It Really Works as a Wastebasket

Reviewed by Dan Speers, 2010-02-01

I have been a fan of the Miami Dolphins ever since the firt play the team ever made in a professional football bame in which they received the kickoff and ran the ball the length of the field to score a touchdown. It was an auspicious beginning that took many years and Don Shula to reach fruition in an amazing series of Super Bowl wins that included the first perfect season in professional football.

So, of course, I had to have the wastebasket. At first, I thought it was probably an ordinary trash disposal container imprinted with the usual team logo and name, but then I found it possessed certain magical powers. For example, it seemed to attract paperclips, small unidentified scraps of paper, and the ocassional house cat.

One day, it actually hummed. Well, what happened was that my foot accidentally bumped it up next to a space heater and the vibrations of the fan transferred to the metal cylinder, creating these tinny little sounds that were amplified by the shape of the can. A quick kick managed to shut the damn thing down but now it's a bit warped on one side, which is actually ok since it's on the side where the dolphin is diving.

Also, it managed to serve extremely well to house the final drafts of my book Master Spies Die Laughing: A novel interpretation of undercover espionage and a singular lack of intelligence, which I would have otherwise tossed in the fireplace.