Carrari
An Italian luxury sports-car manufacturer that’s popular among those who have a need for speed and a desire to pinch pennies. Carrari may lack an iconic logo, but there’s no mistaking the midlife crises cruising around in the driver’s seats of these bad boys.
Frone
Formerly Fruit Phone, this brand’s popularity nearly led to its downfall. At Tim Cook’s first Apple event as C.E.O., he solemnly swore to “sue their asses to hell.” This resulted in not only a name change but also in the newly minted Frone no longer being able to sell semi-disguised iPhones that “fell off the back of a truck.” Some say that the quality has diminished in recent years, but loyalists are grateful for an affordable smartphone option, even if it’s permanently set to a language they don’t understand.
Silly Meerkat Society
Inspired by smash-hit crypto sensations such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, this generic series of non-fungible tokens (N.F.T.s) is just as cool and futuristic as the ones that are being bought up for large sums by the likes of Snoop Dogg, Grimes, and Stephen Curry. The twist? You don’t have to deal with the blockchain and Ethereum, because Silly Meerkat Society pieces can only be purchased on the Starbucks app or with Kohl’s Cash. Earlier this month, a meerkat in a bucket hat smoking a corncob pipe sold for more than fifty million stars (that’s a million grande Pike Place roasts).
Arch City
Why travel all the way to St. Louis when you can visit an approximation of the second-largest city in Missouri for a fraction of the cost? Critics say that its arch droops in the middle, and that it doesn’t get as hot in the summer as in the real deal, but everyone can agree that Arch City’s and St. Louis’s night-life scenes are both thriving to the same degree—especially when the Redbirds are playing well down at the stadium.
YesFlickz
Access the latest and greatest movies and shows with just the tap of a finger, assuming that the founder and C.E.O. Kevin_da_Movie_Man has your selection in his self-described “impressive” collection and is viewing it at that exact moment. What this streaming platform lacks in digital infrastructure—after all, it is just a live feed of someone’s television, presumably Kevin’s mother’s—it more than makes up for in variety. Streams have been known to feature anything from obscure anime to episodes of “The Big Bang Theory”—and who can forget that one time a cat knocked over the Webcam and started playing with it? For some reason, anyone with a login to walmart.com has access to this.
Foon
When it comes to the utensil industry, innovation has been out to lunch since 1874, when Samuel W. Francis patented the spork, a spoon-fork hybrid. Now there’s the foon, which is essentially the same thing, unless someone from the Francis estate is asking. To be fair, the spoon was invented around 1000 B.C. and the fork somewhere between the 400 and 900 A.D., so you kind of have to take what you can get at this point.
Poster’s Choice
A social-media platform with a commitment to quality and good old-fashioned fun. Unlike other apps, which are filled with heated arguments and promiscuous dancing, Poster’s Choice features exclusively clean content from all over the world—but mostly from this one county in Utah—running the gamut from photos of rotary phones captioned “Remember these?” to videos of catastrophe-free gender reveals. It’s rumored that iPhone and Android versions are in beta, but currently Poster’s Choice is only available on Frone.
I Train
Running a route similar to that of the 1 train, which travels between Lower Manhattan and upper sections of the Bronx, the I train takes riders to all of the same stops that are on the 1, but with a few minor differences. For one, there are no ads on the I train—nor are there seats, poles, or windows. Also, the trains themselves are made from old shipping containers that were decommissioned after housing spoiled cheese during trade disputes of yesteryear, and which have too much of a stench to be used as micro-housing or trendy pop-up shops. Which explains the tagline: “Y’know what really stinks? Paying twice as much.”
Weird Willy’s
It’s not Stanford, but a diploma is a diploma.
