Martini Matt.

I had no reason to buy this. I own lots of martini glasses and several cocktail shakers, so $9 was a lot to pay for stale crackers.

Maybe I fell prey to the same thing I always fall prey to during the last week before Christmas: That sick feeling that the world will turn black if I don’t cram in as much holiday idiocy as humanly possible.

Hey, I’m going to miss this. At no other time of year are stores filled with so much goofy and wonderful crap. I guess I just wanted one last memento to carry me through the more wretched parts of 2013.

April, especially. Even from back here, it looks terrible.

I found this “Martini Man” gift set at Target. I know it seems too similar to that Bloody Mary gift set to be worth reviewing, but I didn’t really buy this for website-related purposes.

I think what sold me most was the ultra-tiny martini glass.

I mean, look at it. It barely holds two ounces of vodka, and it says “MARTINI” on it. So cute.

Two ounces of vodka makes for a pretty small martini, but sometimes, smaller works. For instance, smaller works right now. I have work in the morning, so I can’t get blitzed. A two-ounce martini will never “blitz” me. At worst, it’ll just cause me to write blog entries badly. So?

That’s a dirty martini, by the way. I only drink ‘em dirty, and never with gin. There is nothing finer than a glass of vodka that tastes like a glass of seawater. The best part is, I’m not accidentally killing zooplankton.

Deciding when to eat the olives is tricky. I always try to give myself three of ‘em. I plow through the first one before the first sip, because olives are fantastic and cannot be resisted for much longer. The second one gets chomped when the drink is halfway done, and I’ll only eat the final olive when there’s no martini left. (Psychosomatic or not, a martini without an olive is a beeg baag of shit.)

The set’s cocktail shaker is miniature and hilarious. It’s made of cheap plastic, and I cannot envision a scenario wherein any liquid shaken inside of it would survive the trauma without absorbing several silver paint chips. (I used a normal metal shaker for the pictured martini. This wasn’t a theory I was interested in testing.)

Finally, the crackers. They’re like oyster crackers, but enormous and peppery. I guess Company X wouldn’t have branded them “Martini Crackers” if they weren’t good with martinis, but for my money, these hardtack hexagons have nothing on pretzels. Or maybe I’m just bitter because I finished Tiny Martini #1, and my last vestiges of good judgment will not let me have Tiny Martini #2.

Here’s a drawing of an ice monster doing math in a Christmas setting.

Ha, and you thought this wouldn’t be worth reading.

PS: No, I’ve never seen Mad Men.