Pressdog.com

Toys that Won't Shut Up

By Bill Zahren
(Posted 12/28/00)

I’m pleased to announce that the Association of Obnoxiously Noisy and Annoying Toy Manufacturers (AONATM) had record sales this year. And, remarkably, nearly 96% of all noisy and annoying toys sold in the world were delivered to my house this year by “caring” relatives or that punk, Santa.

Here I’m clearly referring to Amazing Ally. My youngest, Jena the Destroyer (legal age: 5 ½), received an Amazing Ally from America’s Favorite Home Invader (Santa Claus). Santa appears to select gifts based on whether they 1) require complex programming and setup, and 2) are “interactive” as defined by an ability to talk incessantly and require constant reprogramming.

Oh, Santa’s a fun quipster, he is. To prove it, he left my children an Amazing Ally and two mutant robotic Poo-Chi dogs. Poo-Chi, the latest from the fun people who launched the Furby virus on an unsuspecting nation, is a little mechanical dog that rocks more than it moves and provides hours of relentless fun via barking.

It used to be that Santa the Funster brought stuff that had to be assembled -- stuff like bikes. Well, that’s sooooooo last millennium. The problem with boring old stuff like bikes is, generally, once it’s assembled, it’s assembled. Sure, it’s a pain to put it together, but at least you only have to do it once.

Now it’s all about stuff that has to be programmed and reprogrammed. Ally, for example, demands to know the EXACT date and time every time she wakes up. Like she’s worried about missing her date with Burly Bob or something. “You’re a (very bad slang word for sexual intercourse) DOLL,” I yelled at Ally after the 19th time she demanded to know the year, month, day, hour and minute. “It could be time for Ally to ride the Landfill Express.”

Thank God the Poo-Chis will eventually go to “sleep” if you bash them repeatedly with a hammer. I’m kidding. We don’t condone abusing even simulated animals here. If you ignore their whining, they’ll eventually shut up and go to “sleep” until one of your kids disturbs the air around them. Then they “come alive” and start barking and doing stuff to further get on your nerves.

In the good old days -- defined as days when I didn’t have to program my children’s Christmas presents -- we got non-electrical stuff like random chunks of wood in the shape of a tractor. Ever wonder why you still see wooden toys built in the Truman administration whereas 98% of all electronic-enhanced crap manufactured since 1998 no longer functions?

Give me the days when we got some lame board games or something that you’d play with for a couple of hours and then ignore for the rest of your life until your kids got old enough to make fun of you for having such primitive toys. At least the board game didn’t yell at you if you failed to play, or constantly nag, “Hi. I’m Ally! Let’s play! What year is it?”

“Hi, I’m Bill. Let’s throw Ally down the storm sewer!”

It could be worse. I could have gotten kids computer software, 79% of which is designed to immediately and profoundly screw up any computer more than two hours old. Last time I tried to load software onto my circa 1995 computer, I spent four hours undoing the hosed video settings. Nice.

The net outcome of all this, is that I’ll take yet another vanload of crap from my parents’ house back to my house where my kids already have enough toys to occupy all the children in all the orphanages in all of Russia for a decade. It’s toy overload. “Hey kids, let’s celebrate the birth of Christ by amassing still more crap! Come on!”

Thank goodness some traditions continue, like Zahrens’ annual Christmas Eve viewing of the movie Christmas Vacation. Nothing says Christmas to me like hearing cousin Eddie talk about his son “barking for the yak woman,” commenting how a chair smells like “fried kitty cat” or expounding the favorite holiday greeting for me and my sister, Teresa: “Merry Christmas! Shitter was full!”

It’s times like those that give us joy in the season, right before we have to get up and reprogram all our children’s “interactive” toys. Happy New Year. Here’s hoping we all control ourselves, lest we end up with Eddie’s eldest -- in the clinic “getting cured off the Wild Turkey.”

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