Beyond Black Friday

Black Friday has come and gone, if you didn't know because you've been hiding in whatever room Donald Trump hides in to escape the FAKE NEWS, which means anyone with an internet connection has been bombarded with deals and coupons and flyers in a melee of frantic advertising that we all know isn't likely to abate until 2019.

Here's the thing about the strange holiday that is Black Friday (and Cyber Monday, and by next year we'll surely have Torpid Tuesday and Wham Wednesday): the deals are usually not that great, and the stuff is usually not really what you actually want. If you wanted it, badly enough anyway, you'd buy it when it came out, like so many lemmings who pre-order and wait in line for the hottest new iPhone. So instead of scouring the web for 20 percent off coupons for a two-year-old television or a mediocre pair of headphones, I threw together a holiday shopping guide for things I actually own, from body scanners to luxury linens to air cleansers to skillets to vaporizers. Life-changing things. Things worth half a mortgage payment. And most of them are still on sale.