Bizarro Meh

Somewhere beyond the dimensional barrier, there’s a universe exactly like ours… except for one horrifying difference: in place of the jaded indifference of Meh, people sell the same dull junk every day with sheer giddy enthusiasm.

And they do it with such unhinged gusto that not even a crushingly mundane product like AA batteries can dampen their supernaturally high spirits.

And instead of confining their activities to an obscure specialist website, they’re given access to the public airwaves, where they might ambush any unsuspecting citizen at any time of day.

Brace yourself. It looks something like this:

And that alternate universe is called “the 1970s and 1980s”.

We’d love to see how Crazy Eddie - or your local equivalent, every city had one - would handle these batteries. To our jaundiced eye, they’re merely some decent, very cheap high-power AA batteries, with the mild selling point that their high output is designed for high-drain digital devices like cameras and wireless keyboards. To Crazy Eddie, they’d be lightning bolts from the fingertips of Zeus. What a fine old psychotic episode he’d have.

Unfortunately, time has consigned Crazy Eddie’s ilk to the clearance bin of history. The “real” Crazy Eddie (not the actor who plays him in the commercials) (which raises all kinds of questions about what “real” means, since presumably the “real” Crazy Eddie does not have the first name “Crazy” on his birth certificate, so we’re really talking about degrees of (in)authenticity here, not a binary distinction) (but anyway) went to jail for falsifying the books to defraud investors. His many colleagues fell victim to those twin scourges of old-school retail hucksterism, old age and the Internet.

Still, if we could only peer through the chrono-dimensional barrier, we imagine we’d see a world where daily deals run on manic enthusiasm and questionable accounting practices. And also where kindergarten is for old people and your dog is actually your cat.