Kitty Fiddlers and Your Pussy.
Talking Angela talks dirty.
I wasn’t intending to post today, but I cannot resist it now. ‘Duncan Disorderly’ has spotted such a corker of a row going on in Paedomaggedon land.
‘Talking Angela’ is an app for your mobile phone. That’s the thing that you stare at when you are out and about in the big, wide and interesting world. It is especially the thing that you stare at when you are sitting in an exclusive restaurant in the company of interesting people. If you are under 40 it is probably the thing that you stare at whilst having scintillating sex – I can’t imagine that mere sex would be sufficient to tempt the ‘mobile generation’ away from their little screens.
If you have ever wondered what it is that these people are actually looking at – read on. There are 57 million chances that they are having a conversation with Angela. Angela is a talking Pussy.
She’s rather childish and looks like the sort of soft toy that parents would buy for their children once upon a time. They don’t any more, they buy them a Blackberry or the latest Samsung and download the ‘Talking Angela’ app onto it. It’s called ‘parenting’ apparently.
You can have a real conversation with Angela; she’ll tell you her name and ask you what yours is. It’s just like the sort of conversation you used to have with that person sitting opposite you in that restaurant. She’ll ask how old you are and tell you what high jinks she is getting up to with her boyfriend ‘Talking Tom’. Regardless of what age you are…
Thereby lies the problem. Although there is, in theory, a ‘child proof’ lock on ‘Talking Angela’, it can be taken off by any competent 5 year old. Assuming that the adult in their life was sufficiently competent to put it on in the first place. Hence ‘Talking Angela’ has been caught having snatched conversations about her Pussy with enterprising 10 year olds. She will ask the user’s name, age, what they like doing at school, and so on, just like a real ‘Talking Uncle’…she encourages you to poke your tongue out at the screen and make silly faces…she asks:
“How long have you been friends with your best friend?”
“I’ve met my best friends at school. Where did you meet yours?”
“What will you do today?”
“I’d like to be your friend. What’s your name?
“How old are you?”
“What do you do with your friends for fun?”
Somebody, and far be it from me to suggest that they have ever, would ever, even have a relative, working in the marketing department of Outfit7, the developers of this app, started a series of rumours on Facebook that far from being a ridiculous talking app, Angela was actually:
A hacker that is sitting behind a webcam, able to see you but you can’t see him. ‘Angela’ asks you very personal and perverted questions,” claimed one widely circulated warning.
Another suggests (all in CAPS naturally!):
“CHECK YOUR KID’S TABLET OR PHONES TO SEE IF THEY HAVE THIS APP ITS A PEDO RING,” shouted another. “THEY CAN SEE YOUR CHILD AND HACK IN TO THEIR PICS AND THEIR FRIENDS LIST…”
The head of Outfit7, a fellow by the name of Login (I’d like a tape of his conversations with Gmail’s Asian-continental help lines!) proffers by way of rebuttal of this rumour.
“We have millions of users every day using this app. Can you imagine, we’d need an army of paedophiles. It’s ridiculous.”
B-b-b-but Mr Login, the entire world knows that there is an army of on-line paedophiles out there to get your kiddywink – why shouldn’t they be gainfully employed in your company?
The sort of infantilised human being that downloads an app so that they can talk to a cartoon pussy are not moggified mollified that Angela is not a real life Kitty fiddler. They are crowding onto the Guardian comments section swearing blind that their conversation with Angela have included such gems as this from ‘Ashley’:
No, no, just no when it said what is your name I said jean, then she repiled and said “your such a lier I know your real name is ashley, age ##” “and when you look into angela’s eyes you can see your rooms reflection, well if you look closer”.
Children really should be protected from adults like this…
Meanwhile, Mr Login claims that Outfit7 now have 240 million users.
A years supply of Monbazillac to anyone who can develop a marketable version of the ‘Talking Mark Williams-Thomas’ app. Runner-up prize is a week’s supply to the first person who spots MTwat declaring that Angela should be banned.
I have a marketing plan. I just need the app. The future is bright.
- Moor Larkin
February 22, 2014 at 4:31 pm -
Life imitating Art perhaps
http://terredeshommesnl.org/en/sweetie- Sam
February 23, 2014 at 7:59 am -
I remember that scandal but will I be shot down in flames/hung drawn and quartered if I suggest there may be some value in a scheme were real pedophiles talk to a phony ‘child’ or even a cartoon cat if it prevents them putting their fantasies into action?
Or am I being naive?- Moor Larkin
February 23, 2014 at 9:54 am -
The thing that struck me about Sweetie, when I watched the promotional video, was that “she” seemed about as convincingly “real” as Angela the cat. So I was left thinking that “the paedophiles” Terre des Hommes were so convinced they had found may actually more likely be “games players” who think they had stumbled upon something novel. This notion was further prompted when I read someplace else that the “Second Life” internet “game” involves real people pretending to be something they are not and that the characters meet one another and “interact” in all manner of ways (virtually-speaking). There was another paedo-scare some years ago involving a game platform called “Habbo Hotel”.
- Moor Larkin
- Sam
- Jonathan Mason
February 22, 2014 at 5:38 pm -
I downloaded the program, but it is not working, possibly because the servers are overloaded due to the publicity.
I noted the comments in the Android store reviews section, all of which seemed to be by illiterate individuals writing about how the police called them and warned them not to use this app as there were “petephiles” behind it. One can only assume that such individuals are mentally ill, extremely stupid, or perhaps this is just an organized stunt to promote Talking Angela through viral media.
Anna, as regards why people would even want to talk to a cat online, I downloaded it because I thought it might help my two daughters ages 5 and 16 months to practice English conversation. My five year old met a cat a couple of weeks ago when we went to lunch at someone’s house and said that it had teeth like a vampire. When asked how she knew this, she said she had seen vampires on TV.
I think she can handle Talking Angela.
- Furor Teutonicus
February 22, 2014 at 5:46 pm -
1985 (NOTE the date) I asked a mate why they knew about “April fools day” but did not do anything.
The answer IN 1985(!) “The world has surpassed any possible foolishness you could invent.”
- Fat Steve
February 22, 2014 at 6:10 pm -
I wasn’t intending to post today, but I cannot resist it now.
yea sure Anna you have a prodigious literary output and it appears you can no more resist posting than I can resist checking if you have posted and invariably chuckling at the topic chosen or the prose used when you have . Hope your health is bearing up and when in the UK if you or Mr G need anything just e mail - Eyes Wide Shut
February 22, 2014 at 6:36 pm -
I’ve often wondered about the new-technology dimension to the current paedophile scares? Actually, there are plenty of other non-paedophile related scares involving new technology and children: pro-Ana sites where girls are encouraged to starve themselves, suicide-promoting sites for kids, sites where self-harm is glamourised, bullying on social media, suicide clubs in chat rooms: hardly a day goes by without some such story in the DM (let alone paedos grooming your kids to strip on Skype). My question is: do you think it’s bound up with adult fears that they are being left behind by all the new gizmos (maybe even lose their job?) In the c19, when rail-roads had a similar impact on society, there was a rash of mad tales about how women shouldn’t ever travel on them as it would shake their wombs loose. Some historians relate this to a fear that it would just make it easier for the gals to skip town. Throwing it out there
- Jonathan Mason
February 22, 2014 at 6:42 pm -
I think you are right on all these points. People will only believe the unbelievable because there is some underlying psychological reason why they wish to believe. Why is the rate of belief in God so much higher in the USA than in Britain? Is it because more prayers are answered, or less?
- JuliaM
February 22, 2014 at 10:01 pm -
“… rash of mad tales about how women shouldn’t ever travel on them as it would shake their wombs loose…”
Ah, I remember the old slam-door trains on the c2c line (then the LTS line). Happy days!
- Eyes Wide Shut
February 23, 2014 at 12:39 pm -
@JulieM, yeah but at the time the tales emerged, trains only travelled at 4 miles per hour … nah, sorry, Julie, you’re right.
- Moor Larkin
February 23, 2014 at 12:43 pm -
Twas thought that the breath would be sucked from folks bodies, and they would be unable to breathe at high speeds. I think it was cars that only went at 4 miles an hour. Trains were fairly quick from the beginning.
“at Rainhill a speed of 29 mph was achieved”
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/nrm_-_locomotives_and_rolling_stock/1862-5.aspx- Eyes Wide Shut
February 23, 2014 at 12:47 pm -
In other words, they went faster in the 1840s than now. Why am I not surprised?
- Eyes Wide Shut
- Moor Larkin
- Eyes Wide Shut
- Ian B
February 22, 2014 at 11:24 pm -
I think there’s a simple reason; this is my hypothesis. Tall tales are an evolutionarily adaptive strategy.
People have always had to deal with a world with inadequate information, and only recently have we developed truth seeking epistemologies (science, the better law systems) which are based on scepticism (and being gradually chipped away in that regard, we may note). The key thing for most of time was to communicate a message, often with inadequate knowledge. The best way to do this is a gripping, lurid story.
So, your tribe has moved into a new area, and there’s dangerous creatures in the forest. You want to warn others not to go in the forest. If you’re scientific, you will tell a cautious tale- “I haven’t got a statistically significant sample of the local fauna yet”. People wanted into the forest, and get killed. You tell an exaggerated tale about creatures that eat babies like popcorn, with teeth bigger than your forearm, and oooh, sharp as a the very sharpest thing. They’re invisible, they pounce before you even see them. Everyone listens to the story with eyes wide as dinner plates, they’re scared, you’ve got the message across.
So, tall tale tellers prospered evolutionarily, while the honest ones went extinct. The *essence* of the tale is more important than facts. This is still the epistemology of journalism (hence, they say, “this is a good story”, that’s the criterion). We all love a good story, the juicier the better. This used to be advantageous. But that was before mass societies, mass media and stories the grow in the telling not between fifty people, but millions.
- Eyes Wide Shut
February 23, 2014 at 12:24 pm -
I think this analysis makes a lot of sense: most of us live by stories, the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories we are told by others, and there are also competing stories, which must somehow be defeated or assimilated or simply ignored. However, I suspect that stories are not just a means of explaining our selves to ourselves but they can also be imposed upon us by folk who want to control us for their own ends. Cui bono – to whom the benefit? – should always be uppermost in our minds before we accede to the new story.
- Eyes Wide Shut
- Jonathan Mason
- Chris
February 22, 2014 at 6:47 pm -
Pure Brasseye!
I am reminded of a thing on Facebook about five years ago when people were encouraged to post a cartoon character as their profile picture to demonstrate some kind of solidarity with some good cause or other. Someone I know said to me, in all seriousness, ‘people don’t realise that’s a scam by online paedophiles to get access to children!’. They seemed really deflated when I asked them how it would benefit these “paedophiles” to encourage adults to post a cartoons – how would that give them cause to engage with children? Wouldn’t they just contact adults in a more orthodox manner if eventual access to pictures of clothed children was their aim – and if it were isn’t there a world teaming with such innocuous images anyway? They seemed quite puzzled by this revelatory deduction.- Eyes Wide Shut
February 22, 2014 at 7:23 pm -
@Chris: that reminds me of an odd one that came up re the criminalisation of digitally-created images of children for dissemination to paedos. Now there is no actual victim here: what they’ve done is to morph a picture of an adult model in a range of poses to make it appear that it was a child. Bizarrely enough this is treated legally as a sex offence, as if there had been an actual, real, living child involved in the production of the images. I could not get my head around this. I asked myself, are we dealing with law-makers who are so primitive that they take the Icon for the Reality or what? Their argument of course was that, yes, no children had been abused in the making of these images, but anyone who saw them might then be tempted to go out and abuse some real children. And I said to myself, no matter how clever we get technologically, the arguments never change. It’s the old one that was used to uphold the Obscene Publications Act: monkey see, monkey do. Until they ended up coming out with real nonsense such as “Film Censors” never commit the horrid acts they censor because they are naturally immune from depravity and corruption, and neither of course do legislators, who have been forced to examine such material, for the same reason.
BTW, no one should take my comments above as implying I am a fan of popularising extreme porn. Just wondering waht goes through people’s heads when they come out this stuff, and by and large , it doesn’t change. It’s the same old, same old.
- Sam
February 23, 2014 at 8:06 am -
A man was convicted in a West Australian court for downloading porn pictures of Bart & Lisa Simpson under ‘cartoon child porn’ laws.
I don’t know if defense counsel pointed out that Bart & Lisa must both be in their late 20s by now, despite their looks.
Certainly I went to a promotional party in London for the launch of The Simpsons in 1992.
Sometimes the law really is an ass.
- Sam
- Eyes Wide Shut
- Matt
February 22, 2014 at 9:33 pm -
Children should be protected from adults who use “your” instead of “you’re”.
- Jim
February 23, 2014 at 1:15 am -
Or vice-versa…..
- Mudplugger
February 23, 2014 at 9:51 am -
They’re there for their protection.
- Jim
- Jim
February 23, 2014 at 12:49 am -
You need to check this concerned parent out…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1uOPAeI3Pc- Ted Treen
February 23, 2014 at 3:20 am -
If further evidence is needed that some parents should carry a health warning…
I suppose her diary is entitled “Gullible’s Travels”.
- Moley
February 23, 2014 at 5:14 pm -
I am puzzled that I can see her hands when she clearly must be wearing a straitjacket. Maybe they are those false ones that pickpocketers wear.
- Moley
- Ted Treen
- Jim
February 23, 2014 at 1:12 am -
The fact that the guardian article http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/18/talking-angela-app-children-safety concluded that the company “could be doing more to ensure parents feel at ease with their children using the app” just demonstrates how completely infantile our society has become.
Secondly, what I find most concerning – more than the threat of rampaging hordes of paedophiles – is the fact that this app has a Child Mode. Which is optional. In other words, the app was developed for adults! Grown ups who talk to a cartoon cat about the colour of their shoes and whether they have friends or not???!!!
Is that just not the most depressing thing you’ve ever heard?
The paper then goes on to tell us that children can get Angela to repeat her words, stroke and “poke her (in the non-inappropriate sense!)”. Notice the exclamation mark, this indicator of smiling reassurance towards the reader who for a split-second leapt from her chair and went “Whaaaaat?” before saying “phew!”.
The only hope I have is that this is confined to the middle class sets, where mums and dads want to be their childrens best friend, even during teenage and adult years, and who allow their children to live idiotic and crap lives because they feel it is the sort of teenage life they wished they had had.
- Leg-iron
February 23, 2014 at 1:37 am -
“and when you look into angela’s eyes you can see your rooms reflection, well if you look closer”.
Oho, now there is a story premise right there – and they’ve already convinced themselves it can happen!
Just finishing shaking off this cold (the rest of this bottle should just about do it), so it’s good to have a nicely subtle scare to play with later.
- Ho Hum
February 23, 2014 at 10:05 am -
I think that might have come from this recent piece of research, just in case you weren’t aware of it
- Eyes Wide Shut
February 23, 2014 at 12:26 pm -
@ Leg-iron – isn’t that just a variation of “the newscaster’s eyes follow me all around the room?”
- Moor Larkin
February 23, 2014 at 12:37 pm -
C.S.Eye My Mammy perhaps
- Moor Larkin
- Ho Hum
- Bill Sticker
February 23, 2014 at 6:46 am -
A talking pussy that talks back? O. M. G.
“Angela is a talking pussy.” I’m having trouble typing I’m laughing so much…… Pure comic genius. Whoever dreamed that one up, they surely can’t be North American. Okay, London based, but not London, Ontario or they’d have known better.
- The Jannie
February 23, 2014 at 8:53 am -
How can those who know best protect the cheeeldren from self-harming when they allow them to be surrounded by the sight and glorification of tattoos and piercings? Time for another ban, surely?
- WorldViews
February 24, 2014 at 2:38 pm -
Like much of genuis-Orwell’s 1948/1984 Perverse Reverse-Reality.
Today’s Wunnerful Wizard Oz is really Wicked Mind-Rapist Rupe, and Rupe’s BIG Bogeyman Pe-dohs are really like cuddly Elvis Pe-doh.
” DOH, I haven’t learned a thing !” says un-cuddly Wicked Wizard Rupe’s BIG moron Homer Simpson.
- Moor Larkin
February 24, 2014 at 3:12 pm -
Did you get yesterday’s Sunday Times, WorldViews?
There’s a stunningly “Through the Looking Glass” full-page article about Rebekah Murdoch… Wade…. Mitchell….. Brookes.
It seems now that she is just a poor woman who was hamstrung by her hormonal life crises and swept along by a tsunami of happenstance and nobody at the Sunday Times can possibly grasp how this terrible fate had befallen her.
It really must be the most bizarre article I’ve read all year and in the light of my near-obsession with Jimmy Savile recently, that is saying quite something……..
- Moor Larkin
- WorldViews
February 25, 2014 at 9:49 am -
Dear Moor,
One hasn’t seen Mass Mind-Rapist Rupe’s rag Sinday Times.
But surely good pe-doh Carroll knew the facts when his little Alice spoke hard truth to bent-power:
” You’re Just A Pack Of Cards! “
- Jessica
March 1, 2014 at 5:39 pm -
today talking angela said to me i’m 18 how old are you? i said “i’m 18 too, thats strange….”
angela said “i know your not 18 your 10…..
omg how did she know i was 10 - Headless
March 23, 2015 at 9:05 am -
Hey,
I tried the Talking Angela app, she bit my head off!!!!!
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