the Scott Stein

We visited the Six Flags drive-through safari yesterday. Despite signs prohibiting it, people had their windows open and were holding out bread and pretzels for camels and giraffes. One giraffe had his entire head inside a car, eating from someone's hand. People were patting their heads and legs as you would with a large dog. This obviously happens every day at the safari, and the animals still seem to be alive, so maybe it isn't a big deal. It's such a widespread practice, the employees must be aware of it. And no one was stopping the people from doing it. People did follow the rules when their own safety was at issue. No one tried to feed the ostriches, who pecked at car windows, and no one--not even the enthusiastic giraffe-patters--was foolish enough to use food to lure animals to the car window in "Bear Country." The black bears roamed free, but the brown grizzlies were kept behind low wire fences.

One of the presents my son got at his birthday party today was Imaginext's T-Rex Mountain (by Fisher Price). The toy features sound effects, lights, moving parts, dinosaurs, and cave men carrying clubs. It has everything a four-year-old could want, prehistorical inaccuracy aside.

When I was in advertising, I wrote copy for toy packaging (dog toys, too), so I know how full of shit the descriptions on these things can be. It's my guess that the copy on T-Rex Mountain's box is not ideologically driven. Most likely, someone in the marketing department believes that some parent out there might have additional motivation to buy the toy because the box says the following (complete and unedited):

Imagine...a primitive civilization of humans and dinosaurs, living in a lush, green land. One side--the predators--is using up its natural resources, wiping out everything and everyone that gets in their way. The other side--the ecovores--wants to preserve their land. And they're willing to fight to make that happen. The battle begins at T-Rex Mountain: Will the predators succeed in destroying the land, causing their own extinction? Or will the ecovores stop the destruction and make the land a place where dinosaurs and humans can live together peacefully for all time? In the world of Imaginext, anything is possible!

Ecovores? For pure nonsense, it's hard to think of its equal. Not that there's any point in deconstructing the babble on the side of a toy box. The toy itself has no message and gives no indication of eco-anything, so the eco-copy must have been added later, after the toy was developed. The packaging will be in the trash tomorrow and my son will not encounter any incoherent socially conscious messages on the box, as it should be. Because for four-year-olds, an epic battle between dinosaurs and cave men is meaning enough.

On a related note, see Nick Gillespie's "Suffer the Little Children: The grim 'fun' of highly partisan kid lit"

Because people need to waste even more time on the Internet when they're at work, here's a fun hand-eye coordination test. I don't know whether it's accurate that a score of 18 is "phenomenal" or that US Air Force pilots are expected to go for at least two minutes. It reminds me of the old arcade game Berserk. Except in Berserk the moving obstacles were shooting at you. And you could shoot back. Apparently, my generation and younger have been training to be Air Force pilots all along. After about eight tries I got to 37.274 seconds. I could go longer if I succumbed to the addictive nature of this thing (why not throw around addictive inappropriately?). I don't know if I would come close to two minutes with some practice, since it speeds up as you go. I don't play video games at all anymore, though through college I played plenty. I'm sure some of you and many of my students who play all the time and are combat-ready will crush my score. Thanks to Kevin for the link.