The 2013 Hater's Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog

[WilliamPitt]

The 2013 Hater's Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog
By Drew Magary
Deadspin

I have a house and, like most houses, it's an unfinished work. There are cracks in the paint. There are piles of old clothes and shoes exploding out of the laundry room, which doubles as a storage room because we don't have a storage room. The walls in our bedroom are bare because we haven't had time to hang pictures on them since we moved in 10 years ago. We need a pantry, but don't have one. We just cram cans of food and boxes of pasta into the front hall closet with the coats and shoes because there's nowhere else to put them. We do not have a larder. I don't know what a larder is but it sounds fucking great. It sounds like you keep LARD in it, and that suits me nicely. But for now, this loving house will do, in all its imperfections. I suspect most houses are like this. There's always some goddamn project that needs to get done and never does.

But that is not the kind of home that exists in the Williams-Sonoma universe. The Williams-Sonoma universe is a magical pristine alternate dimension where every room has crown molding and your wife can fart out a perfect red velvet bundt cake in nine seconds flat from her Wolf oven and you are fucking RICH. Just so rich you don't even know what to do with yourself, which is how you end up spending $48 on a tin of peppermint bark. You host fabulous parties with educated neighbors and you eat organic soup out of a tureen hand-crafted by a cedar farmer in Alaska who only makes four of these tureens a year. It's a fabulous world, chock full of copper cookware dangling from stainless steel hooks and a framed picture of Ina Garten in every room, even the parlor!

(snip)

Item #54-1623164 Monogrammed Steak Brand



Williams-Sonoma says: "Put your initials on your grilled masterpieces."

Price: $39.95

Notes: It's bad enough that the poor cow takes a frat house iron to the ass before being led to slaughter, but now you gotta sign your steak, too? This is what I want to do, and tell me if I'm going overboard here: I want to brand a cow, kill that cow, cook a steak from its carcass, BRAND the steak, serve the steak at a party so that people know it's mine even though they already saw me grilling it, and then I want to eat the steak, shit it out, BRAND my shit with some kind of forged iron shit brand, and mail that turd to the cow's children. You will fear the initials DM, children. They will live in your night terrors.

(snip)

Item #54-1718857 Miele Rotary Iron



Williams-Sonoma says: "Sit comfortably at this machine to press and fold large linens in as little as four minutes."

Price: $1999.95

Notes: Every year, the Williams-Sonoma catalog features gifts that are clearly meant for your help. "Thomas Barrow, my dear footman! Look at what I've got you! Now you can iron my bedsheets in nearly half the time! SURELY YOU MUST BE PLEASED." This thing is the size of a Buick. A regular iron costs thirty bucks. If you have the means to buy a giant robot ironing device, you should save your money and give the difference to ME, because I'll spend that money on more important things. I will fill a pool with snowflake marshmallows and jump into it while stark naked. Two thousand bucks. For an iron. Jesus Christ. Add it to my kid's Christmas list.

The rest: http://deadspin.com/the-2013-haters-guide-to-the-williams-sonoma-catalog-1481230580

Drew Magary is a living God.

[Xyzse]

1. Actually, if I have space...

That Bee hive thing seems reasonable.

Getting ambrosia, honey and other stuff sounds amazing.
Also, by taking some of the bee pollen, it can help boost your system by inoculating against the surrounding area's plant life.

Sometimes trying to buy the regional stuff is expensive as hell. I'd be like the corner side drug store, pushing bee pollen.
Might be fun to act all shady and wear a trench coat.

Then get stopped by police who'd laugh at me for carrying honey.
Actually, there was one time that I got stopped by police and they laughed at me afterwards.

It was when I had a Humongous Hello Kitty in the back of my trunk, that they found when they looked back there.

[sarge43]

13. Actually, it isn't

Magary is right. The WS starter hive is ridiculously overpriced. The Brushy Mountain kit is half the price with the same stuff.

Further, if you're serious about honey harvesting (pollen is a whole other story), the fun has just begun. Basic tools: Full HAZMAT suit, minimum two hives (one almost always dies by the second season ), extraction equipment and a safe place to extract (when bees sense an open large source of raw honey, they go berserk - unpleasant), suburban or rural area, full protection from the critters, rats to bears (we have 12K volt electric range fence around our bee yard and it just keeps them at bay). Package bees, chancy, may not survive shipment and usually aren't enough to build a healthy hive (40 to 60K bees) first season. Nuke hives are a better bet (basic hive with established queen and 10-20K workers). They're running about hundred bucks right now.

Pollen harvesting: Bees store pollen by packing it down in an empty cell, a thin layer of honey over it, then sealing the cell. Just harvest the honey, do a coarse filtering (removing dead bees, bee parts and wax bits) and sell raw honey with pollen. People will swarm.

You might want to look into urban beekeeping. It's always been done - the Paris Opera House has had established thriving hives in its attic for decades. Lots info on the web.

[Xyzse]

14. Cool!

Thanks for the info.

[sharp_stick]

2. Hilarious, thanks for the post

You probably read his kids Insane Christmas Wish List but I'll link it here just in case. It's equally hilarious.

http://deadspin.com/my-kids-insane-christmas-wish-list-annotated-1476311653

[arcane1]

3. That was hilarious.

I may have to share this

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. LOVE It! n/t

[kcass1954]

5. I could send a ton of tablecloths to the dry cleaners for ironing before it would cost $2000.

Well, I could if I had any that weren't plastic.

This guy is hilarious!

[bluesbassman]

6. I wish I could get somebody to fart out a bundt cake for me...

Sounds kinda fun. Alas, no such luck.

[mainer]

7. But I love their stores. If I see a Williams sonoma in a mall, I'm there

Just to fondle their cookware.

[Paladin]

8. I like their stores, too, but I gotta say......

....if there is any symbolic evidence of Asshole Status that outdoes that steak-branding implement, I'm (thankfully) unaware of it....

[RiffRandell]

9. Hey, one of our xmas gifts every year from my parents is their lobster pot pies.

I'm not complaining. They are so freaking good.

They were also on one of my wedding registries.

[IrishAyes]

10. Kinda like shopping at Saks or Nieman Marcus, ain't it?

I'm much more the frugal type, and I hear you when it comes to the house. I shop for most of my outerwear at a church thrift shop where everything's 10 cents, even the occasional designer duds with tags still on. Most of my furniture has been dragged with me from pillar to post as I moved; if I didn't inherit it, I probably got it at auction. Even picked up some dandy things curbside. The worst was when I spotted an ornate iron baby bed in a farmer's field - it had been used to feed hay to livestock and then abandoned. I went and asked, and when the farmer quit laughing he let me have it free. I took it home, spray painted all the pieces, reassembled it, and put it in the laundry room to hold unfolded items until I get around to it. Which is sometimes never. In a hurry I'll go grab a complete outfit from there. Sweats and knits don't hold wrinkles long.

Etc etc etc. When this town let people put out big items for the trash only twice a year, I'd drive my van around at 3 a.m. looking for good stuff. Over time I found 2 ruined dressing tables with matching hardware from the very early 1900's, so now my kitchen cabinets have stunning hardware that didn't cost me a dime.

But $3K irons? I don't think so.

Do you visit DU's frugal living forum/group?

[nolabear]

11. I've been looking forward to this all year!!

[No Vested Interest]

12. When I was first married, early 60's, living in a 4-unit apartment,

the landlady had in the basement for tenant's and her own use an implement similar to the Ironer.
Only we called it a mangle, and it was not an unusual item at the time.

It did approximately the same thing as this "ironer", and I was foolish enough to iron my husband's underwear - boxers and tee-shirts, as well as sheets, which were mostly all cotton at that time and did wrinkle and were softer when ironed on the "mangle.
That all ended with the arrival of first child, 10 months after marriage.

Everything old is new again.

[Blue_Tires]

15. I'm constantly surprised Magary hasn't been put in a white padded room yet...