In 1980, the Rubik's cube sold more than 4.5 million units and sold even more the next year.

I try to be a decent, good-natured, and tolerant person, but there are some things that, for no conspicuous reason, I hate. I hate, for example, stuffed animals tied to the grills of trucks. I also hate fake hands slammed in car trunks. Baby-on-Board signs, and Rubik’s Cubes. Stupid things I can live with, like beer hats and plastic turds. I’ve used a beer hat and it is, in fact, a functional unit; and as for plastic turds, well, turds make me laugh.

But at the mere sight of a Rubik’s Cube my shoulders slacken and I exhale in a titter any good will that I might have felt toward the world. The cheap, adhesive squares of color; the chintzy, creaky cube itself; and the purposeless absorption that damned thing begets all conspire against my open-mindedness. When a friend passed word to me of the Bad Fads Museum (www.bad-fads.com), I thought maybe here is a resource that will help explain the existence of this pathetic puzzle-toy. And I was right. Listed under the Collectible’s link, along with the Pet Rock, the Super Ball, the moped, and the Troll Doll is the Rubik’s Cube. It seems that an Erno Rubik, an architecture professor at the Budapest School of Commercial Art in Hungary, fathered the cube. The purpose, if you can call it that, of the Rubik’s Cube is to twist and rotate the cube until it is a multicolored mess and then figure out a way to return it to its original state. “While some younger children were able to determine the solution in mere minutes,” the site reports, “in actuality, there were more than 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible positions into which the cube could be manipulated.”

Professor Rubik “designed the small puzzle as a way of teaching his students about three-dimensional objects, but after securing a patent for it in 1975, he began marketing it throughout Hungary, Europe, and the United States.... In 1980, the cube sold more than 4.5 million units and sold even more the next year. Over a seven-year period, more than 30 million units were sold....” As if that weren’t annoying enough, “several books were written to provide hints and solutions to the puzzle — many of which went on to become the biggest sellers ever for their publishing houses." I suspect that the legions of Cubisti, all swiveling wrists and profane mutterings, are alone responsible for the nation’s carpal tunnel and chronic fatigue epidemics. Legends abound about “compulsive fans,” such as the one who developed tendonitis in her wrist and the man who divorced his wife for becoming infatuated with the puzzle. Self-help books, with titles like How to Live with a Cubaholic and 101 Uses for a Dead Cube, popped up to help people living with addicts.

The Bad Fads Museum documents the history of many more unfortunate crazes. Consider, for example, the CB radio. The device itself was not the problem; it was the phrasing it engendered that chafes the sensibilities of normal intolerant people like me: “10-4, good buddy,” “Roger that,” or “A-OK." According to www.badfads.com, “Many sociologists claimed that America’s obsession with the CB radio stemmed from people’s desire to indulge their fantasies. The CB radio provided the anonymity for people to act as though they were someone else.”

Yeah, like an asshole.

In addition to collectibles, this on-line museum exhibits regretful fashions and events. In the former category you can try to come to terms with the coon-skin cap, “made popular in late 1954 with the debut of Fess Parker in the role of Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter," or the pillbox hat, made popular by First Lady Jackie Kennedy and then jinxed by her when, wearing one, she cradled the President’s head in her lap after he was struck by an assassin’s bullets.

“How does something that only lasted two months come to symbolize the popular concept of a fad?” ask the curators of the Bad Fad Museum. “Simple— Consider, for it exceeds all appreciable levels of ridiculousness. ” example, the Goldfish swallowing, for instance. This high-protein diet started as a fad in the spring of 1939 when Harvard freshman Lothrop Withington (if you don’t get into Harvard with a name like that, you’re doomed) swallowed one when a classmate wagered that he wouldn’t (think of some of the great things that Ivy League honor has given us). “The event received vast coverage from the local media in Boston, and soon college students throughout the country were trying to top his feat Within weeks, students (mostly men) were sucking down 5, 10, 20 even 30 fish at a sitting.... A UCLA professor concluded that an adult male could safely consume up to 150 fish but warned against exceeding that amount.” At one point, a Massachusetts senator presented a bill that attempted to protect the fish from “cruel and wanton consumption.”

What the Bad Fads Museum demonstrates is that the only prerequisite for a fad is that it be, like flagpole sitting or telephone-booth stuffing, popular and purposeless. In that case, in 50 years or so, maybe we’U find exhibits here on such things as flavored coffee, Congressional hearings, and intolerance.