Amazon Anomalies

Well, the comment-generating title in the last entry almost worked - I got comments all right, but most of them were letting me know (quite fairly) that they objected to the title, rather than having read through the entry defiantly as was my hope. Therefore I will compensate with something mildly interesting.

A few of the computer science students went to a presentation on Amazon a couple of days ago. Most of it was about how they ran their database spread across a huge number of servers, but there was a brief section on some of the more unlikely things that Amazon sells. A quick search around shows a surprising amount of stuff that you'd never come across while browsing the site normally:

• A Qwert Shmarble (No one really knows what this is)
  
• Similarly, a Qwert Stiker Flaggle
  
• A $5.5 million box of chocolates
  
• A large number of other items from the imaginary company EBSQA, including a Pen on a Rope and some asdfasdfg pipecleaners (or, if you prefer, fjdksfj pipecleaners, which are apparently not as cute or cuddly but more fuzzy).

All those are just imaginary items that were left in from Amazon's testing stage, but we were pointed to a number of genuinely strange things as well...

• A huge amount of loaves of cheese, with the current record holder being a three-stone block of mild cheddar
  
• Ice Cream by Mail (I'm still at a loss to imagine how this would work)
  
• A 30-horsepower NorTrac bulldozer
  
• Quite a large selection of vehicles, actually, including...
  
• A JL421-class Landcruiser, if the traffic in St Andrews gets too much for you.

Thanks to that search, my "Recommended Items" box is now pretty surreal, but at least the family's Christmas is pretty much sorted out.

[Edited because I typed this just after getting up and somehow managed to misspell "qwert" twice.]