"Toys are a scam."

It's a great headline: "Toys are a scam. Kids keep asking for them. We keep buying them. And no one is playing with them" (WaPo).

But to say "toys are a scam" is to blame the manufacturers and sellers of toys. They're out to trick parents into buying things that are not needed and might be actively bad. But this puts the blame/"blame" with the parents:

Suzanne Gaskins, a cultural developmental psychologist, says it’s only in the past 50 years that we’ve started accumulating piles of toys. As she compared families in America with those in other societies, a couple of observations stood out. One is that our kids are less engaged in the adult world — regularly helping prepare food, say, or care for a household — and more focused on the kid-centric universe we’ve constructed to “maximize their development.” 

“The first goal for American parents is to let their kids be happy,” Gaskins says. “And not just happy in a contented sense, but happy in an active, almost hysterically happy sense.” 

For Mayan parents, by contrast, the “primary goal is that the kid is even-keeled — not particularly happy, not particularly sad.” 

Hysterically happy — that's something that can only persist for a moment, perhaps on Christmas morning. But one must revert to feeling normal. The keel will even. Imagine if your kids stayed Christmas-happy for months — gaga over new toys for days on end. You wouldn't think, great, they are maximizing their development.

"When the going got rough, I tried to imagine that I was one of those big inflatable toys of the cartoon figures Baby Huey or Casper the Friendly Ghost."

"You could knock them down and they always bounced right back up."

Wrote Bill Clinton, quoted in "In ‘Citizen,’ Bill Clinton gives his side of the story/The former president’s memoir aims to set the record straight, with varying results" (WaPo). 

I was inspired to work on an illustration (with Grok):

At the Lost Toy Café...

... there's the pink giraffe you've been grieving far too long. Go get it or let it go.

Game day parking at the fairy garden.

Yeah, we lost, but what did you expect? And what does it all mean... in the greater span of time?

"[Elle] Macpherson, 60, says she rented a house in Phoenix, Arizona, for eight months, where she 'holistically treated' her cancer..."

"... under the guidance of her primary doctor, a doctor of naturopathy, holistic dentist, osteopath, chiropractor and two therapists. She said: 'It was a shock, it was unexpected, it was confusing, it was daunting in so many ways and it really gave me an opportunity to dig deep in my inner sense to find a solution that worked for me.... Saying no to standard medical solutions was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But saying no to my own inner sense would have been even harder,' later adding she thought chemotherapy and surgery were too extreme."

From "Elle Macpherson refused chemotherapy after secret breast cancer diagnosis/Supermodel says she is in remission after being diagnosed seven years ago and rejecting traditional medicine" (The Guardian).

ADDED: The idea that surgery is extreme is subjective. How aversive to it should we be? It made me think of the newly normalized gender affirmation surgery, bariatric surgery, and the plastic surgery done to fight the perfectly ordinary effects of age.

And I happened to see this earlier today:

Amazing Mom

pic.twitter.com/lGXL89E6xR

— The Best (@ThebestFigen) September 1, 2024

Why I don't have any hobbies.

I'm reading "Six Underrated Hobbies to Try Out/Picking up a new pastime is no small feat" (The Atlantic). "What is an underrated hobby that you love?" it asks.

I don't think I've ever used the word "hobby" to refer to anything I do. I don't relate to the idea of a "hobby," even though I like to do what I want, what interests me, and I have almost nothing but free time. I don't think of this blog as a hobby and might be annoyed if someone I knew called it that. But maybe I would be better off if I did something that genuinely deserved the label "hobby." I don't consider walking in the woods a hobby. Or reading. Maybe photographing the sunrise every day is a hobby, but this is the first time I've connected it with that word, which, to my ear, sounds diminishing.

So let's check out these 6 things. 1. Collecting animal figurines, 2. Playing video games (why not count watching TV?!), 3. Paraclimbing (climbing for persons with disabilities (I don't think sports are "hobbies")), 4. Boxing (another sport), 5. Making pizza from scratch (cooking can be a hobby), 6. Walking the dog and paying attention to the plants and animals that interest the dog (I'm intrigued by the idea of paying attention as a hobby).

Well, it's Labor Day, and I like thinking of my own personal freedom from labor. I'm not decrepit enough to deserve the word "retired" — if you want to think about words. That has to do with withdrawing or receding, retreating, or falling back. I'm reading the OED. Maybe paying attention to words and looking them up in the OED is my hobby.

Did you know that the original meaning of "hobby" is "A small or middle-sized horse; an ambling or pacing horse; a pony"? That goes back to the 1400s. The meaning we know — which begins in the early 1800s — comes from the idea of riding a toy horse — a "hobby-horse." It's "A favourite occupation or topic, pursued merely for the amusement or interest that it affords, and which is compared to the riding of a toy horse...; an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker's opinion) out of proportion to its real importance."

When do you look at your own activities and judge your interest in them to be out of proportion to their "real" importance? It seems that if you're going to call something your "hobby," you're embracing the idea that your love of it seems foolish when viewed from the outside. By the same token, if you decline to use the word "hobby" for what you do out of interest and love, you are deprioritizing what other people think.

"It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white."

"This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). 'Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,' says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. 'I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.'..."

From a Guardian article with a long headline: "America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’/ Elon Musk (father of 11) supports their cause. Thousands follow their ideology. Malcolm and Simone Collins are on a mission to make it easier for everyone to have multiple children. But are they really model parents?"

"He told me that his whole philosophy was to make sure that nobody ever noticed you. Don’t stand out, don’t do anything, or anybody will be able to criticize you."

Said Alison Holt, the sister of Geoffrey Holt, the subject of "He lived a quiet life — then donated $3.8 million to his small N.H. town" (WaPo).

[Geoffrey] Holt worked as a social studies and driver’s education teacher and in a grain mill before retiring and moving to the trailer park, where [he worked] as a handyman and groundskeeper.... Holt was shy and took to others slowly.... Holt collected die-cast cars and model trains and spoke excitedly about automobile history. In his mobile home and a nearby shed, he... was content to spend most of his time at home tinkering with model cars.... He dressed plainly in clothes he rarely replaced. He owned an old car but never used it, opting instead to ride his mower to a nearby Walmart if he needed to shop....

He had no children, and the sister told him she didn't need the money, so he left it to the town, where people barely knew him. Why did he have so much money? It seems that's what happens if you're frugal, invest what you don't spend, and live to be 82.

"The mandate for audience recognition has pushed artists to take increasingly desperate measures—including scrounging up plotlines from popular snacks."

"Eva Longoria recently directed the Cheetos dramedy 'Flamin’ Hot'; Jerry Seinfeld is at work on 'Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.' I.P.-based filmmaking has become so commonplace that [Greta] Gerwig—who made her name acting in tiny mumblecore projects—was caught off guard by complaints that she’d sold out. (One viral tweet: 'i know this is an unpopular opinion but i feel like . . . completely repelled by the barbie movie. branded content with a wink and movie stars is still branded content!') Gerwig told me that adapting Barbie felt as natural as adapting 'Little Women,' though she did use a toy metaphor to describe the process: creating 'a story where there hadn’t been a story' felt like solving 'an intellectual Rubik’s Cube.'... 'Barbie' is somehow simultaneously a critique of corporate feminism, a love letter to a doll that has been a lightning rod for more than half a century, and a sendup of the company that actively participated in the adaptation...."

From "After 'Barbie,' Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toy Box/In an era when 'pre-awareness' rules Hollywood, the company is ginning up plots for everything from Hot Wheels to UNO" (The New Yorker).

I learned the word "toyetic." Here's the Wikipedia article, "Toyetic":

"I solved this very simple with my kids. Clean up or the toys go in jail. I swept everything in a black garbage bag..."

"... taped the top up with masking tap[e], and put a date on it with one week out. If you don't want to lose your toys for a week, clean up your mess kids!"

A comment on the NY Post article, "My husband didn’t do any chores while I worked 10-hour days so I’m getting a divorce."

"Who are these dolls for? Little girls, but really, their mothers, who took their dolls to the American Girl 'hospital' for repairs, who lovingly brushed their hair..."

"... who still read think pieces on the Samantha aesthetic, or Molly’s potential sexuality or what their choice of girlhood doll foretold for their adult personality. (This author, past owner of a Felicity, was indeed a Horse Girl who 'grew up to have an affinity for lovely things [and] a possibly inflated sense of your own uniqueness,' as [the article at that third link] predicted.) Her daughter is getting a little old for dolls, says [one mother]. But she might get Isabel and Nicki anyway. 'I think I’m going to buy them because I want them for myself,' she says. 'Having those dolls would kind of just give me a piece of my childhood back.'"

From a WaPo article about the new American Girl dolls —  Isabel and Nicki — that supposedly represent the historical era known as 1999.

Did you ever buy your child a toy that was really more about you reliving — or idealizing — your own childhood?

What a cool art project: A realistic-looking action-figure set of The DiGrasso Men from "The White Lotus."

At Reddit, someone asks "What's your method here? Kit bashing other toys or are you like molding yourself? Either way this is such cool art!" 

The artist answers "They're 3d sculpts that I do in Blender and then 3d print and paint. The heads are entirely my own designs and then the bodies are usually scans of existing toys that I alter(I like to call that digital kitbashing haha)." 

The execution is great, and I love the idea that there would be action figures of the characters from "The White Lotus," though the comedy of unusual choices for action figures has been around for decades.

By the way, I am such a "White Lotus" fan that I not only rewatched both seasons and watched both seasons of Mike White's earlier show "Enlightened," I rewatched the season of "Survivor" where he was a contestant, and I've started reading books I see recommended in "Mike White's Top 10 Books." I chose the book that someone I know in real life has leaned on me to read. Him, I resisted. But somehow Mike White wants me to read it, and I believe. 

"The history of toys is the history of teaching children to preoccupy themselves usefully and solitarily."

"I give you this toy to bond you to me, now go away and play with it by yourself."

Said the play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith.

Quoted in "'They want toys to get their children into Harvard': have we been getting playthings all wrong? For decades we’ve been using toys to cram learning into playtime – and toys have been marketed as tools to turn children into prosperous, high-achieving adults. Is it time for a rethink?" (The Guardian).

The moment you realize that little genius of yours is a psychopath.

Some parent writes to the advice columnist at Slate:

Well, J likes to play with a train set, and after dinner, I was playing with J, and I thought to try out the trolley problem. We got some Lego figures, put them on the tracks, and I told J that the train was going to hit these five people, but J could switch tracks if J is willing to have the other person crushed. J looked at me, then at the tracks, and then very seriously picked up the lone figure and put it on the track with the other five. Then J took the train, ran over all six of them, turned to me, and said, very seriously, “it was a bad accident.”

I'm just kidding. I don't think the kid is a psychopath. I think he's taking his cue from Mother. She set up the carnage. It was a carnage-setting-up game. It's not like young people in a college philosophy class, where they've all be cued to step up to the highest level of morality or to choose between morality and pragmatism and then talk about why. You might just as well suspect your child of psychopathy because after he builds a tall building out of blocks he takes his toy airplane and crashes into it, like a 9/11 terrorists, though only you know about the 9/11 terrorists. He's never heard of such a thing. Unless you've cruelly burdened him with such knowledge. What is he, 3?

Here are 9 TikTokk videos I found to while away your next 10 minutes. Let me know what you like best.

1. The lizard's table manners.

2. The chef disapproves.

3.  A drawing of chaos and order.

4. Sidewalk chalk art.

5. Broadway Barbara can help you get a good night's sleep.

6. Nurse Melissa is back with her Nancy Pelosi lip-synching.

7. Infuse other exercise classes with religion the way yoga classes use Hinduism.

8. "I want to be the Bob Woodward of 'Family Feud' clips. I want to lead a ragtag group of journalists into the Steve Harvey reaction underworld, like that movie 'Spotlight.'"

9. Evel Knieval and all his friends.

Just 5 TikToks made my list tonight. Let me know what you like

1. Lightning strike.

2. Parrots kiss.

3. The return of the influencer.

4. Asking people to name 3 songs by the band whose name is on their shirt.

5. The turtle sandbox is full of gender.

The NYT publishes an essay by JK Rowling, "J.K. Rowling on the Magic of 'Things.'"

And here I thought she was canceled. 

I do note that there are no comments allowed over there, and I suspect that's because readers would harp on the cause for cancellation and fail to discuss the essay itself.

Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what I'm doing.

So let's read:

I own a cuddly tortoise sewn by my mother, which she gave me when I was 7. It has a floral shell, a red underbelly and black felt eyes. Even though I’m notoriously prone to losing things, I’ve managed to keep hold of that tortoise through sundry house moves and even changes of country. My mother died over 30 years ago, so I’ve now lived more of my life without her than with her. I find more comfort in that tortoise than I do in photographs of her, which are now so faded and dated, and emphasize how long she’s been gone. What consoles me is the permanence of the object she made — its unchanging nature, its stolid three-dimensional reality. I’d give up many of my possessions to keep that tortoise, the few exceptions being things that have their own allusive power, like my wedding ring....

She has a new book, we learn,  "The Christmas Pig" — "a story of objects lost and found, of things beloved and things unregretted."

It's the day before Christmas. Are you thinking about things — things to give and receive, to want and not want?

How powerfully do you imbue things with magic — or do you have anything going amongst your possessions that you could even vaguely term "magic"?

The news of "moral panic."

1. "The conservative moral panic over a new California bill on children's toys" (SF Gate): The purported "moral panic" is criticism of a bill that requires toy stores to have a "gender neutral" section. Who's closer to a condition that can be called "moral panic" — the people who push through legislation like this or the people who don't appreciate the regulation? 

2. "The BBC and The Times are accused of stoking a 'moral panic' against the trans community" (Insider). A trans person asserts "I now feel like I'm a disease, a problem, something that needs to be gotten rid of, because every story that features in the British press about trans people is negative." There was a BBC article recently, "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" about lesbians objecting to being called transphobic because they only want to have sex with people who are biologically female. (Isn't this Insider article itself raising a moral panic — about attacks on transgender people?)

3. "Steven Pinker: Danger of moral panic over 'fake news'" (Global Herald). 

4. "A Frenzy of Book Banning" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). "[T]he paranoid belief that liberalism is a front for pedophile cabals is a staple of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This spreading moral panic demonstrates, yet again, why the left needs the First Amendment, even if the veneration of free speech has fallen out fashion among some progressives." (But isn't there also a moral panic about QAnon?)

5. "Election guru Rachel Bitecofer: Democrats face '10-alarm fire' after Virginia debacle Democrats could still win midterms and stop Trump's coup, says election forecaster — if they actually had a plan" (Salon). Republicans are using "the bogeyman of 'critical race theory' to mobilize white voters anxious about demographic change and overly eager to protect their children (or other people's) from the truths of American history" and Democrats lack "anything close to an adequate defense against these racist moral-panic attacks." (Isn't this idea of "Trump's coup" also a moral panic?)

6. "‘Traditional Values’ Unite Both Sides in a New Ideological Cold War/Republicans and global authoritarians around the world from different political, cultural and social contexts use alarmingly similar tactics" (Moscow Times). "Far-right demagogues from Moscow to Texas increasingly incite moral panic to stir up tensions and deflect from domestic troubles.... [Putin] did not address public health measures and instead chose to rail against 'cancel culture' and gender-segregated bathrooms in the West."

7. "How Did Paul Gosar Become Such a Deranged Meme Lord?/'You are a dentist, for God’s sake. You don’t need to be tweeting these "Attack on Titan" memes'" (Daily Beast)."You’re seeing these weird shades of conspiracy theories—there’s a softer, leftier tinge to all of these. I’m seeing people with, like, anime avatars using astrology to argue [Travis Scott's Astroworld concert] was a Satanic ritual... There is sort of a soft spiritualism, I think, among certain Gen Z and millennial cohorts… I think that these audiences are a little bit more receptive to moral panics than older folks might realize."

8."How France's ‘great replacement’ theory conquered the global far right" (France24). 'The people who watch that interview and who may fall for this moral panic, this idea that they’re going to be replaced ethnographically... don’t want to be called racist and will say they’re defending civilisation."

"In the pre-Taliban days of the late eighties, when I spent time with the mujahideen of Kandahar, who were then fighting the Soviets..."

"... a pair of local Islamic scholars banned music after consulting their sacred texts; this rule was added to their list of severe prohibitions, which included death for adulterers and the amputation of hands for thieves. In a court, set up in the middle of a battlefield, the two judges explained their sentencing system and told me how many murderers and adulterers they had put to death, after which one of them said, 'We adhere to the Sharia in all cases.' Patting a pile of holy tracts next to him, he added, 'All the answers are here.'... Within a couple years, they controlled most of Afghanistan, and Kabul fell to them in 1996.... Afghan women were all but excluded from public life, with many girls prohibited from attending school; the freedom to work for female teachers, doctors, and nurses was drastically circumscribed. The Taliban zealotry grew so great that children were forbidden to play with dolls or to fly kites, in favor of prayer sessions, while ethnic minorities and members of religious sects other than the extreme Sunni version of Islam that the Taliban espoused were persecuted. In one incident, it is estimated that the Taliban killed at least two thousand ethnic Hazaras, who are Shiite. Public executions became a norm, as well, often of women accused of various moral offenses. The killings were often carried out on sports fields or in stadiums, with the condemned sometimes stoned to death, or summarily shot in the head, or hanged, or, in the case of homosexuals, crushed and suffocated by mud walls toppled onto them by tanks.... The Taliban have rendered Afghanistan unworkable as a country; unworkable, that is, without them. And the truth is that they were never really beaten....."

Writes Jon Lee Anderson in "The Return of the Taliban Their comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a successful guerrilla war of attrition" (The New Yorker).

At the Christmas Café...

 ... you can write about whatever you want. And I hope you got whatever you wanted.

 

ADDED: These are photographs that I originally blogged in 2006, in "Things made by children for Christmas long ago." The objects, which I still have, were made more than 60 years ago. 

I see that in the comments here and back in 2006, someone asks if my name is really Jo Ann. No. Jo Ann was a doll's name — and I still remember which doll. The stockings — which are about the size of the image in the photograph — are doll's stockings. We made Christmas stockings and gifts for a family of dolls.