8 Essential Black Friday Purchases to Make This Year
The holidays are a time of immense social pressure: You spend all year destroying your relationships with your friends and family in a variety of exciting and unprecedented ways, and this is your one chance to patch everything up. But how do you choose your gifts? The only things as prevalent on the Internet as porn are obnoxious gifts, so how can you ever be sure that you're getting your friends and family the gifts they really deserve?
Well, we at Cracked have spent the last few years scouring the Internet for everything interesting or noteworthy, and we're happy to say that we know exactly what you should buy. So bookmark this page and we'll see you in just under a month when you wake up in a panic, having completely spaced on holiday shopping until now. We promise that these are the most important gifts anyone could ever get. So from us at Cracked, Happy Every Holiday!
Merry New Thanksamadannukkahmas.
The Gift of Great Sex
A good way to tell if your friends need this gift is if they're always bragging about their sex lives, because talking about how amazing their genitals are is pretty much the only surefire sign there is that someone isn't really getting any and is desperate for anyone to show them how. If no one's shooting up that conversational rescue flare, you can always just sleep with all your friends, pick the one with the least impressive performance, and give them a guide to better sex.
This will shock the stock photo people, but more than 70 percent of sex occurs above the ankle.
In that instruction manual, they'll learn that real-life sex is nothing like their sex education (i.e., Internet porn) taught them. For example, women are usually happy to provide feedback about sex, a smaller-than-average-size dick actually makes women more likely to want to bone you again, and sex, like Mario Kart, gets better with practice and never gets old.
The Gift of Healthy Digestion
Why give someone a gift they can lose or break when you can give the gift of fixed innards? Studies suggest that the easiest thing for your system to digest is knowledge. For example, did you know that you're not pooping right? You've been pooping wrong your whole life and never knew it. Every loaf you've ever pinched has been an abomination, and not in the way you're thinking: See, the best position for pooping isn't actually sitting, but squatting, particularly for men, because sitting on a can is the equivalent of choking your prostate for a few minutes each day. Fortunately, there's some shockingly educational literature written on the subject, as well as a number of other things.
All this pain could have been avoided.
The Gift of Healthy Self-Esteem
If you have a friend whose face resembles a colon and open parenthesis mashed together in an unholy union recognized by no known grammatical religion, that person needs an injection of confidence. Luckily, you can buy that now.
Cracked is not responsible for any cheering-related injuries you might suffer.
For everyone who wishes there was some trick or shortcut to confidence, we offer good news: there is. See, the trick to feeling good about yourself is perspective. You need to understand that gaining a skill is more complicated than a montage (it takes years of dedication and hard work, not just for you, but for everyone); that your generation isn't the worst (your Jackass: Bad Grandpa is just the 1950s Three Stooges); and that you have an amazing sixth sense that can keep you from being eaten by bears.
The Gift of Fiscal Responsibility
You know your friend who, despite having a steady job, is always broke? Always pining over new video games? Always buying extended warranties for his cellphones? Well, you have an obligation to help that poor sap, and we have just the thing.
A book. It's a book, that should be clear by now.
It's like a Kindle, but it burns cleaner.
The difference between getting control of your finances and never having enough money for food is as simple as understanding where your brain is doing you wrong combined with a little bit of luck (which, we should point out, has been generously slathered on this particular publication thanks to some shaky witchcraft). For example, if you've ever spent a whole bunch of money on something stupid and then decided to keep spending because otherwise that early money would be wasted, you've been deceived by your brain. The real way you should spend money isn't in steady streams, but in short, controlled bursts.
The Gift of a Night Out Drinking
You know your friend who's always too busy to take any time off because of her fast-paced office job where she wears actual pants that go to a dry cleaner and everything? You need to teach her to relax by taking her out drinking -- responsibly.
Pictured here.
Fuck yeah! Turns out science has figured out a lot more about drinking than you realize. For example: the cure for hangovers? Bacon. You're welcome for that, forever. But there are a lot of other tips your fastidious friend can bring with her into that oh-so-boozy night, like the fact that alcohol makes you more susceptible to freezing to death, that booze is more likely to kill you than any illegal drug, and that a lot of the myths we have about drinking responsibly ("Sleep it off!") will actually kill you deader than the last guy to make a sudden movement at Liam Neeson's PTA meeting. Armed with this knowledge, you and your friend can really cut loose, let your hair down, and fucking chug in a responsible fashion with adequate water in between and spread carefully throughout the course of the night!
The Gift of a Good Night's Sleep
So you've got a friend who always has bags under his eyes who calls you at 3 a.m. to relate how worried he is about all the sleep he's missing. You know what he needs? Something to help him relax -- like a rocking chair. No, we're kidding, rocking chairs are for old ladies, not to mention incredibly dangerous. What he needs is confirmation that it's everyone else who's sleeping wrong.
You fool.
The reason your friend is having trouble sleeping is because he, like virtually everyone else in the industrialized world, is trying to force himself into an unhealthy sleep pattern. We used to sleep in two four-hour chunks punctuated by a brief sex break in the middle of the night, but ever since the advent of electricity, our double whammy of responsible-length naps has been crammed into one long slumberous binge. So buy your friend a good night's sleep, along with a reminder that he should read it by candlelight.
The Gift of How to Survive a Gunfight
You know your friend who's always getting into gunfights? C'mon, we all have one. Your first instinct might be to buy her some guns, but let's be honest -- if she's around to receive gifts, she's already got plenty of those. No, what she needs is guidance, and not only will the Cracked De-Textbook clear up most every misconception anyone has about guns (do you think silencers keep guns quiet, or that fully automatic rifles are practical in a fight? You're wrong!), but it'll help correct her life's course. Because if she's been in multiple gunfights, either she's had a truly epic streak of John McClane bad luck or she seriously needs to change the strategy she uses to make life choices.
Waving a gun around while shouting so rarely improves a situation.
For the Guy or Gal Who Has Everything
If you have friends who already know all this and have no need to improve their lives at all whatsoever, then the only real choice here is to get them the Cracked Alumni T-shirt, because whether they have actually been reading our website and books or not, they're the kind of people we want on our side. So give them our number. But casually. In fact, just drop it like it was an accident. No, you know what? Give it to them, but subtly. We don't want to seem desperate.
But be sure to let them know we're real easy.
