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Topic: You just couldn't make this up (Read 1375 times) |
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Kharin
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In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
  
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You just couldn't make this up
« on: 2002-03-08 11:45:57 » |
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1860000/1860315.stm
Step aside Barbie and Ken.
They already have competition from the Muslim world in the form of the new, modestly-dressed Iranian doll called Sara.
Sara never goes out without a headscarf or her brother Dara.
The Arab League is also working on its own culturally-sensitive alternative to Barbie.
Now, meet Shimmy.
He's the first ever exclusively Jewish, truly "kosher" doll.
"We started with a boy, because of the fact that girls have chests," says Budi Dvir, the marketing director of the Tel Aviv-based company that developed the doll.
Doll with a difference
In other important respects, Shimmy is also a doll with a difference.
He has unnaturally chubby cheeks, a little red button of a nose, and four fingers on each hand instead of five - a way of getting round the Ten Commandments' ban on making "graven images".
Shimmy - who like Sara and Dara - is manufactured in China, also says a prayer when you squeeze his hand.
"Shimmy is built around Jewish law," says Mr Dvir. "Religious children need a character they can identify with."
Out of the closet
And he's selling like hotcakes.
"I just can't get enough stocks of it," says Shalom Halpern, who owns a toy shop in an orthodox neighbourhood of central Jerusalem.
"When I first got it I was sceptical that it would sell. But people just keep buying."
Mr Halpern says that some ultra-Orthodox parents used to surreptitiously buy Barbies for their children, making sure they played with them inside their houses where no-one else could see.
Shimmy brings doll-buying out of the closet.
"Religious children are also children - with the same desire to play with dolls like anybody else," says Halpern.
"It's a natural thing. Now parents can buy a doll without feeling guilty."
And Shimmy has proved so successful that the manufacturers are now working on a sister for him.
"She'll be called Rivkele, and she'll be modestly dressed, in a skirt not trousers," says Mr Dvir.
She'll also have four fingers not five.
One other thing, insists Mr Dvir: "She won't have a chest."
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Zloduska
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Handcuffs are for amateurs.
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Re:You just couldn't make this up
« Reply #1 on: 2002-03-11 02:52:14 » |
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Quote:| "Shimmy is built around Jewish law," says Mr Dvir. "Religious children need a character they can identify with." |
Oh, excellent. At last a poor Jewish child can relate to a boil-faced alcoholic, chest-less, four-fingered, plastic mutant talking automaton! No wonder they are so popular.
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WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY FEEDING THESE KIDS?!
* Zloduska cradles Teddy the "Bondage Bear" in fear
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Silnaika
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Dead silence shall return.
  
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Re:You just couldn't make this up
« Reply #2 on: 2009-11-29 07:43:21 » |
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that doll looks like a clown...kinda
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