Holiday Gift Guide: Cool Stuff We Can’t Believe Exists

We recommend perusing these selections with your most elegant finery and Corgi.

While buying gifts for your loved ones, liked ones, tolerated ones, and ones you’d like to catapult into a wall of vipers, you may have forgotten to get a little something nice for yourself. On the next pages you’ll find some low-cost items which might make a good gift for yourself or for someone you don’t want to launch (via ancient technology) towards an odd assemblage of venomous reptiles.

This Flashbang Bra Holster ($40) is perfect for the woman — or man, we don’t judge — who wants to conceal a gun underneath their breasts. This video sold me on the idea:
 

 
 

Zipbuds ($40) zip up when not in use to keep them from becoming an inexplicably knotted-up mess whenever you look away for five seconds, as is the case with all other earbuds.

This OCD cutting board ($25) speaks to me. It says, “Buy more Purell,” and that’s a great idea.

These officially-licensed LEGO lunchboxes unfortunately don’t snap into each other, but we’d still like to build a Great Wall of Sandwich out of them regardless. $17 (£11, €13) at Firebox.
Grid-it organizers are an easy way to corral all those little items before throwing them into a bag. They’re available for $10 and up at Cocoon Innovations and Brookstone.
If you play old school video games on your computer with an emulator, the Go Pad is a handy (and highly portable) controller which plugs into a USB port and works with most games that don’t require an analog stick. $20 at Ion Audio.
BrickStix are decals used to modify LEGO with themes including zombies and WWII soldiers. (Those two aren’t the same set, even though that would be awesome). Eight different reusable decal sets are available here and here for $6 per set.
There are also decals to customize IKEA furniture. A lot of these decals at Mykea cost more than $30, but they may be the only thing holding some of these furniture pieces together.
The Obol separates milk and cereal, or soup and crackers, or cookies and milk, or chips and dip, or even cookies and soup if you’re some kind of weirdo who dunks your Hydrox in Campbell’s Chunky. (This is not a euphemism.) The bowl is BPA free, dishwasher safe, mostly unbreakable, and made in the USA. (USA! USA!). It’s $20 for one or $50 for three at Obol.
The tipping Magisso Teacup won the 2011 Red Dot Design award for designers Laura Bougdanos and Vesa Jääskö. It has a compartment for loose leaf tea. Tipped one way, the tea brews. Tipping it the other way after the tea is steeped lifts the leaves out of the water as seen in this video. I may have to get one of these since my teaball got rusty. (This is also not a euphemism.) $20 at Uncommon Goods.

If you like Brandon Bird as much as we do around here, you might like recreating three of his paintings (Brave Cone Dog, Uncanny Valley, and Bad Day on the High Sea) in paint-by-number form. $12 plus shipping for the three pack with paints, brush, and instructions at BrandonBird.
Although this $16 Melting Clock is small, made of cheap plastic, and has some bad reviews, it’s still based on Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory so I want one.
This “10 Ton Lampshade” is pretty awesome, but I may have to write Meninos an angry letter for pricing it somewhat high ($75) and, more importantly, for lying to me. This thing doesn’t weigh anywhere near 10 tons. Now what am I going to use to crush that vexatious road runner?