I was shopping for a new belt, recently, and- wait! Come back! 

 I know, I know. But I swear to Christ I'm going somewhere with this. 

 I can't think of anything more tedious than "belt shopping", either. It's honestly the most mundane thing a person can do. I was led on my couch, trawling through Amazon for the cheapest effective way to stop my trousers from falling down, and suddenly I found that I was in the midst of developing a new hobby. 

 Not "belt buying", obviously. My new hobby is flicking through advertising images on Amazon to see how desperately companies are attempting to make absolutely unremarkable items look desirable. Don't believe me? Go and search for cheap belts. Here's what that little rabbit hole turned up:

"He'll never believe it's BELT!" the imminently single woman in this Christmas ad seems to simper. Because the holidays are famously a time when people lose weight and struggle to keep their trousers tight. Or maybe it works the other way. Maybe she's grinning like that because she's about to react to his crestfallen face with "You're going to need a bigger one of THESE when you're done inhaling turkey, you gluttonous fuck! Hahahaha! Did you still think I'd get you a real present?! This is only so you can hang yourself after your whore of a secretary gets as tired of your bullshit as I am. We'll see how cute she finds your snowman jumpers when you're living with her at her mother's house while she tries to scrape together a deposit for her own place with whatever money she didn't spend on piercings..."

 Neither of these scenarios explain why this belt is apparently being delivered in a small-ish bag, like the killer from Seven has ordered that it be delivered to this address at this time and we're about to see Brad Pitt demanding that Morgan Freeman reassure him that his trousers are still up. 

 Either way, I tend to wear a belt all year round, so this one was a pass for me. 

 No more awkward holes for this couple, apparently! This might mean that this belt has some sort of lube dispenser or else that it subtly alters your brain chemistry so that you get really into pegging. Or maybe the buckle has a little compartment full of poppers? We're left to wonder, but a common theme in these ads is hiring unrealistically sexy people (or quite possibly having A.I. draw some unrealistically sexy people) in the hopes that we'll notice how their pants stay up. It's a pointless strategy. There are hundreds of reasons why I don't look like the people in this picture, and the belt is none of them. I'm gonna pass on this, too, and my awkward holes' loss is my wallet's gain.

This guy is planning to blow up a plane. No question. Hundred percent, final answer, that man is staring into the middle distance while he thinks about the look on his ex-wife's face as his voice comes over the cockpit intercom, and how everyone at his old job will finally stop laughing at his flight simulator hobby for the last four seconds of their lives. I'm far more convinced of this than I am of anything about any fastening mechanism around his waist, because this picture doesn't even show the belt, which is honestly why I'm here. I guess at some stage I might decide to sacrifice two hundred passengers on the altar of Jihad, but far more pressing is my need to keep my strides up. Pass. 

 Intrigued by what other prosaic items were trying to grab my attention, I decided to search around. Instead of "Men's belt," I backspaced as far as "Men's" and then the first auto-fill was "slippers." Okay. Perfect. Surely slippers aren't crazy?!

 Rock Dove promises to be "the slipper you'll never take off", which sounds less like a promise and more like a threat - like these are some sort of Monkey's Paw footwear that will either bind to you indefinitely or kill you before you get the chance to put on other footwear. I checked, by the way, and the Rock Dove is the technical name for the common pigeon. Or, more accurately, the common pigeon is the domesticated, urban evolution of a bird that used to be called a Rock Dove. 

 I'm not sure slippers ever really portray the wild, untamed version of anything, but maybe it's an attempt to make the commonplace sound exotic. Which would work, except that every third pigeon you see tends to have at least one horribly mangled foot, so I'm still not inclined to get a pair of these any time soon. Next slipper.

 "Did you see his face when he opened it and it was just a belt? Christ, that was embarrassing..."

 "I know! Nice slippers by the way."

 "Thanks."

 This slipper company (and I don't get paid for this, so fuck anyone who thinks I'm checking the name) seem to be aiming their marketing squarely at people with dangerously little imagination. These slippers? Why, you could wear them to... fetch... your mail...s ... or... in... daily life... Maybe you could play guitar! These slippers will keep your feet relaxed while you do that, which in thirty years of playing guitar has never once been a concern for me personally, but maybe that's why I'm bad at it. 

 I'm unclear if these slippers work with other stringed instruments, or if I'd need to buy a second, different pair if I wanted to switch to the banjo. Either way, people who couldn't imagine themselves maybe going to get the mail in their slippers are going to strain something when they're also asked to picture slippers that aren't directly in the shot, because like the belt company that dressed that plane hijacker, this slipper ad has fallen at the first, lowest and only hurdle by not actually showing the product in the picture. 

Okay, so belts and slippers are a lot crazier than anyone was predicting. What about t-shirts? Surely there’s nothing more blandly ubiquitous than a t-shirt.

This is the top seller on Amazon! A male model, who predictable already seems reasonably fit, is used to illustrate how the most popular t-shirt on the most popular shopping website can be used to either incompetently pretend that you’re not a tubby sack of insecurity wrapped in a sweatshop garment (best case) or else make your Tinder date say “…oh…” when you finally take your shirt off like they just received a fucking belt for Christmas.

Okay, I lied, I wasn’t going anywhere with this. I bought a three-pack of cheap belts that didn’t have a deranged picture attached and now I’m going to bed.