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A Stirling engine turns a temperature difference into motion: heat one end, the air inside expands and contracts, the piston runs. This mirror-polished model comes with a small alcohol burner and a built-in voltmeter that reads what the spinning flywheel generates, enough to light the included LED. It's a working demonstration of an idea from 1816, and you can hear it across the room.
Feed in a regular roll and it chops the sheets into wet pellets, then fires them about thirty feet. Water rather than spit, biodegradable, and the packaging promises no stains, a sentence that tells you what the first question was. One roll makes several hundred rounds. No batteries.
Fifty nine inches of plush shell with straps, so it's a costume, a weighted blanket and an excuse in one object. Put it on and lie face down; that's the intended use. It arrives compressed and puffs back up after a few taps. Machine washable, and it will need to be.
Hand-blown borosilicate glass in a shape with no inside and no outside. That's not a sales line, it's topology. Cliff Stoll blows them himself. The listing notes that it's microwave safe and doesn't work as a mousetrap, and the fact that both of those needed saying tells you who's been ordering.
Two aluminum rods on a double pendulum, revolving slowly and never quite repeating, on the desk in every villain's office since it showed up in Iron Man 2. Four AA batteries in the base keep it going for months. It's quiet, it's hypnotic, and it's the one desk sculpture people recognize on sight.
It started as a gag gift and then buyers kept sleeping on it. Molded in one piece from natural latex instead of stuffed with shredded foam, so the valley between the halves supports a neck the way an expensive pillow does. Three sizes. People keep it long after the joke's over.
A saucer hovers over a small cow and a beam of light lifts it, built from reflective film and LEDs so the beam looks solid from across the room. Touch the base to change color, and the tint shifts depending on where you're standing. It's a lamp, and it's also an abduction in progress.
A ballpoint that rests on a small pedestal by its point and hovers at an angle, held there by magnets. Nudge it and it spins. Aircraft aluminum and zinc, and it writes, though most owners spin it more than they write. It's a fidget toy with an executive haircut.
A six cup coffee maker, a griddle and a four slice toaster oven fused into one appliance. The pitch is counter space, and it holds up if you were really going to buy all three. If you weren't, you've bought a large machine that makes breakfast four minutes faster than a pan.
You hold it in your teeth like a bit and nod, the weighted ends flap, and the resistance is supposed to work the muscles around your mouth. Thirty seconds twice a day, per the maker. Whether it changes a jawline is unproven. Whether you look ridiculous doing it is not.
The countertop version of the machine behind every movie theater lobby. It doesn't freeze anything on its own, and that surprises people. You pre chill the canister and the syrup, then it spins the mixture with ice until the texture goes to slush. Syrup is sold separately. Budget for that.