Word: ancients
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...East Village is a New York City neighborhood with a complicated vibe. It's a place where restaurant equipment wholesalers and ancient brick walk-ups rub shoulders with spanking new condo towers and hip hotels with signature martinis. Almost everywhere there are also traces of the hippie-Boho culture that settled in before the 1960s and does what it can to keep its flag flying. And for nearly 150 years one of the neighborhood's anchors has been the sturdy main building of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a college where presidents from Abraham Lincoln...
...best toys transcend, their survival a testament to their purpose and power. The Babylonians played board games; the ancient Greeks had yo-yos. The Chinese were flying kites 3,000 years ago. Crayola crayons were first produced in 1903. In 1916, Frank Lloyd Wright's son John, inspired by the way his father had built an earthquake-resistant hotel in Tokyo, invented Lincoln Logs. And many great toys are accidents or improvisations, a serenade by kids whose first drum set is a wooden spoon and a tin pot. Play-Doh was invented as a wallpaper cleaner. In 1943 a Navy...
...worst toys are the opposite: overdesigned, overengineered, the product of so much imagination on the part of the toymaker that they require none from the child. The ancient Egyptians played with dolls, but today's dolls are practically self-sufficient: they talk, walk, dine, dance, do long division. Why bother setting up the play schoolroom when they already know more than we do? Among the Huffington Post's "15 Toys Not to Buy" this holiday season is Baby Glutton, a doll made in Spain that makes sucking sounds and comes with a halter top for little girls - with flowers...
...long as you can still hear and see, you'll never run out of stories. I ran into an ancient cousin of mine a week ago, and she told me something I'd never heard before. My grandfather Keillor died before I was born, and she told me that every night, he lifted my grandmother into his arms--he's a farmer, a big woodworking guy--and carried her upstairs into bed. He had a big mustache and beautiful singing voice. From that, you could come up with a whole year's worth of stories almost...
Christmas carols today carry cozy connotations of ancient traditions as old as King Wenceslas, but Christmas caroling as we know it dates back to the 19th Century and not much further. In fact, caroling itself didn't always involve Christmas, and the ancient tradition of traveling from house to house to wish neighbors good cheer didn't always involve singing. There's a distinction to be made between carols - songs stemming from medieval musical traditions - and today's Christmas caroling, says Daniel Abraham, musicology expert and choral director at American University in Washington, D.C. "The concept of carol...