I’m getting ready to pack up and leave for Anaheim, CA. By the time you read this, I should already be there. Please send me some nice thoughts on Monday as I am doing my little experiment to see just how much punishment an insufficiently trained body can endure during a half marathon. I’m taking bets. Who thinks I’ll still be able to walk around Disneyland afterwards and who thinks I’ll need to be pushed in a wheelchair?

Who thinks ibuprofen is a good thing even if it comes in a plastic bottle?

I probably won’t blog while I’m down there, but I’ll be taking all kinds of notes on plastics while traveling, plastics in theme parks, plastics in hotels, etc. I’ll post my weekly tally some time on Tuesday after I get back.

So for now, I leave you with the weekend discussion question. Here’s the setup: this week, Michael forwarded me an article from the San Francisco Chronicle, written by a guy so flabbergasted by a certain useless plastic item that he actually contacted the marketing person who dreamed it up and interviewed her. Perhaps by now, you’ve already read about the Neosporin travel tote. Several eco-bloggers have already picked up on it. If not, click to read “The Neosporin travel tote: Tracking down the human behind the crap we have to buy.”

The article got me thinking about all the many useless plastic items that are manufactured each year. At least, plastic bags and bottles serve some purpose. But many plastic items serve no other purpose than to make somebody else richer. So I looked around my house for the most outrageous plastic item I could find, and I came up empty-handed. (Granted, I didn’t climb up into the attic. I’ll bet there’s some worthless crap up there. If it was useful, it would be down here being used.)

I guess I just don’t hang onto junk. Life is too short and the house is too small. But I did think of an item that I saw in the toothpaste aisle of Elephant Pharmacy a while back that just had me rolling my eyes. It’s the Tube Wringer, a chunk of plastic bigger than the toothpaste tube itself that you use to get out the last of the toothpaste. It comes in a plastic bag, of course. And at first, it may seem like a good idea, this contraption. But have these people never heard of the back of a comb? That’s what I used (back before I started brushing with baking soda) to squeeze out the last of the tube. And where in my bathroom would I store such a thing anyway?

Okay, I’ll admit that’s not even close to the craziest or weirdest thing out there by far. But it’s the only thing I can think of at 2:30am while my mind is preoccupied with remembering everything I need to pack. I could have listed my plastic Bill Clinton penis pen instead, but that at least makes me laugh. So the question for this Labor Day weekend is: What is the weirdest, craziest, most useless plastic thing in your house? The thing that makes you go, “Wow. Someone actually got paid to come up with that.” And if you, like me, don’t tend to accumulate that kind of stuff, what is the most ridiculous thing you’ve seen in a store lately?

Have a great weekend, and I’ll be back next week.

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