What grandpa got for father’s day

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Kids forgot to get you a father’s day gift? It could be worse. A friend tipped us off to an item on Andrew Sullivan’s blog about the ‘10 Worst Products for Men Ever Created.’

Hair in an aerosol can, anyone? Or perhaps a chest hair toupee? Maybe save up the big bucks for a scary wire-and-colored-lightbulb contraption known as the ‘Prostate Warmer.’ (We won’t even talk about some of the others.)

Of course, history is littered with -- and the pockets of many a trickster lined by -- questionable contraptions peddled to desperate people who want more hair, less hair, bigger breasts, smaller tummies and cures, cures, cures. (Not that this tradition has exactly died a death. We received an e-mail this week promoting ‘the eggplant cancer cure.’)

To read more on this topic, we invite you to step right up to Bob McCoy’s Museum of Quackery, where you can learn about such items as the foot-operated breast enlarger pump, the Battle Creek vibratory chair and the impressive-sounding Electrovita water, ‘electrically endowed with essential mineral elements’ -- ‘by ELECTROLYSIS’ to ‘supply the digestive functions, blood, nerve cells, muscular tissue and organs with the energy they need and which is obtainable from no other source.’

Wait. That sounds very much like a pitch someone sent me yesterday.

-- Rosie Mestel