Category: toys

berry me deep

jamberry.jpgOur blueberry-picking excursion of the weekend has me thinking about berries. Mmmmmm, berries.

I love berries. And so do lots of other people. Berries show up in muffins, pies and other baked goods. Also in lots of books and folktales, and few songs. Plus a few other places you wouldn’t expect to find berries. Which is how berries ended up in my list of themed things.

  • Jamberry, by Bruce Degen
    A book of a bear, a boy, and many, many berries. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries. And silly rhymes.

    Quickberry, quackberry
    Pick me a blackberrry

  • Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey
    A picturebook of berry-picking and bears, and mistaken identity.
  • Blueberry. The name of my stuffed bear I got from my mother for my fourth birthday. I still have him.
  • Violet, the gum-chewer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the book by Roald Dahl, and the movies based on it) turns into a giant blueberry.

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  • Firefly & Buffy. Maybe Joss Whedon has a thing for strawberries. In Firefly, strawberries are a luxury item and valued commodity. A box of strawberries is what Book uses to convince Kaylee to take him on as a passenger in the pilot episode. In the Buffy Season 6 episode “Wrecked,” the creepy Rack tells Willow “you taste like strawberries.” (I also feel like there was a scene in the bronze at some point where some random dancing person gets briefly turned into a giant strawberry. Am I imagining this?)

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  • Strawberry Shortcake. The doll. The cartoons. The empire. I still remember the commercials for the doll from when I was little. I can still hear the song, with it’s mockable swellness:

    Strawberry Shortcake
    My she’s looking swell!
    Cute little doll
    With a strawberry smell.

  • The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear, by Don Wood Another picture book. About a mouse. And a strawberry. Also some mention of a bear.
  • The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, by Molly Bang. I don’t actually know this berry-oriented book, though it won a Caldecott Honor medal. I liked the author’s story of struggling to get it published.
  • The Strawberry Legend. A Cherokee Legend where a woman forgets her anger and remembers her love as she eats some berries. (There’s at least one book version, too.)
  • The Blackberry Bush, a folktale in the book Stories to Tell to Children by Sara Cone Bryant.
  • Blackberry . One of the rabbits from Watership Down, by Douglas Adams.
  • BlackBerry. An electronic device. John had one for a couple of years. He would sometimes throw it when he got email because it would irritate him so much with its onslaught of interruptions.
  • Blowing a raspberry. Okay, it has nothing to do with berries. It’s when you make a sort of continous spitting noise by sticking your tongue between your lips and blowing, or by blowing through loosely closed lips. I have no idea why it’s called a raspberry.
  • Knott’s Berry Farm. Not actually a farm, and not so much berry-ish. It’s a large amusement park. But the founder did sell berries.
  • Frankenberry. A cereal. Berry-flavored. Also a cartoon character from the cereal box and commercials. Has a bit of a cult following. (There also seem to be some other meanings to Frankenberry, as seen on Urban Dictionary, but they seem pretty lame to me.)
  • Finally, here are a few berry songs that I picked for you:
    • Raspberry Beret, Prince (Okay, not really about raspberries)
    • Blueberry Hill, Louis Armstrong (Not really about blueberries)
    • Strawberry Fields Forever, the Beatles (…nothing is real…)

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    • iPhone: good features, but falls short of design expectations

    As some of you know, we are very much a pro-Mac household. Also, John is more than a bit of a technophile. So it shouldn’t come as much surprise that John wanted to get one of the new Apple iPhones as soon as possible. John camped out for most of the afternoon today outside a nearby phone store, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on one of the coveted, ultra-cool, ultra-sleek iPhones.

    The iPhone has been awaited with great anticipation for years, long before it was officially announced by Apple. But since Apple released details and images of the iPhone, with its large high-res LCD and touch-pad with multi-touch operating, and versatile phone + camera + video player + music player + internet ready identities, it has been creating quite the buzz.

    We were, naturally, quite eager to see whether the iPhone could live up to the hype. Since some of you may not have had a chance to see the iPhone in action yet, aside from in the commercials, we thought we’d share our own experiences and impressions.

    When we got ours home, John opened up the box.

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    As advertised, all he needed to do was plug it into the computer, and go through iTunes in order to activate it.

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    Also as advertised, the iPhone not only shows images, but it can also function as a music player:

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    The iPhone is easy to navigate, with handy built-in scrolling features:

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    While much of the functionality has been very cool, the design of the phone itself is surprisingly clunky: with big plastic buttons, and a screen that’s a bit smaller than we’d hoped. The sound quality of the music is a bit tinny, and somewhat annoying with various boingy and chirping sounds jumping in unexpectedly, and the selection of songs you can listen to is quite limited. While I do like the way the brightly colored lights flash when I push the buttons, I haven’t yet figured out how to dial the phone, as there are only buttons for 1 through 4. Most distressingly, we have already encountered at least three bugs with the iPhone, which are obvious in the image below.¹

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    Has Apple fallen down in its standards?

    ————-

    ¹ And not just bugs: a frog, a bird and a duck, too.

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    I yam what I yam

    It’s time for another helping of Themed Things Thursdays. It being vegetable week here, in honor of my first pick-up of my CSA veggies, this Thursday Theme for Things is vegetables. Okay, the list is a bit heavy on the onion bits (with apologies to those who don’t like onions), but you can pick them out.

    some vegetables

  • beans
    Jack and the beanstalk, a fairy tale featuring magic beans that grow a towering beanstalk.
  • corn
    Children of the Corn (1984) A movie based on a Stephen King story. Horror in the corn fields.

  • spinach
    The cartoon character Popeye (The Sailor Man) gets super-duper strong when he eats a can of spinach. Even has a little song he sings when he gets all juiced up: I’m strong to the finish, ’cause I eats me spinach…
  • broccoli
    Powerpuff Girls episode 17 “Beat Your Greens“. Alien broccoli attacks.
  • cabbage
    The Kids in the Hall offers Cabbage Head, a man with cabbage for hair. (There are also the Cabbage Patch Kids, scrunched-up looking dolls that were all the rage in the 80’s, and that now have their own urban legend.)
  • pumpkin
    Peter Peter pumkin eater. A nursery rhyme. Also a song you can play on the piano using only the black keys.

    Peter Peter pumpkin eater
    Had a wife and couldn’t keep her
    He put her in a pumpkin shell
    And there he kept her very well

  • peppers
    Peter Piper A nursery rhyme and tongue twister: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”
  • carrots
    Bugs Bunny is known for his trademark carrot-munching. But did you know that his carrot-munching was a Clark Gable immitation?

    bugs

    Bugs Bunny’s nonchalant carrot-chewing stance, as explained many years later by Chuck Jones, and again by Friz Freleng, comes from the movie, It Happened One Night, from a scene where the Clark Gable character is leaning against a fence eating carrots more quickly than he is swallowing, giving instructions with his mouth full to the Claudette Colbert character, during the hitch-hiking sequence.

  • potato
    Everybody’s favorite spud has got to be the ever-dignified, interchangeably featured Mr. Potatohead (Apparently, there are many new Potatohead varieties that have sprouted, including the venerable Star Wars Darth Tater
  • sweet potato
    “Sweet Potato,” by Cracker. (Off the album “Kerosene Hat”) A rockin’ romp of a song. Be my sweet potato, I’ll be your honey lamb

  • yams
    Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. Yams play a central role in the Nigerian community depicted in this novel. (See? I can get all literary, too.) (By the way, these yams aren’t the same as sweet potatoes, which are often called yams in the US)
  • turnip
    You can’t get blood from a turnip, or “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip” (You can also find more garden-variety cliches) An expression meaning that it’s not possible to extract something from a source that doesn’t contain that thing.
  • onion
    1. The Onion (“America’s finest news source”) My own favorite Onion article? This eerily prescient one from January, 2001.
    2. Shrek (2001) An animated movie featuring an ogre who likens himself to an onion:

      Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
      Donkey: They both smell?
      Shrek: NO! They have LAYERS. There’s more to us underneath. So, ogres are like onions.
      Donkey: Yeah, but nobody LIKES onions!

    3. The End: Book the Thirteenth, the final installation of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket begins with the following layery, teary-eyed, oniony sentence:

      If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.

  • bok choi
    Bok Choi Boy, the story of a young lad raised by vegetables to become a legendary leafy-green fighter for truth, justice and better nutrition. (Okay, I made this one up.)
  • a whole bunch o’ different oversized veggies
    June 29, 1999 written and illustrated by Caldecott award-winnder David Wiesner. A picturebook featuring gigantic vegetables raining down from the skies. A beatifully illustrated, beautifully absurd book:

    Cucumbers circle Kalamazoo. Lima beans loom over Levittown. Artichokes advance on Anchorage.

    Check out some of the illustrations on the publisher’s webpage for the book.

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    all roads don’t lead to Ikea

    We had grand plans for the day: to go to Ikea and buy a kitchen table and an itty-bitty table for Phoebe. It’s a bit of a trek to get there, so that was pretty much the agenda for the day.

    We planned to leave home by 10:00 a.m., and were happy to make it out of the house around noon.

    Before leaving, I checked the directions online, and they looked pretty straightforward. We’d been there twice before, after all, so I didn’t bother to write them down. As you can guess, things were not as straightforward as I remembered. We didn’t get “lost,” exactly. We just had some difficulty finding what we expected to find. At one point, we drove down a street that looked vaguely familiar and I ever-so-briefly saw the Ikea sign poking its head up above a large building. But the end of the street came, with no sign of Ikea (or sign of the sign, for that matter). So we looped. We explored. We meandered and roamed for a bit. We marvelled at how so large a thing as an Ikea store could be so very thoroughly hidden in a rather small Massachusetts town.

    Eventually, I realized that we had a road atlas in the car, and as I attempted to get us back to the main drag, we passed a street sign (an unusual thing to see in many parts of Massachusetts) that said “Ikea Way.” We took this to be a very good sign.

    Soon after, we found our hidden prize. It was as if we found that Easter egg, albeit one the size of several city blocks. Our cheaply manufactured blue and yellow pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This felt like accomplishment. It was as if we had completed a quest. I ask you, can one feel such a sense of accomplishment by merely following directions? Pshaw.

    (Oh, and we did get a kitchen table. And a table and 2 chairs for Phoebe that are really frickin’ cute, and that John’s already taken over for his laptop. Plus a kitchen clock. And a basket for the laundry room. Oh, and some tongs. And a huge stuffed orca, 2 rats, 4 bats, a crab, a turtle, some finger puppets, a wooden gear toy and really, we did try to show some restraint. We could at least fit all our purchases in the car at the end of the trip. Without even resorting to strapping Phoebe’s car seat to the roof of the car.)

    I’ve got a lot of balls

    I’ve got balls. Bouncy balls. A whole lot of ’em.

    Here’s a list of some bouncing balls I’ve encountered. A list of 5 things of the bouncy ball persuasion. And a whole lot more balls than that. On with the bouncing!

    1. The Sony Bravia commercial. My sister sent me a link to this ad, which I hadn’t seen before. It features a whole lot of bouncing balls, bouncing down a street in San Francisco. And through the wonder of YouTube, I can bounce it to you here.

      The making of video is fun to watch, too. You can also read more about it, and see some cool photos. And want to get some balls of your own? Get a bunch of downloads.

    2. Want to know more about the bouncing of balls? Learn about the physics of bouncy balls, or about bouncing ball simulations.
    3. Here’s another bouncing ball commercial, this time for a museum in Mexico. Features a pair of balls.
    4. “Follow the bouncing ball.” Old-time TV (and movie?) sing-alongs used to feature a bouncing ball that would bounce along the words displayed on the screen. It’s a bit hard to find examples of this, though I came across a version someone random made and put up on YouTube. Or if you don’t mind being forced to watch an irritating ad, you can sing along with some old TV show themes songs with the help of a bouncing ball.
    5. My favorite balls of all are from the Futurama episode “War is the H-word“. (By the way, this is also the episode where Leela dresses up as a man, and where Fry buys his ham-flavored gum. For “breath as fresh as a spring ham.”) This episode features a planet of bouncing balls. And these fabulous ball-bouncing quotes, from the treaty negotiations with the head of the balls:

      We demand bouncing, followed by rolling, followed by rolling of the third type.

      and

      We cannot condone bouncing of the seventh variety.

      and

      The Elders tell of a young ball much like you. He bounced three meters in the air. Then he bounced 1.8 meters in the air. Then he bounced four meters in the air. Do I make myself clear?

      and let’s not forget when Leela says:

      We’re here. I followed the bouncing balls.

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    This post is being submitted to the //engtech 5 things contest, which strongly advocates bouncing of the 5th variety.

    back to the rat race

    We got back home late, late Wednesday night (or early, early Thursday morning). I had an amazingly wonderful time on my trip, and felt totally decompressed.

    Of course, the problem with decompression is the shock of re-entry.

    I’m compressed again.

    Compression happened pretty quickly. I was hit, knocked down, and run over several times by the realization that I’d gotten no work done at all for over a week. (I managed to read 2 pages of a book I need to read. Does that count?)

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    Once again, I’m faced with loads of deadlines. Reading for my program requirements. Reading for class. An assignment for class. Stuff for my job. And not a whole lot of time. Rats.

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    By the way, today marks fourth months of this here blog. And I have a whole bunch of things I meant to write about that I haven’t gotten around to. For example, I have yet to write an “about” page. About me, about this blog, about the term tokens, about about. Maybe I’ll get around to this in the next month or so.
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    This post also marks my 100th post. Of course, I only wrote 99 of them. The first one was the auto-generated one I got when I signed up for a WordPress blog. And it got so many insightful comments, from a variety of fascinating personages, that I decided to keep it.

    the friendly skies await

    Today we embark on a big adventure: we’re flying out to California to meet my new nephew, Diego. This will also be Phoebe’s first trip travelling by airplane. Which leaves me feeling both excited and apprehensive. And at this point, I also feel a bit of panic. Because I still have a whole lot of packing to do. Because we will need to be bring with us a whole lot of stuff. Stuff in such quantities that we will wish we were traveling with a pack animal. (I understand that llamas can carry quite a lot…)
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    One of the many adventures we’ll have on this trip is making it through airport security. And I’m reminded of one more thing, which I didn’t include in my list from my post on that topic: the airport security playset, purportedly made by Playmobil, but now sadly appearing to have been discontinued. A few blogs wrote about it a while back. This one in particular shows some great pictures. Maybe if we had the playset, we’d be better prepared.

    Okay. I really need to get going. I have to check the TSA website about travelling with a llama.

    history of the Little People airplane revealed

    When I was doing some preliminary research for my recent post on the Fisher-Price Little People airplane toy, I came across some obscure but interesting information about the Soviet origins of the plane design. I had to share. The article is supported by some incredible photos and diagrams, including this one of the first flight of the prototype.

    chirp…ribbit…glug glug

    We’re back home now. After a somewhat bizarre ride home.

    While down in New York, we’d visited John’s aunt and uncle for a bit, who gave Phoebe a new toy. (Actually, this gift was largely provided as a distraction to keep Phoebe from eating the cardboard jigsaw puzzle pieces that were spread out on their coffee table.) Phoebe’s new toy is also a puzzle, a wooden one with little cutout shapes with pictures of animals. When you pop each piece into place, once the batteries are installed, it emits a noise corresponding to the animal on that piece. John’s aunt and uncle didn’t have the two AAA batteries needed for the toy, so we didn’t get to hear the animal sounds till we got back to John’s parents’ house. There, we found some batteries, and installed them in the puzzle into the little compartment that is held closed by a phillips head screw. I tell you this for a reason.

    Last night, as we were driving home, with various piles of stuff and bags of toys in the back of the car, we made a discovery. When the puzzle gets cold, it doesn’t need to have the pieces inserted or removed in order to activate the sounds. And we didn’t have a phillips head screw driver in the car with us. Or other tools, such as a hammer, that could be used to smash it open. The puzzle nearly got abandoned at a rest area. Happily, it did eventually quiet down when the car warmed up.

    Lesson: When travelling with battery operated noise-emitting toys, consider removing the batteries first.

    Request to toy makers: Please always include an “off” switch on your battery operated toys. Especially those that need tools to access the battery compartment.

    Fun game: Can you identify these animal sounds?