HOLIDAY RANT #2: We Rock ABOUT.COM's Top 10 Holiday Toy List!

For the second installment in my Holiday Toy Rant Series, I've chosen not to deal with one particular toy, but rather, an article which appeared on About.com this past week. About.com, which has so much information on it and yet manages to be ENTIRELY useless, and their correspondent Dipika Mirpuri have compiled a list in this article of the Top 10 MUST-HAVE toys this holiday season. If you do not have these toys, your children WILL hate you mom and dad, and they WILL murder you in your sleep. So be prepared to fight excruciatingly painful lines of crazy-ass parents the day after thanksgiving at your local wal-mart, cause these mothafuckas are going fast.

http://toys.about.com/od/holidaytoysandgifts/tp/topten2006.htm

There's the article.

Read it?

Okay...

#10: Butterscotch My Furreal Friends Pony from Hasbro

"This very life-like pony from Hasbro is an extravagant treat indeed! Special sensors make it possible for Butterscotch to react just like a real live pony. Moving eyes, head and ears and a soft flowing mane and tail make Butterscotch a treat to touch and play with. Younger kids will enjoy sitting on Butterscotch and being gently bounced up and down. You can even "feed" the pony, or groom her and watch her reactions!"

Wow. This whole thing. I don't even know where to start. Let's take a look at it.






















Okay, first off, look at that thing. There isn't one thing about it that isn't initially creepy. In fact, I could do one WHOLE, ENTIRE rant on the fact that I simply don't want that thing in my house. How would you like to be walking around downstairs at night in the pitch dark to raid the fridge and just see that thing STARING at you. That would personally put me in the ICU Burn Unit solely to treat both emotional and mental scarring. The other initial problem with this is just the image it projects. Anyone else get this weird "Stuffed dead dog" mentality out of this...I mean, it's just plain creepy...I look at this thing and I see something bordering on a Taxidermist job. It looks like your kid's horse died and you had him stuffed and placed on his favorite patch of land in your living room. Yeah, that's not going to scare your children.

But perhaps the most horrible part of this toy is this:

"Younger kids will enjoy sitting on Butterscotch and being gently bounced up and down. "

What in the fucking mchell is About.com suggesting that Kids do with this thing? Because it appears that Dipika is suggesting they have wild bestiality sex with it. Now that's a toy. Mom and Dad, have your little angel repeatedly ass fuck a stuffed horse. That's it. Way to go. "Warning: Buttercup may cause your daughter to orgasm and/or be no longer "intact" '

We're skipping Toy 9, because it's the Wii. And the Wii will kick ass.

Well There's Your Good News and Your Bad News...

Don't worry, there's a full post coming tonight, but I wanted to do a quick one just to post this picture.





















It's really a lose-lose situation. Unless you are Jay, that is.

I don't know whether to be happy that some one just kicked Rob Schneider Really Hard in the face, or be sad that he probably enjoyed it.

HOLIDAY TOY RANT #1: Mattel's Superman Inflato-Suit

There is nothing at ALL flagrantly homosexual about a kid who is wearing this.

This, apparently is being prepped by Mattel as the biggest sell to children this holiday season, likened to Cabbage Patch Kids and the Tickle-Me-Elmo, Mattel believes this will be the single most hard to find item this holiday season among the 3-7 set. Stores will be selling out across the country. The first shipments are out now at major retailers.

" Kids who truly aspire to be their favorite Super Hero will love the Superman Returns Inflato-Suit™. Featuring a dedicated battery-operated fan that fills the suit with air, it emulates the muscular physique of their favorite Super hero."

You flip a little switch in the back and the suit gives you gigantic inflated muscles with a little battery operated fan.

Anyone else see the uh, problems with manufacturing errors present in the early prototype suits?

For example, say you have a much younger, smaller child who's suit is actually MUCH larger than he is. Pick up a few gale force winds and the kid inflates the suit, little junior flys through the air and screams bloody freaking murder into the next county.

As an alternative situation, let's say manufacturing plants use faulty or misplaced fans in one or more of the suits.

Kid gets the suit on Christmas morning and screams like the Nintendo 64 kid. He throws on the suit, his body trembling in almost orgasmic anticipation, he flips the switch and...the misplaced fans actually just make him look really really fat.

Decades of rehabilitative therapy.

Let's also take a look at the kid in this picture to see some more inherent problems with this product.



This kid looks like he's freaking suffocating. His ripe orange size head cannot bare but collapse pressured by the weight of his incredibly powerful pectorals.

He's trying to impress the ladies in his playdate independent study finger painting group but alas the power of the Kryptonite in his drawers is far too much for his obscene biceps to handle.

Buy the suit and Lex Luthor has already won you little bastards.

And what if the little fraker pops? Not the kids obviously (although that would be the funniest national recall of a product ever = Don't buy this product or your kids will spontaneously explode when they wear it), but can you imagine if the fans in a suit are too powerful and cause a kid's suit to actually EXPLODE? How do you explain that to your children?

"Well you see son, Superman's biceps can only take so much super power, otherwise they blow up! It has to do with the special atmosphere on krypton"

Yeah, that's great Dad. Now the kid will be watching Superman movies and shouting like a drunk man at the screen like "OH MY GOD, DON'T KICK HIS *expletive deleted* SUPERMAN! YOUR MUSCLES, THEY'LL IMPLODE!"

You and the rest of your family, will never be allowed in a movie theatre as long as you live on this planet.

I guess grandpa can still get into his special pornos though, because he was in the navy and he's seen all that stuff before.

But even greater horrors could be created by the fact that no sex/gender is indicated for a person who would be wearing this suit. Parents MAY think it's a good idea to buy this for their little angel princess to pretend she's supergirl or superwoman, but that's not a good idea, first of all we know they are both raging lesbians, but besides that, I think it's of paramount importance RIGHT NOW for Mattel to say that this suit, IS FOR BOYS ONLY.

Can you imagine the inexplicable horrors if parents in naivity actually bought one of these for a girl? Yeah, she can have fun for a while, but then she discovers the switch. She is perplexed at first, but as her parents never told her about what it was for as they probably never read the goddamn box (for the same reason Americans don't watch foreign films, your average american can't read), but she inflates it, and one of two things happen. A. She's so horrified that she immediately rolls around on the ground trying to cover her grotesque form, failing miserably until she finally just has to pop it with a pair of toenail clippers, destroying the suit and putting her parents out a massive investment, forcing the parents in question to put her under permanent grounding under lock and key in their attic.

Or B. She actually enjoys it. She keeps it secret from them for a while, but they find out about 20 years later when their daughter appears on television looking like this...



Yeah, that's right, your daughter has so much steroid induced testerone in her body she's developing a beard like Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments, among other things...honestly, she might be growing boy parts. All because you bought her a suit. If she wins Ms. Olympia or one of said Female Bodybuilding pageants, it won't matter, because you are all filthy stinking rich, and the rich can do anything they damn well *expletive deleted* please, but let's say you don't win. Let's say you don't win and your daughter is so crushed that she trains like mad for every single pageant afterwards, but never wins, because no matter how hard she trains, she'll finally lose because of that one, crushing loss at Ms. Olympia. But she keeps training, so hard that eventually...



Daddy's little angel goes the way of Florence "Flo-Jo" Joyner and flat out exercises herself to death. IT HAPPENS. It only takes this one case to prove that hard work, too much hard work, actually does *expletive deleted* kill you.

Joe Parent, Flo-Jo says no to the suit, shouldn't you?




And even besides that, despite his massive fake inflated muscles, this kid...



is going to grow up to be gay. Think about it. This is the only job he'll ever get, modeling this goddamn suit. Oh...he'll try for other jobs as a model/child actor, but when "I wore a huge inflatable blue suit in a Mattel ad in October of 2006" is the only *expletive deleted* thing on your resume, you're screwed kid. It's just what's going to happen. So he'll never get a job again, and as the baby boomer generation is getting older, his parents are going to retire and never get a new job, so what's he forced to do, live with his mom until he's about 30 and all she can show prospective girlfriends is that picture.

Despite what any mother tells you, prospective girlfriends actually don't find your old pictures adorable. It's creepy. So this kid will never get a girlfriend, forcing him to make a "lifestyle choice" and become raging homosexual.

Nothing good comes from this suit.

So this looks like a job for superman.

To destroy this suit before ONE parent buys this for their stupid, undereducated caffiene junkie children.

CUSTOMER OF THE NIGHT: 10/28: What is this, the Andy Griffith Show?

Excuse me sir, would you like me to play this?


This gentleman comes up tonight with his 6, maybe 7 year old son and he hands me the rental he picked out for his kid (Zathura), and a card coupon good for a free rental.

So I ask him if he has his blockbuster card.

"No."

Do you have your driver's license?

"Yes, I have that."

So I look up his name in the system, quite a few people with the same last name, about 2 pages worth, I read off each one.

"Nope, nope, nope...etc..."

Me: Have you been here in a few months?

Customer: I've never been here. I don't have an account.

Me: Oh.

First of all, he waits til I go through 2 pages of member names to tell me this. Could he have said when I originally asked for his card "I don't have one. I don't have an account." ?

So I said to him, assuming, you know, he just needs to get one first "Let me just grab the application you can sign up for one it will only take a second."

So he looks at me like I'm nuts "I don't want to sign up for an account."

Me: Oh, well, you'd need to. We sell merchadise without accounts, but in order to rent you need an account so we can track who has what copy of what title.

Customer: Let me explain, you see that card?

Me: Free Rental, right.

Customer: My son here won that at his school through this thing called "Race for Education". He did really well in school and got an A so his teacher gave him that as a gift, he just wants to use that.

Me: I understand. That's very cool. But Blockbuster policy dictates that we need a membership account to rent. It doesn't cost anything to sign up for one. The account is free, the rental would be free with the card, so if it's a just a one time thing, you could theoretically sign up, rent this, and never come in again, we'll never charge you a red cent and you'll never hear from us again. No money changes hands.

Customer: My son just won this and I want to use it, I DO NOT want to sign up for an account.

Me: There's no way to do that in this computer to do that even if I WANTED to do that.

Customer: Can I please speak to a manager?

*Pulls Tom Over*

So the customer explains to Tom what he just explained to me.

Tom: The computer doesn't even let us rent to non-members, I'm sorry but even if I wanted to do it, there's honestly no possible way.

So the guy takes the card back from me and as he's leaving, he turns, pats his son on the head gently and says "I'm sorry son, but I guess Blockbuster doesn't care at all about your special achievement"

And then he leaves.


And all Tom can say is "Is this a difficult concept to grasp?"

CUSTOMER OF THE NIGHT 10/13 : That Whole "The Customer is Always Right" Thing? Yeah, It's invalid if you're an obnoxious dumbass.

Do I LOOK like I'd watch this?

Guy comes in, he's a very LARGE, elderly man who walks with a hunch, and picks some movies off the shelves, looking around for stuff on our new release wall.

So this guy is at the very back of the store, I'm out on the floor headed back towards the office, and my Manager is up at the very front behind the registers.

So he turns to me and he says "Hey Kid! Have you seen this? Is it good?"

He shows me Cello.



So I'm like "I don't know, I haven't seen that one, BUT it's probably worth it because that company that released that movie, Tartan, releases some of the best in Asian Cinema. You'll definitely want to check out a film called Oldboy."

So he's like "Oh! Thank you!"

So I go in the back for a second. While i'm in the back office, this happens, from what my manager told me after he left.

This guy is all the way at the back of the store and my boss is up at the very front.

And he is SCREAMING at my boss while she's trying to help a customer

"EXCUSE ME LADY! CAN I GET SOME HELP BACK HERE!"

"One second, I'm helping out a customer..."

"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU SAY? I CAN'T HEAR YOU! I NEED YOUR HELP LIKE NOW!"

"You're going to have to wait, I'm helping someone!"

She finishes checking out the customer in front of her.

"YOU GUYS GIVE AWFUL CUSTOMER SERVICE HERE!"

"What can I do for you?"

"I NEED YOU TO TELL ME WHERE I CAN FIND A MOVIE CALLED OLD MAN!"

Now this is my store manager, and she never watches movies, so she doesn't know what he's talking about and types it into the computer and gets no results...

"Are you sure that's what it's called? Nothing's showing up!"

"YES THAT'S WHAT IT'S CALLED! YOU GUYS HAVE NO CUSTOMER SERVICE HERE! YOU CAN'T EVEN HELP ME OUT! WHAT HAPPENED TO "THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT!" REMEMBER THAT ONE LADY? SOME COMPANY CALLED TARTAN MADE IT!

"We can't look it up by company!"

"GOD DAMN YOU'RE USELESS!"

So I come out of the office. the guy asks me "Where's that oldman movie you were telling me about, your employee up there knows absolutely nothing."

"It's called 'Oldboy'."

I grab it for him.

He turns to this younger customer in his mid-twenties and says to him: "Are you some kind of secret shopper for their company or something, can you tell this company what an awful employee this woman is?"

The younger customer pauses for a second, and turns around and says "No, I'm not, but if I was I'd tell someone how incredibly obnoxious you are!"

So this guy comes up front and I'm ringing him out...and he turns to my boss and says "Tell you what, because this kid (referring to me) isn't an idiot like you, I'm not gonna call your company and complain about how ignorant you are! You don't know nothing do you?"

Me: "Do you have your blockbuster card sir?"

Him: "Just look me up by my name!"

Me: "Any kind of photo ID? Driver's License?"

Him: *leans down on his elbow's on my counter* "You guys are *expletive deleted* unbelievable, do you know that? I'm just renting a movie!"

Me: "And I can't rent without your license."

So the guy gives me his license.

I ring him up and tell him the price.

Him: Whoa! whoa! How much?

Me: $

Him: I'm just renting a movie? That's insane!

Me: That's the price sir. Sorry.

He pays me and leaves.

So later in the day my boss tells me to go down to the genuardi's near our store and pick her up lunch.

And the guy's there, and as I'm getting her lunch he comes over and says "You're that lady's boss, right?"

And I'm just like "No, She's my boss."

And he just walks away.

I guess he was going to tell me to fire her.

CUSTOMER OF THE NIGHT 10/07 : I Heard You the First Time, Ms. Blimp, and I STILL Don't Care.

You know, this may be shocking to this woman, that
Pregnant women do not get absolutely everything
and anything they desire (unless of course you're
Gwenyth Paltrow or Reese Witherspoon, and if you
are Paltrow, the only thing you get the ability to do
is name your kids after a wax fruit basket)


Today, a VERY pregnant woman comes into the store, and she's in there for a good half hour, before she finally comes up with her rentals.

Me: Hi, do you have your Blockbuster card?

Woman: No.

Me: Do you have your driver's license or some kind of photo id?

Woman: No.

Me: I need some kind of photo identification in order to rent to you.

Woman: I'll give you my phone number...it's -

Me: I can't take your phone number miss.

Woman: Of course you can, stupid. It's-

Me: No, I can't take your phone number. I know for a fact I can't take it. I've worked here for 2 and a half years and there's absolutely NO way I can take your phone number, the computer has no way of even inputting it. It's not possible. If you don't have your Blockbuster card, Your driver's license, or some kind of Photo identification, I CANNOT rent to you.

Woman: Just take the phone number!

Me: I can't. There's no way to put it in the system.

Woman: *leans over and sticks her stomach right out towards me* you know, you have ALOT of nerve telling a pregnant woman what she can and can't do smart guy! I'm PREGNANT, you should be bending over backwards and doing what I tell you to do, cause I shouldn't be on my feet like this.

Me: Miss, even if I WANTED to take your phone number, if it was at all possible, I couldn't do it, there's no input for that in the computer.

Woman: Want me to get your manager and he can help you figure out how to take it? You're new aren't you?

Me: Miss, I'm not new. I know how to work the computer system. I can't take your phone number.

Woman: And why not?

Me: Because then ABSOLUTELY anyone who knew your phone number could rent on your account without you knowing it, ring up huge charges in auto sales and not return anything, and leave you with a huge bill. So we make sure that only the person that owns the account rents on it so there are no surprises. It's a safety precaution.

Woman: Well, I have no id, and i'm PREGNANT, and I want these movies, so what are you going to do?

Me: If you want to go out into your car and get your license I can wait.

Woman: I don't drive around with ID.

Me: I really don't know what to tell you...I can't rent this stuff to you.

Woman: Maybe you didn't understand me *she points at her stomach* I'm PREGNANT!

Me: Congratulations. I need Photo ID.

Woman: Okay, *she turns around and looks back at me* Okay, but ...I'M PREGNANT...like I want these movies...

Me: And I CAN'T rent them to you without I.D. Being pregnant has nothing to do with it. It's about monetary liability. what would you do if someone came in here and got tons of movies, never returned them and left you with a $70 bill in auto sales?

Woman: I'd sue you bastards for every last penny your worth! NOW RENT ME THE GOD DAMN MOVIES!

Me: Not without identification.

Woman: *screams* F... YOU!

and storms out.

Sorry, no exceptions, Photo I.D. or no rentals.