Knowing is Half the Prattle.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

You're Never to Young for Censorship.


So, we have this little toy called the "Alphabet Pal". This is the new and improved version of the toy. The original is green and this one is purple. It has an extra button on the top in the shape of a bug reclining on a flower and all it does when pressed is say "Hi I'm Edison, let's sing along with Alphabet Pal". Dumb button in an even dumber location, because a little kid is going to hit that button a million times and little Edison is going to annoy the living crap out of you. Both of these new "features" are not the big improvement. The toy now has an undocumented feature that censors your child's play for his/her own good. Part of the point of the toy is that it has little buttons, one for each letter in the alphabet and when you set it to one of its modes, the toy says the "sound" when you press the letter. For example, when you child hits a letter "A" it says the "aah" sound. Pretty fun. You should be able to pronounce out words by hitting letters in succession, but now it doesn't necessasarily let you. The new feature of this toy keeps track of which letters you have previously pushed and when you put together two or more letter sounds that the toy maker finds to be a "naughty" combination, it doesn't allow you to play the sounds together. For example here's an audio clip of what happens when you try to pronounce a popular word begining with "F". Audio Clip. It always puts in that "he he he that tickles" when you hit a naughty combination so it can stretch out the time between the naughty letters.

In fact the toy won't even allow you to put together u and k (or u and c) at all. Through some experimenting on my own here are some combinations of sounds that it doesn't allow together.

  1. U-K
  2. P-I-S
  3. C-N-T
  4. D-I-K
Your two year old is going to have to learn how to spell duck somewhere else.

Why don't we do this with all kids toys? What's going to stop someone from doing this with the refrigerator magnets?


Now we're going to have to put repeller magnets into the refrigerator magnets so that kids can't put certain letter combinations together.

When you try to put the letters together they will just split apart. Saving your child from sin.

In honor of the new and improved Alphabet Pal. I've made a little bit of a porn soundtrack using the toy. Enjoy.

Oh yeah Alphabet Pal ... Give it to me.

Thanks to Issac Hayes for the music, the king of music that sounds like porn.

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