In Which We Move Beyond Parody

While waiting for my traditional New Year's Day take-away to be prepared (which apparently they did by cooking it in super-heated mud, but we'll deal with that another time) I happened across this news in the august pages of the Sun (I don't know why I don't read said paper more often, it makes me laugh like hell, gives me a feeling of superiority even beyond that which I normally have, and contains tits into the bargain).

Obviously, I'm not the target audience for a £1 000 vibrator, or at least if I am someone in marketing needs to be fired. Even so, this release begs a number of questions. First of all, who spends a grand on a vibrator, and wouldn't you want that money to go towards some kind of extra feature (the specifics of which I'm desperately trying not to consider), rather than a band of diamonds? I mean, I get that people of a certain stripe like diamonds, and that "diamond-encrusted" is a description that can be used to shift pretty much anything, but since the jewels in question are hard enough to cut into bank vaults, you would think them inappropriate decoration for something intended for internal use (which is the most delicate phrase I can think of under the circumstances).

That's only the first half of the problem, though. So far, it's just a bizarre and overpriced sex toy (having said that, though, I'm not sure what a vibrator without an encrustation of precious stones would cost, and I don't feel comfortable attempting the relevant research on my parents' PC). What makes it worse is this line:

A bizarre attachment to the toy though is a guitar pick, with the lyrics from Stewart's latest solo song, 'Let's Do It Again', scrawled on it. Buying the toy also ensures that its owners get a code that allows them to download the tune.

Let's be kind, and assume that they don't literally mean "attached" (and by "kind", I mean "not having your nightmares haunted by the image of Sweet Dreams strummed out with a giant pink dildo") so much as "accompanied by". Even so, combining a four-figure sex toy with an attempt to push your latest musical witterings pushes the whole thing past "baffling and disturbing waste of money" into "baffling and disturbing waste of money/ insane ego trip/ desperate last gasp at relevance". It's not like it can be passed off as a special offer. There cannot be, I mean simply cannot be, on any level, on any plane of existence, someone who thinks "Well I wasn't going to blow six months food budget on this gem-encrusted abomination, but now I know I can save 80p on i-Tunes at the same time, dildo me the fuck up!". I'm pretty sure "0.08% extra free!" isn't going to work in any situation, and when the original purchase is designed to be plugged into your most personal orifice and the add-on is designed to piss you off with its MOR banality, matters are unlikely to improve.

Which leaves us with the inescapable conclusion that this is the most implausible ego-trip observed for quite some time. Stewart may desperately be hoping that the market for extravagant portable pseudo-pricks is lucrative enough to move his song up the download charts, but one imagines the most plausible conclusion to this seedy tale is the three dozen people foolish enough to both purchase and download will think "Damn, but this song is wank. Which reminds me..."