This just has to stop!!!

It's Hannah Again. Should We Take This?

"Hey! It's Hannah Montana!"

It is!? Seriou --

"It's time to WAKE UP!"

But I already am --

"Hey, I know it's early, but you have an awesome day ahead of you!"

Right. When's the last time you were a sixth-grader with braces in public school?

"So put on your favorite outfit, eat a healthy breakfast, and GET A MOVE ON!"

And then, she of the rabid tween fandom and questionable Vanity Fair spread hangs up the phone, leaving behind only the faint echo of exclamation points and a reminder in the in-box to shop Wal-Mart.

* * *

Just when it seemed Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus's alter ego) had reached the saturation point in your child's life, a revelation: The teen singer's voice can be the throaty alarm clock that rouses your offspring, via telephone, in the morning.

This is thanks to a back-to-school partnership with Wal-Mart and a sparkly purple Web site, http://www.hannahmontanacalls.com. It will remain live until Sept. 15, by which point parents will have given Wal-Mart all of the back-to-school money they can possibly give.

The site is a drop-down menu of outsourced parenting at its Disneyest: Moms and dads (and 20-something hipsters, who will doubtlessly seize on the ironic potential in scheduling a call from HaMo) can choose either a wake-up call or an activity reminder for one of 24 squeaky-clean extracurriculars.

Parents provide their own contact information -- as well as a phone number for their kids, which seems to go against the whole "Children, don't give out your personal info to strangers" dictum. But maybe this is less of an issue when the stranger is a disembodied Hannah Montana? Or when the choices are (a) Give your kid's phone number to a stranger or (b) Fight the "Oh yes, you are going to your violin lesson" battle without the help of a teen superstar.

Data-mined-to-death parents, we read your mind and already asked: The world's largest retailer says that all personal information "will be used exclusively for the purposes of scheduling your child's wake-up call." Oh, and there's that confirmation e-mail containing promotional shopping links.

About 28,600 parents so far -- 2,548 in one recent 24-hour span, said a publicist for the promotion -- have decided that potential loss of privacy was a worthy trade-off.

But alas, on our first trial run, Her Royal Montananess totally flaked out -- she was supposed to remind the call recipient to go to play practice, but instead gave the standard wake-up call.

Choose your own wry observation:

(1) What else can you expect from a 15-year-old virtual babysitter? Bet she lets the kids drink Red Bull before bed, too.

(2) Faux intimacy aside, guess we're not as tight with HaMo as we thought.

:-(