Honestly, thumb people…

If you’ve spent much time with little kids – especially little kids who start to cry or get cranky – there’s probably been a time when you’ve had to resort to singing weird songs to distract them. And maybe you’ve even put on strange voices and pretended that your thumbs/a toy/a piece of apple/a shoe is magically able to talk. In the hope that the talking is enough of a funny surprise to stop the crying. Or perhaps you remember that childhood game where your thumb battles another thumb, with the gauntlet being thrown down: 1,2,3,4 – I declare a thumb war. And then it’s on – sort of like an arm wrestle for thumbs. Of course, if none of this sounds at all familiar, you can just ignore this opening paragraph and you might still like this product that I saw on the Matomeno website, which never disappoints…

The post was called My thumb is my friend! which sounded wacky enough for me. And now that I’ve seen this product range, I think it’s something that we could all use at home, in the classroom, or in the office. In fact, I could have made this another EverydaySparks CEO post, as these little beauties will be mandatory for performance review discussions and will most certainly help at salary review time. Basically, there are five stampers (so, technically, I guess you could use them on your thumb and fingers if you wanted to create a whole gang), which you ink up and use to bring your digits to life.

Whatevs, I hear you say. That’s not so exciting. Well, of course that’s not where it ends – the good folk at Mikke Remikke have taken it to another level with costumes to accompany each of the faces. That’s right, you can choose from five characters: Timmy, Michael, Cathy, Bob or Andrew. Uh huh. Each comes with its own costume and hair-do. And accent and personality, presumably – but that part is up to you. I’d keep an eye on that Timmy – not sure if it’s the pink ‘fro or those overalls, but I think he’s an accident waiting to happen. Oh, and look out for Andrew – anyone wearing a personalised sweatband as a jumper is probably not a-ok.

Perhaps you know someone who finds it difficult to communicate in conventional ways, or someone who’d like an instant gang of new friends. Or maybe you’d just like someone else to blame for dumb things that you might say or do. Whatever the reason, you can find out more via the Matameno site here or you can buy them (and read a bizarre translation of the product and its purpose) at the Rakuten Global Market here.