Grodin On Gifts

Catalogues Dominate The Mailbox

(CBS)  A weekly commentary by 60 Minutes II correspondent Charles Grodin.

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It's the gift-giving time of the year, and the catalogues for gifts are flooding the mail.

The catalogues that have come in the past couple of months dwarf everything else in the mailbox. I'm always hoping to find a letter in there.

Have you ever looked in those things? They've got some pretty unusual items.

There's a telescoping flagpole you can take with you when you travel: "Honey, did you pack the flagpole?"

There's all the latest in high-tech electronics. Of course, I still haven't mastered "seek and scan" on my radio.

There's the indestructible mailbox. You can fire a rifle at it. Put 800 firecrackers in it. Hit it with a baseball bat or even put a 15-ton bulldozer on it.

How tough does a mailbox have to be?

There's a surprising item from the Preferred Living Catalogue for the Affluent Home Owner. If you've got a few extra bucks, you can get the Emergency Escape Smoke Hood. It's probably just me, but I'd find it kind of hard to relax if I saw one of those things lying around.

Another strange one: it's what they call the most comfortable pool float made. In the illustration, you can see that his head would be in the water if his hands weren't supporting it.

That's comfortable?

Then there's the automatic pet feeder that feeds your pets when you're not home.

Of course, if it doesn't work right and puts all the food out at once, you could have some really fat pets.

Put food in front of most of us, and we'll eat it.