Otter's Journal: Radio controlled cars! The season's hottest gift!

For the last month, all my accounts have been drowning in spam for miniature radio-controlled cars. It's replaced Nigerian scams and Korean porn as my number 1 nuisance.

Being totally out of it on these matters, is this actually a popular gift item this year? Or is there just a single spammer bombarding me?

Very hot gift

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They're actually pretty cool. Hot wheels without the track. There's all kinds of stuff you can buy to mod the cars, too. I don't have any, but I was shopping for gifts for the nephews, and the minis top the list. They charge up off the remote's batteries, just enough to go for a few minutes. You charge 'em up, race, charge 'em again.

Radio-Controlled Cars Suck

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I'm not exactly "Doctor Hip"...but from what I can tell, someone's pushing these little cars damn hard. Two years ago, there was a cart in every mall selling those little mechanical helicopters. This year, those helicopters seem to have been replaced by the tiny RC cars. I'm not sure what's worse, when I'm strolling through a mall: worrying about being smacked in the head by a toy helicopter, or worry about tripping over a tiny toy car.

(Although, as today is already December 17th: This close to Christmas, if I'm "strolling through a mall," I probably deserve both a smack on the head and to be knocked on my ass.)

When I was a kid, one of the toys I always wanted but never got (doesn't everyone have a few of those?) was a radio-controlled hovercraft. Radio-controlled vehicles were pretty popular, as I remember. "G.I. Joe" would be interrupted every afternoon by a half-dozen commercials telling me why I should buy the newest -- which would be shown driving over rocks, or through mud, or across a dirt track. More than a decade (and that's all I'll say...) later, radio-controlled cars have gotten...uh...smaller, and more lame? What's with that? I'd have thought they'd be selling ultra-maneuverable RC helicopters, and super-fast RC jets.

I guess it's a "toy recession."

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