A crapalogue is booklet advertising many products for sale,
typically by mail order, that no one in their right mind actually needs.
Crapalogues will be delivered to your door several times a week if,
in a moment of confusion, you actually gave your real name and address
to a sales assistant instead of, say, the address of the neanderthal
individual down the street who always leaves his transit van blocking
the road.

Crapalogue products tend to fall into one of the following categories:

• The better mousetrap:
  these take an existing device and improve it by adding one or
  more of:
  
  • the latest in micro-electronics
    
  • space age materials
    
  • a motor
    
  • magnets
    
  • velcro, teflon, or lycra
    
• The retro-product:
  an attempt to re-introduce something your grandmother used
  daily as something terribly new such as "baking soda"
  toothpaste. This category may also include "better
  mousetrap" ideas, like making anti-maccassas with velcro.
  
• The polymorph product:
  an existing device is disguised with a moulded plastic
  surround, or an "amusing" image. Examples include telephones
  disguised as a plastic duck, toilet seats or bowls decorated
  with the faces of politicians.
  
• The adaptor product:
  designed to connect two existing devices and provide you with
  some new functionality:
  
  • vacuum cleaner and dog brush
    
  • hair dryer and inflatable bed
    
• The multiple product:
  two or more existing devices are incorporated into a single
  item that is far more complex to use. Examples are combined
  salt and pepper mills, oil and vinegar sprinklers, and
  inspection light/warning beacon/car tyre inflator. This
  last deserves particular mention: should your car develop
  a flat in the middle of the night, how do you see and pump
  up the tyre whilst placing the beacon some distance behind
  the car?
  
• The organiser product:
  something that will make you a more organised person by
  organising other things that belong to you. Examples include
  coat hangers that you can hang five shirts on, plastic
  cubicles for shoes, a black lump that will attract all the
  ferrous items on your desk, and the all-time classic
  electric tie rotator.
  

Often a cursory examination of the product will reveal the fatal flaw
that will render it totally useless, and therefore consigned to your
(very well organised) cupboards, when it is finally delivered to
the you:

• 
  A transparent bucket with a hinged lid on the end of a stick
  to allow the most arachnophobic individual to catch spiders.
  Arachnophobes rarely want to catch spiders, so just the stick
  would suit their needs.
  
• 
  Plastic shapes that take up space inside cupboards, thus
  allowing more items to be stored there.
  
• 
  An electronic device to lull you to sleep with the sound of
  a running mountain stream, right up until the point you
  realise that you really, really will have to go to the
  bathroom.
  

The existence and diversity of the crapalogue simultaneously illustrates
the extreme inventiveness and extreme gullibility of the human race.

The name crapalogue was inspired by a time when this researcher
was seduced by the charms of this method of shopping, and ordered a book
called "Flushed with Pride" which described the life and times of
Thomas Crapper, a victorian engineer who pushed forward the bounds of
lavatory design.

The book was actually reasonable, and so was the half-completed jigsaw
storing device ...