Hello Kitty What?

Okay, I found the link—fire­cat had men­tioned it in her jour­nal a while back. sam­bear and god­dessin­ga seemed dubi­ous when I men­tioned the exis­tence of this thing. 

Hel­lo Kit­ty USB-HUB

Now, I did­n’t read all that ver­biage last time, but I remem­bered that it “talks” and moves its arms and head around. This time, though, I noticed this bit:
- Com­pat­i­ble for both Mac and PC com­put­ers — Easy instal­la­tion with the soft­ware that comes along with this Hel­lo Kit­ty Vibra­tion Mas­cot. The motion and sound func­tion can be turned on and off, so there is no need to wor­ry about it start mak­ing nois­es while your are asleep or at work.

Hel­lo Kit­ty Vibra­tion Mas­cot? Does that mean what it seems to mean, or is this one of those woe­ful­ly bad Japan­ese to Eng­lish translations?

There real­ly is a Hel­lo Kit­ty Vibra­tor, and now I have to wonder—does it attach to a com­put­er with a USB port? Because I don’t see that men­tioned. I can just see a new fad, peo­ple sit­ting on their Hel­lo Kit­ty Vibra­tors, hooked up through their Hel­lo Kit­ty USB Hubs, posed in front of a Hel­lo Kit­ty Web­cam (because I’m sure there has to be one, though I haven’t seen or looked for one—hell, there’s a Hel­lo Kit­ty Toast­er Oven), and run­ning some sort of soft­ware that lets ran­dom web vis­i­tors con­trol the vibra­tor and view the results.

You know, the inter­net has seri­ous­ly changed what I think of when I see San­rio prod­ucts. This is sor­ta dis­turb­ing, con­sid­er­ing the fact that my step­kids are absolute­ly ga-ga over some of their char­ac­ters. Come on—how many 14-year-old boys do you know of you’d choose the han­dle Pochac­co first, over absolute­ly any oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ty in the world? And yes, G’s very favorite char­ac­ter is Hel­lo Kit­ty, fol­lowed by Angel Kit­ty. I’m still unclear as to whether Angel Kit­ty is just a Hel­lo Kit­ty line, or anoth­er cat alto­geth­er. Okay, I’m not going to win any step­moth­er of the year prizes, but then I already knew that.