As regular readers know, on the first of April each year, I write an article that is silly and (what I think is clearly) untrue. And I was really pleased with this year’s entry, Miracle Reagan Toast Discovered. I’m still kind of amazed that no one seemed particularly taken with it. While it’s true that some of jokes are groaners, and most of the jokes are too sly by half (“the companion piece of toast, which interestingly contains an image of Jane Wyman”), the very idea is funny. We’ve seen images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on toast. So I was very pleased when I came up with the idea that conservatives would find Reagan on a piece of toast.

Well, friend of the site Madeleine “Mad” Kane brought my attention to this article, This Selfie Toaster Can Burn Your Portrait Onto Your Morning Toast. I was immediately skeptical. It just had to be from a satirical website. As I’ve noted before, they aren’t always that clear and if it isn’t The Onion, no one really knows. But it is true: for just $70, you too can have a selfie toaster.

But don’t get too excited. The toaster is probably not what you are thinking. It isn’t like you plug in an SD card, select and image and it burns it. Not at all. Instead, you send the company an image, it creates a special metal plate that is put in the toaster and sent to you. So you can create a toast with your image on it and your image alone. I guess for $70, that’s about all you could expect. But it strikes me as kind of pathetic.

How I originally figured it worked was that you stick an SD card into the toaster, select an image, the computer inside converts it to grey scale, and burns whatever image you want on the toast. Is that asking too much? I don’t really think so. I’m already working on a far more interesting project, but I don’t think it would be hard to make such a toaster. You would simply have to design it such that instead of one continuous heating coil on each side, you’d have to have perhaps a thousand that are controlled by the computer. That would make the toaster expensive. But if one could bring it to market for $500, I’ll bet it would sell.

As it stands, the Selfie Toaster is narcissistic. Do you want to look at yourself on your toast every morning? Or your wife? Or even your kid? Not to mention that the bread isn’t properly toasted. I suspect that people will use the toast to give out as gag gifts or as a form of marketing. And then, within a week or two, the toaster will find itself stacked on a shelf in the garage. Perhaps a better name for them would be Shelfie Toasters.