http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2009/11/27/consumer-zhu-zhu-pets-hamster.html
The next great Christmas toy for children (and the inner child) is the Zhu Zhu Pets mechanical hamster. This little guy drives cars, runs around in hamster wheels, and shits everywhere like a real hamster. Back up, it doesn’t actually shit everywhere like a real hamster and you don’t have to place it in a cage full of wood shavings where it will live out its years in sorrow.
I think it’s interesting that this is the biggest toy this Christmas as it follows the oft mentioned Zizekian argument that in a post-modern world we want to consume products but we want the products to have their malignant aspect removed: God without belief, Coke without calories, Chocolate laxatives, hamsters without a mess. We want the same great taste sans the consequences.
When I was a kid I had a hamster named squeakers. When he died I secretly cried in my bedroom and then moments later buried him in an empty sour cream container in the alley. When he was buried I placed a cross over his grave thinking that if I gave him a Christian burial I would see him in the next life. I still hold on to that hope.
I don’t know what I want to say exactly. I lament the fact that children aren’t getting real hamsters and are instead getting an ersatz of a hamster. I lament that lazy parents who don’t want their kid to have the responsibility of a real hamster will buy them this fraudulent simulacrum and deprive their kid of all the joys and pain of having and losing a living being.
Within a span of a few days (a couple years ago) I read the His Dark Materials Trilogy (the first book of which was made into a movie called The Golden Compass) and watched the movie The Fountain starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.




