My mom’s not very good with surprises. This means that I’m tasked, annually, with determining what I should receive as a birthday gift from my parents. Don’t ask me why they insist on getting me stuff this late in my life, but they do.

In the five months it took me to come up with something this year, I also came up with what I think is a great idea for a new Golgotron periodical feature. For now, I’ll be calling it “Shit you should buy”. Actually, I don’t care who buys it, or if you just figure out a way to replicate it without a purchase, so let’s just call it “Shit Stuff you should have”.

And so, I present to you, the first SYSH…

Helicopters. Radio controlled helicopters, that is.

While fucking around at Josh and Cory’s, we always manage to waste a reasonably long time flying one of these little buggers around the house, or more recently, into the pool.

Cory says he picked it up for about $20 at a WalMart or something, but please be kind and don’t give those fuckers your business. If you absolutely feel the need to buy one in person, pretty much every mall in town has some kiosk dufus ready to sell you one. Luckily, you can more easily just click over to Amazon and buy one of about a thousand different models. And that’s where it gets difficult for me. I should be able to tell you which one to get, but I don’t have a clue. Even the crappy one Cory bought was a lot of fun, even if it doesn’t hold up well to any sort of abuse (actually, it has; I believe it survived the trip to the pool, which is pretty impressive). Instead, I’ll just point out a few that stood out to me:

Dragonfly (fun toy) Pretty similar to what we were flying around the house and about the same price. It’s good for some fun as long as you don’t plan to keep it forever because you’ll probably send it too close to the ceiling fan or something.

AH64 Apache (kinda serious) This is one you might want to be more careful with. By no means is it one of the big dogs, at least it’s not the bottom of the barrel like the $20 jobbies, and it comes with some spare parts to keep it going after you do, inevitably, fly it into something you shouldn’t.

Belt CP 450 V2 (hardcore) This is your serious trickster machine. Read the product description and you’ll see it comes with all sorts of fancy stuff that I’m sure is easily breakable, even after spending $800. Apparently flying upside down is just that cool. You’ve got to spend some serious money for this toy, and I can’t in good conscience suggest you do that, but it’s the sort of thing I would love to play with if Cory decided to buy it.

Believe it or not, even the BELT-CP 450 is low end compared to how far you can really go with recreational radio-controlled helicopters. If you want to learn more about these things and see just how freaky this hobby can get, start by visiting a dedicated RC helicopter shop, like HeliProz – They’ve got a lot more info than you could ever hope to get from some loser who’s done nothing but flown around a dinky mall-toy helicopter. They’re also eager to sell you any type of part or kit under the sun, including gas-powered copters which I didn’t touch on in my examples above – those are all electric, RTF (Ready to Fly) models.

Of course, if you really want to be one of the cool kids, you would skip right past the tiny electrics, past those hobbiest kits, and get the real deal: