This season’s animatronic Baby Alive [Learns to Potty]—which retails for $59.99—comes with special “green beans” and “bananas” that, once fed to the doll, actually, well, come out the other end. “Be careful,” reads the doll’s promotional literature, “just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the ‘potty’ and sometimes she can’t!” (A warning on the back of the box reads: “May stain some surfaces.")

...Jim Silver, editor of Time to Play, a Web magazine that reviews toys, says children want reality.
...
Silver said he laughed when he first saw the pooping dolls and wondered if they were necessary. Although he said he has been sworn to secrecy about next year’s new toys, an early peek shows reality is only going to get more real. “You’re going to see the envelope pushed to make baby dolls as real as possible without being offensive in any way. 

The 2009 Baby Alive Catalogue

Baby Alive Spits Up on Your Nice Jacket - Are you wearing a nice jacket?  Did you just get it cleaned?  Baby Alive will know—and she’ll let you know, too!  By spitting up on your jacket.

Baby Alive Draws on the Walls in Sharpie® - Uh-oh—look who’s very gradually learning the complexities of representational art!  Actually, Baby Alive may just be following its evolutionarily developed need to seek your attention, even if with behavior that invariably draws punishment.  Baby Alive comes with an unlimited supply of Sharpies® that you will never be able to locate. 

Baby Alive Spends Forty-Five Minutes Narrating a Dream She Had - Baby Alive follows you from room to room, droning about woodland creatures and princesses, and becomes very agitated when it seems that you are not listening.  Baby Alive’s recall of her own dream is peppered with fabrications and redundancies, and usually resembles a pastiche of sequences from popular animated films.  Maybe you should stop plopping Baby Alive in front of the goddamned TV all afternoon.  At this point, it may be too late.

Baby Alive Grows Increasingly Resentful of You - You don’t let Baby Alive do anything Baby Alive wants to do!  Baby Alive can’t believe you won’t let Baby Alive hang out in front of the mall on Saturday night with Baby Alive’s cigarette-smoking doll friends!  Baby Alive doesn’t want to be your doll!  UGGGH.  BABY ALIVE WISHES THAT YOU WERE DEAD.

Baby Alive “Does” Your Taxes - It’s really more like “spits up on.”

Tags: toys, baby's first poopy, commerce, pooping doll, offensive toys, baby alive, frightening reality

A passenger on a French train had to be rescued by firemen after having his arm sucked down the on-board toilet.

The 26-year-old victim was trapped when he tried to fish out his mobile phone, which had fallen into the toilet bowl, and fell foul of the suction system.

The high-speed TGV train had to stop for two hours while firemen cut through the train’s pipework.

The man was carried away by emergency services, with the toilet still attached to his arm. 

Things for which it is, and is not, worth it to reach into a train toilet (a partial list):

1. The Dowager’s diamond pendant: worth it
2. Mechanical pencil: not worth it
3. Map showing location of secret spy headquarters: worth it if you are a spy
4. Baby (cherished): worth it
5. Baby (colicky): not worth it
6. Baby’s first poopy: not worth it
7. Cell phone: worth it only if cell phone is constructed from Dowager’s diamond pendant
8. Travel copy of Da Vinci Code: not worth it, even if book is not in toilet at all but on the floor

Tags: technology, transportation, cell phones, baby's first poopy, train, toilet, books not worth the paper they're printed on, the dowager