Word: toying
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...glass, and an authentic Darth Vader Halloween costume (in fact, the one glaring gap in my collection was the Imperial Walker from the Hoth segment of Empire Strikes Back--but I seem to have recovered). My relatives put themselves through unspeakable torments trying to locate the newest Star Wars toy or trinket, as they are wont to remind me, and my oldest friends still harangue me for having stubbornly insisted that I had to play the "cool characters" in our games. My best friend Adam and I have known each other since those times, so it is entirely understandable that...
Maybe I was a little too fast to jump on the "trash the Coop" bandwagon. I, who once so proudly declared my nonmembership in the Coop, now toy with the idea of joining. Mo Shepard over at Book Tech proclaimed that books are "Five percent of total education cost, and 80 percent of total education." How many classes do I take because of the syllabus, in spite of the professor's droning tone.... I believe. Maybe books are expensive, maybe they could shave off a few dollars here and there, but in the face of copyright lawsuits and the Harvard...
...Board, was talking about his car--a two-seater red Mazda Miata convertible. "It's totally impractical as a car," he said, his eyes twinkling as if he'd rather be out dragracing along the Charles than cooped up dealing with administrative work. "But as a toy, I love...
...child's brain suffers. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, for example, have found that children who don't play much or are rarely touched develop brains 20% to 30% smaller than normal for their age. Laboratory animals provide another provocative parallel. Not only do young rats reared in toy-strewn cages exhibit more complex behavior than rats confined to sterile, uninteresting boxes, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found, but the brains of these rats contain as many as 25% more synapses per neuron. Rich experiences, in other words, really do produce rich brains...
...must admit that America is no worse off for the Tickle Me Elmo dolls; they are just this year's leading symbol of the unabashed capitalism that plagues every American December. One company is surely much richer for producing the toy that turned parents into larger, more insistent versions of the whining children for whom they were buying the dolls. I can even dismiss my curmudgeonly opinion that dolls shouldn't talk, giggle or move on their own--that human imagination should be more important than technical ingenuity--in the face of the techno-addicted, video-game-actuated children that...