The Ultimate Thing …
The ultimate promise if you buy the ultimate thing is it will improve your quality of life. We’re encouraged from all sides to keep up our shopping search for the elusive gift for that someone who has everything. Maggie Wrobel, in November 3 Globe & Mail, suggests the Sixixis Cityscape Hanger.
It features “ornate carvings of famous city skylines,” she writes. “People seem compelled to pay tribute to the world’s great cities,” she adds, “even if they have never set foot outside Saskatchewan.”
Is this urban cool, or a rural shot?
She’s right! Living in Service’s land of beyond for decades puts me totally wet behind the ears and out of touch with Hog Town sophistication.
The owner of the boutique featuring this ‘light-as-air hanger’ says, “the hangers have been a smash hit, especially with the sentimental set.”
Sentimental about a coat hanger?
Really? Urban sophistication, eh? H-m-m!
The illustration is the London, England skyline, just one of the famous cities coat hangered. The sales pitch promises “a glimpse of the cityscape you love.” And 120 of those fat and happy Canadian dollars gets a hanger to your door; shipping extra, of course.
Urban sophisticated shopping apparently demands big-box stamina so we catalogue and net-shopped for get-in-shape stuff. We found a quarter-size sensor you slip under the sock liner of your Nikes, then you plug a special receiver into your iPod Nano, and start running.
Distance, calories and time are calculated, and announced in your ear as you trot to good shape. Surely a sweet deal at $29 of those lower USD.
Add a wrist monitor to track all the rest of your body readings, for $220, or for stay-at-home exercising, a run-and-watch treadmill with a built-in, 8.5-inch flat screen TV, for $2,600 USD.
“Your own personal rain cloud,” as an after-shopping shower would surely be a must. Jaclo’s Spa Rain Canopy showerhead, resembling a chrome plated floor vent hanging over your head, promises such, for a paltry $4,900.
A high-speed dinner before a high-speed cruise to wrap up the evening perhaps?
Turbo Chefs Oven cooks a rack of lamb in five minutes, a three-course meal in ten. As $6,000 it puts it: “gourmet recipes within reach of someone who finds instant oatmeal tricky.”
The highway cruise matching the high-speed life style should be in a Phantom Drophead Coupe, according to The Week magazine, which provided much of this goodie list. They promise us, “never has Rolls produced a “more outlandish, outrageous car — the perfect addition to your toy collection.”
(Forty-eight valves — 6.7 litre V12 — 453 bhp — 130 mph — $412,000; maybe a driver’s, or a mechanic’s dream car, but not a global warmer’s favourite machine, eh?)
This is, I’m told, but a glimpse into the pile of pretty classy urban stuff available for the high speed urban life style, and more power to they who can cut it.
I do wonder though, how all these high priced “things” compare to a pair of sox, even the wrong size, clumsily wrapped from your youngest, bought with recycled bottle income?
It’s our choice, high speed urban, or low speed rural quality of life?
From this rural perch north of 60 that sock-shopping young child on your lap deciding if we’ll read Winnie-the-Pooh, Sponge-Bob, Dora, Snow White, or The Cat in the Hat puts a warmth in your heart, and a satisfaction in your soul which is pretty hard to beat. That’s my choice!
PS: If, in the hustle- and-bustle shopping about to come, you begin to think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.
A giant tip of the hat to the people who matter to you. As neat as they are, the things you buy can’t meet their measure can they?.
PPS: Up To You Toronto is the Toronto boutique-selling the coat hangers; Turbochef sells the oven; Jaclo the shower head; oh, and I found a motorized marshmallow turner, if you’re interested.
They’re all on the ‘net, but in my books the ultimate shopping is still with the hometown crowd — people and their stores with real roots in the place.