The worst part about talking with your friends about what you’d do if you won the lottery is that, for a little while, you actually feel like it could happen. Oh, you’d give away a bunch of money to charity? Buy your best friend a house? Take your significant other on a trip somewhere they’ve always wanted to go?
Well, those sentiments are nice, but since you haven’t won the lottery, they help no one.
But the holidays are a time to dream, right? So here’s a list of things that are nice but you likely can’t get for anyone this December.
1. A Jetpack
Yes, jetpacks exist. But they aren’t exactly what you might think – they’re water-propelled, so they can only be used over said water, and are connected to some hose contraption. For somewhere around $100,000, you get a CFI 1 Pilot Certification Training and Safety Course, a jetpack stand, helmet radios, and a few other things. Its flight ceiling is 30 ft., so it’s not gonna turn you into Iron Man or anything. It’s really just paying a lot of money to go up high over the water for a bit. If you think you might have seen it before, its likely because of this guy.
2. Prima Cinema Player and Subscription
Ever wanted to have a theatre in your own home, where you can watch movies as they come out? Well, keep chasing that dream, because it’s likely that only people who can afford to install home theatres can afford this thing (it’d also look pretty funny hooked up to a lone projector in your one bedroom apartment). You buy the player and security device for about US$35,000, which can apparently be installed with any sound/projector system, and then all you have to do is shell out a meagre $500 for the movies ($600 for 3D). It’s great if you’ve got Richie Rich sort of cash.
3. 84″ Class Ultra High Definition 3D TV with Smart TV
Of course, instead of getting the home theatre experience, you could settle for something closer: an “84 3D TV. That’s a pretty big TV. It comes with a Magic Remote, which hopefully means you can control it with your mind, access to over 1,400 apps, and something called Dual Play where you can play video games against someone else head-to-head, on the same screen, but you both get full screen views (which doesn’t seem possible, but hey, jetpacks, right?). It’s only $20,000, so if you have a house you can re-mortgage to buy a TV, have at it.
Remember going to the movies at SilverCity, playing arcade games like Cruisin’ USA in those (probably filthy) car seats, with the real-looking steering wheel controllers? Now you can have that for a lowly $90,000. The trunks are calfskin (the best skin for gaming?) and each is handmade. It’s got something called the Thrustmaster T500 RS Force Wheel (which is a pretty funny name), a wireless music system, motion-detection camera, and a couple microphones, which leads us to the best part of this – the actual end of the product description on the site: “Maybe you’ll start with a little karaoke sing-off—you chuckle, imagining your version of “Welcome to the Jungle” blasting through the unparalleled 1800-watt sound system.” If the idea of you or your friends pretending to be Axl Rose didn’t make you want to spend the money, I don’t know what will.
5. La Boite LD120 Hi-Fi Soundsystem and Laptop Desk
This one is a bit more affordable than most of the things on the list. It’s basically a desk that looks sort of like a weird, 4-legged spider that you plug your laptop into, and it makes your laptop louder! Like an iPod dock, but for a computer! You plug in your laptop to its speaker system via USB and then it plays through its speakers, which are supposed to be turned at the wall, so the sound reflects and is wider and stuff like that. You can get it with cool red legs. It only needs one cable to be plugged in. There isn’t much more to say, it’s a desk that plays your laptop music through different speakers. Only about $1,700.
6. Red Epic-M Monochrome Camera
Did you like Fight Club? This is the camera they used to film that movie. Imagine how good your dinner parties, footage of your children making food messes, and cat videos would look filmed through something like that. It has features so advanced I don’t know what most of them mean, like a 5K monochrome sensor that offers improved net resolution, a new low-pass filter, and a free upgrade to a Dragon Monochrome Sensor whenever that comes out. If you’ve always wanted to see what your kid’s swim meet would look like through the eyes of Tyler Durden, well, that’s bizarre, but you can do it for $42,000.
The weird thing about guitars like this one is that the more advanced they get technology-wise, the dumber and dumber they get aesthetically. If you’re too lazy to twist your tuning knobs yourself, this is the great, brutally hideous guitar for you. It has robot tuners, which means you just press a button or turn a dial and you can play just like Keith Richards (no you can’t). Now, the look of a guitar isn’t that important, unless you’re in a heavy metal band (it should be a Flying V, or something by Ibanez, preferably), but this seems like a lot of money for not much payoff. If you want to shell out around $5,600 for what is, basically, a reason for your friends to laugh at you and be bogged down by the terrible burden of tuning your guitar manually, this should work out great.
8. Hart Aural Pleasure Speakers
This one easily wins the award for best product name on the list. You can get them private cast in 18ct gold, and they look kind of like a fat worm from a sci-fi movie sitting on a toothpick that is melting at the bottom. They are also “HiFi Choice Awarded 5 stars for sound quality!,” which sounds pretty good. There isn’t a ton of info about them on their site, but if you can afford to buy speakers cast in gold, you might be able to pay for a lot of things without thinking too hard about them. They cost about $4.8M, which is likely enough to buy a lot of impoverished kids food, water, shelter, and an Ivy League education, so shame on you.
9. Tropical Island Paradise Yacht
Yacht Island Design just went to the edges of what we thought excess could be, then puked all over it with a new, shinier type of excess. The Tropical Island Paradise Yacht is a 90 m behemoth of something nobody needs. It’s basically a tropical island, complete with waterfalls and a volcano and little huts, laid out tastefully upon a boat that looks like a really soft space ship. They’re also working on other absurd yacht concepts, such as The Streets of Monaco and Project Utopia, which is what looks like a boat from the future (maybe it can also fly?). No real price, since its a concept, but it’s safe to guess it will cost you many millions of dollars.
You gotta save the best for last. This robot toilet is what must be the finest in waste expulsion experiences, complete with motion activated seat, an “advanced bidet system,” a dock for your MP3 player, and an integrated air dryer, which happens to be part of the bidet. If you go to features, then click on the advanced bidet system, you can watch it come out of the back of the toilet, like a creepy robot penis. It even has different settings, like “pulsate,” “oscillate,” and “wave.” It’s only about $6,400, so if you always wanted to pay the same price for your toilet as a good used car, here’s your chance.
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Matt Williams is a writer and musician with a decent fantasy football team. Follow him on Twitter @WaterInHell .
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