Segway, or a giant Roomba with handlebars. Hammacher Schlemmer actually makes a Roomba, which sheds some light on the Hover Scooter development process.
"Stand on this, Ted. I've got an idea."
A Jetpack
Are you an adventure seeker with a small fortune and balls so big they have their own death wish? Just head on over to Jet P.I.'s website and buy a jetpack.
Unfortunately, the website has a little disclaimer saying that their jetpacks will only be sold to "qualified individuals who have undergone extensive training," giving young sci-fi fans a devastating introduction to the "need a job to get experience/can't get a job without experience" Catch-22 long before it ruins their mid-to-late 20s.
Jet P.I. doesn't provide a price for its retail jetpack either, probably because the number is so large it hasn't been invented yet, but its pilots are available for public appearances for anywhere between $2,000 and $25,000. So all's not lost, kiddo! For the price of a new Toyota you can watch a retired stuntman have the time of his fucking life.
A Tank
In the UK, when the army winds up with a surplus of armored fighting vehicles due to a redesign or a botched order, they gather the extras, remove their weapons and then market them to the general public. This is another way of saying "you can buy a tank, on the Internet."
We suddenly regret everything we have ever purchased up to this point.
According to this poorly maintained website written entirely in comic sans, all it takes to have your very own piece of armored joy is $60,000 and an import license. Accepted methods of payment include cash and wire transfer, because anyone buying a tank out of pocket using a mysterious European bank account is clearly a legitimate enthusiast and not Alan Rickman from Die Hard.
"Do you accept partially singed cash with blood on it?"
Sadly, tanks aren't exactly street legal, so unless you have a farm or a private island or something, you aren't going to get to drive it a whole lot without getting shot and/or going to jail.
Uranium
Uranium, the heavy radioactive isotope that turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into craters and poisoned subsequent generations of their people, can be yours for about $200, which you may notice is less than the cost of an Xbox 360 and at least twice as bad for you.
Reading like an Overstock.com for supervillains, United Nuclear's website proudly states that no federal license is required to purchase their radioactive materials, and that their radiation counts are accurate and not affected by alpha radiation counts. Amazingly, at the time of this writing, most of their uranium stock is sold out, which makes us wonder what type of person makes bulk purchases of radioactive material over the Internet.
"Their prices are competitive but fair."
United Nuclear insists that its radioactive ores are only meant for scientific research and "professional collectors." While we're willing to believe there are people enthusiastic enough about tanks to buy them to drive around scaring the shit out of farm animals, we have to believe that the "professional uranium collector" demographic consists almost entirely of cat owning billionaires who have fed at least one secret agent to sharks.
When not writing articles for Cracked.com, Andre can be found furiously scribbling science fiction on the back of cocktail napkins at his website, www.ashtreehill.com.
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For more must-buy purchases, check out 7 Items You Won't Believe Are Actually Legal. Or find out how you can be an Internet superhero, in 8 Awesome Cases of Internet Vigilantism.
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