People who know Charles will understand the level of concern and general not-totally-pleased-with-this-development-ness that has emerged with the popularity of the photographed toy. I (Charles) have totally forgotten its name, but it is something along the lines of "visual-undersea-developmental-crack-gateway-drug-towards-hdtv-mind-numbing-drooling." I think that is both copyright and trademark.

You see, I have a problem with TV. Not conceptually or politically (those are beliefs and arguements for a different time). I have a problem as in, "hello, my name is Charles and TV is an addiction" type problem (but obviously not that severe). Many friends can attest to the reality of me vaguely trailing off a sentence while I am speaking as the TV hypnotically lulls me into a trance. It is worse than Lorlei. At least with her, you get to blame the girl-ness up on the rocks. With TV, I can end up staring for hours at such intellectual wonder as COPS (sing it) (you know you want to) and FOX "news."

All of this intro to say that Aldus is totally keen on this TV-like toy. It is teaching him cause-effect, hand-eye coordination, self motivation, colors, how to calm himself, independence, etc. So all of this is great stuff. Developmentally, I can see that this is all a good thing.

However, I am a bit worried that this is a bit too much like TV. And TV can be a problem. For some people. Granted, there is an entire nation that is not really honest with itself about the deleterious effects of TV, so maybe I should be worried...

As an aside, the toy plays music. This is fine. Yes, the music is irritating, because it is baby music. But not really. There are actually 4 recordings: Twinkle twinkle, Bach WTC #1, some Brahms piece that I don't recognize, and sea shore/waves/white noise. The problem is that they are using sorta cheap and cheezy MIDI versions of the music. The "instrumentation" is a mix between really good high school music student + vegas lounge singer. The music is almost right, but not quite perfect. The Bach piece for some reason seems to skip a measure or two in a few places and merge different parts of the song. Luckily I don't know the Brahms piece.

I am tring to decide if this matters at all... and I think it does. If it was a book, a childrens version of Hamlet (work with me here) and the story skipped some parts *and* mixed up Polonious and Hamlet, I think we would be irritated. However, if you mix up a few repeats and add a few ill placed frills in music, no one is supposed to care? It seems that for Aldus's musical literacy, we should care. I'm just having a hard time getting worked up about this.