The cost of air travel can sometimes get out of hand, especially since airlines have found more and more ways to take money from their customers. From bag fees to charging for food on many flights, the perks of flying the friendly skies have largely disappeared.

But on a recent trip for work, I re-discovered something which makes up for all of that. Well, at least for me.

I got a chance to peruse the Sky Mall catalog.

If you don’t fly, you have no idea what you are missing. Sure, SkyMall has a website, but anyone can find all kinds of oddball products by surfing the web. Only SkyMall gives you a magazine filled with these kinds of items for the time you are captive in an airplane.

Let’s say you see a photo of someone using Orbitwheels online. These are round things you put your feet in to move around, I guess. The catalog copy calls them “a cross between a skateboard and inline skates.” I am not funny enough to describe the picture.

You might have a laugh, send the link to someone and move on if you find this online. In catalog form, you cannot look away. They might as well dog-ear the page for you because you just have to come back to look again to see if you can figure out how these things work.

If you find them at the SkyMall website, you will probably watch the promotional video and say, “No way would anyone in their right mind ever use those things.” With the catalog, you need to ponder that question over and over again, if only to get the sound of the seven children in the two rows behind you out of your head.

The folks at SkyMall don’t just want you to have new ways to get around. They also realize that they have the products which can solve one of the most pressing problems facing America today – dogs going to the bathroom.

The SkyMall catalog has not one, but two different fake lawn areas for people to put inside their house so a dog can get to work without going outside. I feel like I can rest a little easier now.

Not only do these products have fake grass to provide a place for the pooch to go, one of them has a scented fire hydrant (really) as well as an attached drain hose for outdoor use . Yes, they have a way for you to get rid of your dog’s business for when it goes outside to use the fake grass to go to the bathroom.

So I may have had to subside on only a small bag of pretzels for my flight, and there may have been no in-flight entertainment, but I walked away with a free catalog which offers me access to a product which can let me potty train a cat faster than most people potty train their children.

And people think America is not as great as it used to be.