1-2. Paula Deen’s English Peas/Rachael Ray’s Late Night Bacon
Food Network stars like Paula Deen and Rachael Ray pride themselves on uncomplicated dishes that viewers can easily recreate for their disappointed families on dinner tables across America. The recipe for Deen’s English Peas is roughly this: Drain a can of peas, add half a stick of butter, heat on the stove, and serve with middle finger raised in the air. The recipe for Ray’s “Late Night Bacon”: Eight slices of bacon, a bunch of paper towels, a microwave, and fuck off. Both were easy pickings for Food Network posters, who didn’t disappoint. On the English Peas, some offered fake compliments (“My kids were getting pretty tired of plain old veggies for dinner, so I thought I’d give this one a try. Delicioso!”), some expressed confusion (“Which half of the butter stick do I use?”), some offered substitutions (“I eliminated the butter and in place of the peas, I substituted one can of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti & Meatballs”), and still others dabbled in surrealism. (“I used my Slap Chop to combine this tasty recipe with a photoshopped picture of a nude Rachel Ray. I ate it, and for a week my poop smelled like butterscotch, and had glitter all over it.”) As for Ray’s bacon, it’s more of the same, including praise laced with concern (“tasty… but I could only finish half the paper towels”), sarcastic calls for other late-night recipes like “a glass of milk,” and even a Paula Deen crossover that adds a cup of melted butter as a side dish.

3. AudioQuest K2 Terminated speaker cable
Audiophiles may be inclined to splurge a little on speaker cables: Anyone investing hundreds or even thousands on a top-quality receiver and foundation-trembling speakers probably wants the connection between them to hit a similar standard. Enter the AudioQuest K2 Terminated speaker cable, available for the entirely reasonable price of $8,450. This may sound a tad steep to the more casual listener, but one user review raves, “I was finally able to hear an auditory gem that has been long-rumored among music connoisseurs: Aretha Franklin’s stress-fart just prior to her high A in her recording of ‘You’re All I Need To Get By’.” According to other reviewers, the price isn’t so bad when you consider that the cable was “fabricated from 1,000 Onyx Dragon fetuses,” and gives users “dominion over all animals, great and small,” the ability to read Sanskrit, and godlike powers when its fibers are woven through the fabric of a Three Wolf Moon shirt. The caveats? “My cats chewed on this cable and now they can both speak. One of them is gay and the other wants to kill me. I would have rather not known.” Another reviewer lays out the horror story awaiting anyone who uses the cable: “Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the… whispers… began.”

4. Three Wolf Moon
It’s rare that a comment-driven meme manages to ripple out from the Internet into the real world, but in 2009, a tongue-in-cheek customer review on Amazon.com led to a 2,300-percent sales increase of the “Three Wolf Moon” T-shirt, designed by Bulgarian artist Antonia Neshev. Thanks to the original 2008 review from “B. Govern”—which raves that the shirt “Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women,” but admits that “wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark”—thousands of irony-starved Internet denizens raced to purchase and/or post their own hyperbolic reviews of the “power animal” shirt. The shirt racked up more than 2,000 customer reviews (and a 4.5-star rating!) on Amazon, but its meme status spread far beyond the online marketplace, with Three Wolf Moon showing up in tribute videos, parody shirts, and eventually in meatspace on the backs of real human beings—including Dwight Schrute—before eventually succumbing to its inevitable fate as a wadded-up ball of poor judgment in the back of a dresser drawer.
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10. Uranium ore
It’s mildly startling to see a seller offering low-radiation uranium ore (“for educational and scientific use only”) via Amazon. But the listing is a bonanza for more than 300 faux-reviewers, who made the most of the idea with reviews that trend heavily into the realm of absurdist science fiction. The reviews from happy mad scientists who used it for time travel or uncontrolled mutation abound. The reviews also tout its many unlisted uses (“I put it on my cat's food and now it has 18 half lives”), and gripe about unintended side effects. (“I deducted one star because of the giant mutant ants.”) But the best review is the simplest: “I purchased this product 4.47 billion years ago, and when I opened it today, it was half empty.”
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