The Feline Empress of Evil [© McGehee] passes Go:

The board locations, of course, are in Kitty’s hometown of, um, London. Also available: Yahtzee and Connect Four.

(Via Finestkind Clinic and fish market. Picture from Sanrio.)

Celebrity culture has grown to such an extent that anyone who’s ever had a word with Ryan Seacrest is now deemed a “star.” So it’s somewhat heartening to see that the editors of Elle’s Taiwan edition have given a cover to someone who is legitimately a household word:

Considered vis-à-vis her main competition, Kitty is arguably not a sheer force of nature, but I suspect Kitty’s probably easier to dress than Miss Piggy, no small consideration for a fashion mag.

(Oh, and Kitty White is apparently her real name.)

I didn’t think so.

(Via FAILBlog’s WIN!)

Hello Kitty dresses up as a turkey:

Sanrio is selling this little plush Kitty with the bird suit for a mere $19.50, presumably just in time for Thanksgiving. (And heck, the grocery stores are full of Halloween stuff, so it’s just a matter of lead time.) She’s eight inches tall, so mark her down as a single serving.

(Via Finestkind Clinic and fish market.)

So I’m reading HelloGiggles, because — well, just because, okay? — and this startling revelation comes across the screen:

You are never too old to own Hello Kitty products. I have a Hello Kitty credit card, Zooey has a Hello Kitty sewing machine and Molly has Hello Kitty earphones.

Now how hard is it to find a Hello Kitty sewing machine? For the below-average Googler, it takes all of 500 milliseconds:

This obviously isn’t a Bernina-class machine — I used to own something like this, in a mundane Nineties PC beige — but what the heck. (I actually did some minor stitchery on a Bernina, back when I was married; she got custody of the machine, which cost nearly as much as the children.) I will not ask when Zooey has time to sew.

Old and busted: Love Land in Chongquin.

Though they billed it as “tasteful” and “educational”, investigators conducting an emergency tour of the park after it attracted worldwide attention last week disagreed, and said that investors were “interested only in profiting from sensationalism”.

“The investigation determined the park’s content was vulgar and that it was neither healthy nor educational. It had had an evil influence on society and had to be torn down immediately,” a government official further said. A demolition team immediately dismantled the eye-catching legs that revolved above the park’s entrance.

New hotness: Hello Kitty in Zhejiang.

With construction set to begin in July, the 150-acre theme park will focus on appealing to the obsessive nature of the popular Japanese feline’s fans, comprised mostly of preteens and young women. The theme park, which follows on the tails of the recently announced Shanghai Disneyland, will presumably attract a million visitors each year.

The Japanese company Sanrio, which created the tiny white feline, already has two Hello Kitty theme parks in Japan: Puroland, a 500,000 square foot indoor park outside of Tokyo, and Harmonyland (above photo), which rests on 60 acres in the Kyushu prefecture.

Make of this what you will.

I don’t know why you say goodbye; I say hello.

(By Yoshitomo Nara. Via KA-CHING!.)

What more need I say?

(Filched from Must Have Cute; spotted first at Finestkind Clinic and fish market.)

P. J. O’Rourke drives a Fiat 500 for Car and Driver (April), shows it to the journalism class he teaches at Hillsdale College, and he has some good news — or is it bad news?

[What] I think is the 500′s best marketing point [is] its appearance. This came from my star pupil, Ms. B. On one hand, she was referencing an international design icon that drives sales in more than 4000 retail outlets in the U.S. alone and generates half a billion dollars in annual revenue. On the other hand…

When Ms. B saw the Fiat 500, the first words out of her mouth were “Hello Kitty.”

Not just hers, either, I suspect:

Compare to, for instance, this Kitty-oriented smart fortwo.

Sanrio and Sephora have collaborated, kinda sorta, on a new cosmetic line, which presumably may help you look like this:

Yes, it’s the ubiquitous Hello Kitty, with the standard Signature Fragrance (1.7 ounces, $55, which sounds pricey but which is a heck of a lot cheaper than the stuff I wear), various goodies for your face, and typical accessories.

Although I question the legitimacy of a Hello Kitty lip gloss. I mean, Hello Kitty doesn’t even have lips.

Old pal (and occasional commenter) Mel sends along this not-exactly-towering presence:

Target.com sells this humidifier on its Web site, but it’s apparently not available at Target stores. You’re looking at $39.99, maybe $5 of which, I’d guess, went to Kittyfication.

“Eve never pleases me,” sang the Brothers Gibb, “and Kitty can.”

In fact, Kitty will even let you drive:

In an effort to boost sales, the importers of the smart car have introduced various “Expressions” packages, including custom paint and vehicle wraps. Among the latter are Hello Kitty designs licensed by Sanrio and reproduced on 3M vinyl. Pricing starts at $1,700.

I suppose an Eve package would have completely unadorned body panels.

(Via Jezebel.)

Maggie found this in Japan last fall:

“It has a slight chestnut scent,” she says. If that seems odd, well, it could have been a whole lot worse.

It appears that yes, Hello Kitty can has cheezburger:

(Raked up from the fires of Hello Kitty Hell.)

When I go into those occasional “sucks to be me” moods, I have to look for positive aspects to my existence as a countermeasure. (If one of them also works as blogfodder, so much the better.) One such positive aspect is the fact that I know several women who will not only get the joke, but might actually consider getting the shirt:

This might not be Hello Kitty. It might be Goodbye Kitty. We cannot possibly know without observing, and then we change the outcome.

Heisenberg may or may not have been available for comment.

(Via Finestkind Clinic and fish market.)

There pretty much has to be Hello Kitty swimwear, right?

I suspect not all of it is quite this abbreviated, though:

Our model here is actress Hayden Panettiere, who is almost (seven weeks to go) twenty-one, and we won’t discuss those faint traces of orange peel. This is her second appearance here, though the first time we were just showing you her shoes.

“Agip” is a real Italian oil company. And yes, that’s a six-legged dog on the logo.

(From — where else? — Hello Kitty Hell, via Boinky.)

In a world where you can actually have a Web site called Cute Overload, there may no longer be a place for a single mass-produced exemplar of cuteness. Which, if you’re Sanrio, is a major problem:

At age 36, Hello Kitty may be running out of product lives.

That is the fear of executives at the Sanrio Corporation, the Japanese company that created the cute, cartoonish white cat in 1974, and groomed her into a global marketing phenomenon worth $5 billion a year.

The numbers don’t look good:

In a closely watched ranking of Japan’s most popular characters, compiled each year using sales data by the Tokyo-based research firm Character Databank, Hello Kitty lost her long-held spot as Japan’s top-grossing character in 2002 and has never recovered.

In the latest survey, released this month, Kitty ranked a distant third, behind the leader, Anpanman, a character that is based on a Japanese jam-filled pastry and is produced by Nippon Television. The second spot is still held by the venerable game and animation brand Pokémon, owned by Nintendo.

Incidentally, we should not mock the Japanese for Anpanman, unless we’re willing to take the responsibility for the Hamburglar.

Besides, Japanese characters can be derived from just about anything. I spent part of last night reading up on a series called Durarara!!, among whose characters is a transplanted Dullahan, the Irish equivalent of the Headless Horseman. Except that it’s a she — and she rides a motorcycle. (Yes, she wears a helmet. No, I don’t know how it stays on.) I don’t think Celty Sturluson, or even Pokémon, can possibly replace Hello Kitty on eleventy-six bazillion different consumer products, but the recession notwithstanding, buying inexplicable stuff is an irreducible part of the human experience for any level above bare subsistence.

Is this one of those times?

(Seen at Picture Is Unrelated.)

It’s the Hello Kitty ice pack:

Also noteworthy as a rare shoeless appearance by the Shoe Girl.