Month: June 2007

Now that the Hello Kitty ceramic figure has been saved and is on its way to well protected safety, I thought that with my new found affection for Hello Kitty I should do something responsible for all those impressionable kids out there. I therefore spoke with my wife and convinced her to give me a couple of Hello Kitty plush to use as characters to make an educational video. Even better, Hello Kitty is dressed in a school uniform and Dear Daniel is in a graduation gown. The question became, what lesson should I teach to all the impressionable kids out there?

I considered this awhile and thought it’s important for kids to understand that fireworks are dangerous. I could have Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel show the dangers of playing with fireworks. If in the process of showing how fireworks can be dangerous, Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel accidentally found themselves trapped in barrage of fireworks and ended up lighting up in amazingly colorful sparks, we would all know that this was a sad event, but they had taught everybody an important point.

Or if I was to teach kids about the dangers of playing near the water by a fast moving river and both Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel accidentally fell into the river and got swept through raging rapids and then over a high waterfall, we would all feel bad, but understand that they had done a great service in teaching us about safety near rivers.

Or if I had a wood chipper and wanted to teach how dangerous it is to be near one of these machines as the machine grinds branches into small chips and Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel accidentally get stuck in one of the branches and go through the chipping machine, we would all feel terrible, but know that they had taught us a very important lesson about the dangers of wood chipping machines.

After considering numerous ways I could teach kids about the dangers in the world with Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel (and smiling the entire time), I realized that I didn’t feel like sleeping on the couch in the Hello Kitty sleeping bag for the next month.

I have therefore decided to let the readers of this blog tell me how they would use Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel to teach kids about safety. Of course you should have a video camera to tape the lesson and any accidental events that may happen during it.

If you feel that you can do justice in teaching an important lesson to all the kids about safety using the Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel plush pictured here, please leave a comment on exactly what lesson you would teach and at the end of the week I will choose the best one to send these two plush to…

As you all know, I promised to choose someone to give the Hello Kitty ceramic figure to in order to protect it when you overwhelmingly voted to save her instead of letting me smash her with a hammer. There were a lot of entries that put a lot of thought into how to protect Hello Kitty, but ultimately I decided to go with Heather and her Nerf missile guns (she is being sent out this weekend), because one of the things that I love to see in Hello Kitty Hell is poetic justice:

Although I don’t have a Blendtec blender with which to protect Ms Kitty, and I don’t have a tank that I could use in Hello Kitty’s Arsenal of Free Cuteness, I can offer the services of my geek brother and I. You see, my brother is rather famous for his many ingenious ways in which he modifies Nerf guns into semi-automatic dart-firing machines. And honestly, as much as I love tanks, they’re much to hard and rigid to protect Hello Kitty. And as much as I love Blendtec blenders, the blender is much too square, and its blades are much too sharp and shiny. No, Hello Kitty needs to be protected by something from her own universe; something soft, cute, brightly colored, and slightly fuzzy. You know, like a Nerf dart… that’s capable of being fired across a football field.

You might be wondering, how would a Nerf gun compare to the protection power of the glock that someone else offered? Well, I somehow doubt that Hello Kitty’s cute little petite, feminine hands could withstand the shock of firing a glock. But she could easily fire the cute little missiles that come out of a Nerf gun with enough force to give a full sized man a black eye. See? Not only would a Nerf gun provide protection through pain, that pain would come from something as soft, gooshy, and cute as Hello Kitty herself. It’s a little something I like to call Poetic Justice.

So if you grant me the privilege of protecting Hello Kitty, I will do my best to guard her with my family’s entire arsenal of super soft, super cute weaponry. That includes everything from the air-tank powered automatic dart rifle, to the massive customized camel-back missile launcher. I’d even take Hello Kitty out to the next Nerf War, so that she can learn how to defend herself with a Nerf gun her own size. But if she should happen to take a little friendly fire, don’t worry, how much damage could a Nerf missile really do?

Anyway, that’s my pitch from my Nerf soapbox. I say the best justice is poetic justice, and the best way to protect the sweetest, cutest, softest, most feminine kitty in history, is with the softest, foamiest, fastest weapons on the planet: nerf.

Now, I know that Heather will be doing her best to protect Hello Kitty so that no harm comes to her, but I also know that none of us could blame her if while teaching Hello Kitty how to protect herself with the Nerf missile launcher Hello Kitty accidentally gets some string tangled around her neck at the end of the Nerf missile and launches herself the distance of a football field into a brick wall (or some other unthinkable tragedy) since we all know accidents do happen.

I feel good in knowing that I have honored your wishes to save Hello Kitty and to place her in a protective environment…

A rare glimpse of sunshine to drown out the Hello Kitty Hell pinkness arrived in my email:

I’m going to be honest with you – I found your website by trying to find Hello Kitty items. And I’ll admit that I am (or was?) a Hello Kitty fan. Not really a fanatic, but I did shriek with delight sometimes over anything with that cat on it. Actually, my boyfriend is in Japan right now, so he sent me Hello Kitty items – an alarm clock (it speaks in Japanese, though, and doesn’t sing the Hello Kitty song), some Hello Kitty candy, and Hello Kitty noodles or something weird like that. Now, at the time, I thought this was awesome.

But then I started researching Hello Kitty items, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Hello Kitty is no ordinary cat. Call me crazy, but it has some freakish power of sucking in people with it’s cuteness. For some reason, women are more likely to be sucked in by this. Men seem to be able to resist. Fortunately, I’ve never been one to like pink, so I’ve busied myself with non-pink Hello Kitty items (tough to find, I know). But your website, the one that opened my eyes to Hello Kitty bras and Hello Kitty pads (honestly, wtf?), and that eerie Hello Kitty Darth Vadar, has almost made me disgusted with Hello Kitty.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I do think that Hello Kitty is slowly taking over the world. My boyfriend has claimed that every store in Japan has something Hello Kitty in it, so it’s already claimed them. When will it claim other places? I see it’s already claimed your home.

And to think…I wanted a Hello Kitty toaster. But now, instead of cute, it seems cultish.

And on that note I must thank you. The truth of Hello Kitty is very exposed in your blog. I only hope more people can see it. — Savvy

Of course, the true question is, how many million more to go ???