[Bumped]

I just searched for last minute gift ideas and realized that the search results are dominated by folks who don’t have your best interest in mind. So here’s my list of easy to find locally, cheap, and much appreciated last minute gift items.

Manly man gloves, for the guy who would never spend $25 on gloves.

If your man is a home owner with any kind of yard he will love these Sears Craftsmen $25 work gloves that are now selling for $16.87 in store or online–that is if he doesn’t already have them.

Yes, your wife will think you’re crazy but my daughters really found these useful.

My wife thought I was crazy but I’ve given the Walmart ball compass to my college age daughters and they have loved them. They’re easy to carry in your purse and they will make the female loved ones in your life the equal of anyone else when it comes to directions. Find them near the camping/fishing gear.

Edam Cheese, in the fancy cheese aisle.

The California State Lottery featured a series of television ads in which past winners described small, telling moments in the days after their million dollar wins. My favorite was the laid-back dude who, as the camera pans the deluxe meat and cheese aisle in his supermarket, narrates thusly: “it didn’t really hit me until the next day in the supermarket when it was like ‘Wow. I can totally afford all this cheese.’” For some reason this strikes me as the perfect everyman fantasy–to finally be able to afford all those $12/lb cheeses, gourmet mustards, and specialty pepper sauces we family men have resigned ourselves to doing without.  So go down to the nearest upscale market and buy your guy some Edam cheese. It’s under $10, will be appreciated, and shows how thoughtful you are.

Stealth “funny book by the the Narnia guy”

Stealth gift for teenagers: If your child is of a literary bent, there’s no better stealth gift than The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, available from any local bookseller. Just toss it off as “I heard this is really funny–it’s the guy who wrote the Narnia books” and hope they take the bait. It’s short, very funny for the mature reader who can keep up with some older references to WWII, rationing etc., and probably the most entertaining book on morality ever written in English.

If you’ve seen him use a Bic pen in public, buy him the Parker Jotter.

A friend, a brilliant software executive, once confided that he loses pens all the time. We compared notes one day and each of us had of course lost our beautiful graduation pens within the first year. We concluded that we are simply not suitable recipients of gift pens. Independent of each other we figured out that the cheapest decent pen around is the Parker Jotter Pen. It is the “go to” pen for the guy who can’t keep hold of a pen and doesn’t want to look like some kind of piker by whipping out a $0.29 Bic pen at a meeting. It goes for about $6 and is sold just about everywhere. If you’ve ever seen your loved one use a cheapo Bic pen in public, go buy him one of these and a 2 pack of refills. Better still, ditch the refills and just buy him two pens because he’ll lose the pen before he ever needs the refill.

Can you figure out a game you can play with this? ‘Nerf said.

Here is a gift that you can use to play a really fun game that the manufacturer will never, ever, tell you about–not in this world and in this litigious business environment.  It is the Nerf N-Strike Maverick which is described at BoysStuff.Info this way.

The Maverick is very robust and well put together. The shooting device is a simple revolver, which is both reliable and effective. Just like with a real revolver, as you cock the gun the revolver turns to line up for the next shot.

The very fun game that you can play using this gun that the manufacturer will never tell you about is a very safe and benign variation of a game that perhaps you are familiar with if you are a fan of Michael Cimino or Christopher Walken. A game that can really only be played with a rotating barrel but a game that of course we would not want to describe to anyone who is not 100% emotionally stable. The nerf variety is surprisingly intense, a tremendous amount of fun at a party, but again, you’ll never hear me, the manufacturer, or anyone responsible suggest it to a large audience.