Birds of a Feather 3-Pack
Hey, it's little dead birds! For all your little dead bird needs! Granted, they were never little live birds, but they're covered in actual bird feathers and if you put them on their sides the resemblance is remarkable. Apparently you're intended to strap them to various crafts against humanity in order to give them that breezy dead-bird-festooned air that really moves the wicker at the downtown arts fair. B-

A Surprise For A Girl
Am I the only one who reads the phrase "a surprise for a girl" and thinks "missed period"? Well, this pink-encrusted bag contains something much better than a missed period: tootsie rolls, a plastic house filled with "ponyholders" and plastic rings, and an inexplicable little plastic ghost with a hole in the top of his head. While nothing in the bag was actually surprising in any useful sense, I was taken aback somewhat by the word "ponyholder." C

Play-Doh Neon Garden 2-Pack
I include this just to point out that you can sometimes find brand-name stuff in a dollar store, if you're willing to limit yourself to colors that went out of style about the time Tiffany fell off the charts. But this is actual Play-Doh, not some thinly-veiled rip-off with a name like "Playful-Dough." And it's still moist and still smells like something you should really at least try to eat. Remarkable. A

Paper Bag Organizer
After several people wrote in to tell me that they do in fact use dental mirrors on themselves -- apparently having enough interest in the far reaches of their own mouth crannies to rig up a double-mirror solution -- I'm reluctant to declare any commercial item useless. Having said that, this is useless. If you sort your paper bags by size and hang them from the wall on a device too narrow to hold more than five or six of each size, stop it. What you're doing is wrong. D

Small Soldiers: Neighborhood Meltdown
Ah, the perennial dollar store favorite: crappy books nobody wants based on crappy moves nobody saw. In this case the beginning of the book is set in a store filled with stupid crap nobody wants, lending the whole affair an interesting recursive quality that doesn't reduce the crappiness one bit. Warning: contains the sentence "Before they knew it, they were involved in a kiss that lit the future." D-