They have four hundred dollar snowboards, you know. It would probably be more than three thousand sanrio dollars. Between the watches, backpacks and Hello Kitty ice cream makers marked down to thirty-five dollars, it would probably be cheaper to make your own Sanrio merchandise.

Sooth, get your bad self a Hello Kitty rubber stamp and create your own Hello Kitty stationery, bedsheets or Sport Utility Vehicle! Make a Hello Kitty crop circle! Because Hello Kitty, Mimi and Coro-chan are tight with the alien homies.

But if you purchase official Sanrio items from official Sanrio vendors, you may wind up with a little extra trinket affixed to your bag. I have a couple of these trinkets, to wit:

A tiny Hello Kitty sailboard.	Here is an obscure-around-here character: a tanuki (or possibly another masked animal like raccoon or ferret?) in a basket.	Chubby plastic pencils! Pull the tops off and inside one is a little pencil, inside the other an eraser.
Here is a Minna no Tabo megaphone and a Monkichi pillbox. The megaphone has a sticker depicting the Minna no Tabo kid yelling "ya-ho" at a doglike Minna no Tabo animal. It was never very clear to me what the idea of MnT was. Maybe they were a troupe of vagabond performers. Mountebanks. Carnies.		The Minna no Tabo fortune-telling top! This is the coolest. Say it lands with the bunny side up; it is written (in kana) "maamaa" expressing so-so or maybe-ness. The pig side says "mou ikkai" or one more time. And so forth. It has proven even more accurate than a Magic 8-Ball.

Doesn't this remind you of those medieval religious images with symbols of the four apostles in the corners? It does me, but maybe I am just extraordinarily saintly.

To review: the lion/eagle-scorpion-fish/person/bull quartet that pop up all over the place are supposed by some to correspond to the Big 4 evangelists of christendom. So, is Hello Kitty the apostle of a coming new age? Is that what the Sanrio Corp has in mind, that we follow Keroppi in search of the perfect pond? And what are we to make of the (ahem) pre-christian connections?

Muy misterioso, don't you think? I never would have guessed that Pekkle the Duck would rank that high.

And if Hello Kitty is a mere apostle, then who is the Head Honcho? Who is the High Muckymuck?

Bad Batz Maru?

That would not bode well for the sanctity of the enterprise. Let's see what the cards say about the future of the Corp, shall we?

It reads like a Bill Burroughs novel, doesn't it? From scruffy roots, they claw their way up the merchandising ladder. Always terrified of missteps and of running out of ideas, they buy the Sony IP library. They are huge. They become a think tank, a lightning storm of conceptual innovation. Media Lab meets Xerox PARC meets Disney on steroids.

Too big to be owned by a mere country, Sanrio becomes the mercenary imageering combine that creates the official political reality for government clients.

What a letdown! I should at least get a holographic polymath research assistant out of the deal. Oh well. What's the time frame on this, anyway?

More? There is always the original Sanrio page of great antiquity.

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All trademarks are the property of their owners, which should not be such a surprise. Hello Tarot is not a product of Sanrio. Sanrio dollars are not available in the present day and will only be available in the future to Sanrio citizen-employees. Images may not be copied telepathically without the express consent of their trademark holders.