(It’s funny because Alice looked just like Barbie when she decided on her career six months earlier.)

Last week, we gave you the first in our new column, New Sports, in which pissing off Gary Coleman got extreme and fun, and therefore competitive. In this second edition, we move on to a sport that ruins the lives of people who have a right to be short.

Mousetrap: Hopes and Dreams Edition - With each incarnation, Barbie dolls serve to demonstrate to young women just what avenues the feminist movement has opened up for them. Over the decades, Barbie has adopted all kinds of careers and pastimes that were previously considered solely within the realm of men. Don’t want to stay home and cook just to make that sonofabitch happy? Try being a doctor, or go water-skiing, why not? But Barbie’s 126th career is taking to exxxtreme sport levels the trend of glamorizing what women can do to make their daily lives as horrifically mundane as the 9-5 gentleman. I give you: Computer Engineer Barbie.

Computer engineer Barbie, which will be released in winter 2010, sports a geek chic binary code patterned tee (We’d so wear that!) and she comes equipped with everything a modern day geek girl would use. That includes a smartphone, Bluetooth headset, laptop travel bag, and last but not least – a pink laptop. No word on whether it’s a Mac or PC though.

Be honest, would you so wear it ironically, or because you just can’t get enough of the myriad ways ones and zeros can be arranged? This has to be a sport the employees of Mattel are professional level at by now. “Let’s see what we can make girls believe they can maintain their blond hair and pink clothes in perfect shape through.” You’ve got your veterinarian Barbie, who manages to keep a crisp doctor’s jacket and miniskirt pristine while hosing down dirty, hairy dogs with shit-matted fur and fleas, all in preparation to give the thing an intrusive operation that is costing its owner enough to feed Ethiopia for a week. Does she use a pink syringe to put down the hopeless and unloved mongrels, or is that reserved for the cupcake enema bag? Or convincing girls that after the first year of ankle swelling, tumor breeding agony, elementary school teachers continue to pick out matching ABC jumpers and cute horn rimmed glasses, and don’t just thank fucking christ that they can show a VHS and work through the Thursday morning hangover. And does Desert Storm Barbie (I shit you not) come with a pimped out wheel chair, or a pink happy-pill container to hold the prescriptions that Therapist Tiffany (sold seperately) gave her?

Fuck no, because coming up with ways to set up epic adult disillusionment from childhood like some hellish game of Mousetrap from the seventh layer of Drury Lane is just hysterical to them now. If the makers of these dolls had ever left their pink tower filled with carb-free muffin tops and unicorns, and actually met a software engineer, they would know that it pays the bills, but at the cost of any semblance of a social life and, in some cases, sanity. Does Computer Engineer Barbie leave the pink convertible behind for a rusting, tan ’87 Escort? Or Ken for some hapless Dilbert clone with acne and premature ejaculation because real men like Ken and G.I. Joe like girls whose calves justify the wearing of mini skirts? Do you make the Dead-End Alcoholic Barbie or the subsequent Christian Scientist Psycho (complete with rotting teeth and an outfit for AA)?

The real moment of victory for Mattel employees – their touchdown with a two-point conversion with 20 seconds on the clock – has to be when the girls finish college and, assuming they haven’t adopted the persona of Unshowered Hippie Barbie or Militant Dyke Barbara, they walk into their first place of work decked out in pink down to the scrunchie and panties, and everybody immediately hates them. And they can’t understand it when nobody is impressed that her bedazzled smart phone can find a nail salon in under 10 seconds, or that her binary shirt is both functional and fashionable, and they just want to sit in the bathroom stall and sob and eat Twinkies.  I bet the very sight of a paunch and a receding hairline on a 30 year old woman gives them so much wood they go home and put the beavers in the creek out back out of business.

In the first round ever (debatable) of the new professional sport of playing Mouse Trap with millions of little girls’ futures, I award the sadistic employees of Mattel a win over their tiny consumers, who should start fitting themselves for orthopedic loafers and posture correcting braces now before there’s too much demand. I give the sport as a whole four stars for entertainment, because disillusionment is all I have left for visual pornography. I’ll give it a 5 when Mattel stops trying to be subtle about it and makes Piss Standing Up Barbie (Dream House Set comes with a pink urinal) and No More Periods Barbie (hey, Ken’s back!) so that in 13 odd years we can see a whole female generation of hopes and dreams fall like Goofy off a cliff.