Tagged: toys

We, The “Idiot Savants”

One delightful aspect that accompanies the hobby of reading that I did not expect when I began to read could best be called “following my whims”. In my case, I wanted to be a bit methodical, so I began with a couple sets of liberal education type books (AKA classical education), filled with essays by great and influential writers. (Keep in mind, this “began with” is after master’s level coursework, age 35ish). The editors of these sets would have pleasant introductions which included “for more on this topic” recommendations. And ebay supplied the steady-stream of follow-on books at minimal cost.

Math History is my main “whim” of late. This is because I have a belief that “there is no math in the Bible” and want to be able to explain the importance of my claim eloquently.

After you read Math History for long enough, to the point of being half-way through the first of four volumes of The World of Mathematics, you find essays on “Idiot Savants”.

Here I want to say I have provided enough information to not need to explain what “Idiot Savants” are, but to be clear, we are talking about people—a very, very few in number—who can perform, say, 10 digit by 10 digit multiplication problems in their head. The interesting part is that this ability has no apparent correlation to life skills or general wisdom or even other talents, professional or otherwise. IE, most jarring, even these “Idiot Savants” can be not good at math in the complete sense. In a word, to modern man, they are perplexing. Just what exactly is their “skill” or “talent”?

The above picture of the plate is something I took in a downtown toy store, one of the last holdouts of its kind, in my city. There are a couple of problems with it; can you spot them?

  1. If a kid can’t eat, a kid can’t read.
  2. If a kid can’t put food in his mouth, a kid isn’t hungry.
  3. Eating does not require plates.
  4. If a kid can’t distinguish plate from table (as manifested by their inability to keep the food on the plate and off the table), then they certainly aren’t able to distinguish individual sections within one (1) plate.
  5. Some forks, especially kid-sized, have three prongs.
  6. Lastly, and this may be picky, but if you’re going to put dinosaurs on a baby plate, I think the least you could do is label them with their names, followed by phonetic spelling. How else will the child learn?!

Faithful Readers, there is a big world out there. If your world is small, in other words, if you feel like you’re really close to finally being fully tooled and comfortable at, this, our problem-riddled life, then I challenge you to consider if you are, in fact, an idiot.

You Have Listened To Good Music, Right?

For Sam

Dear Stereo Makers,

How many times have you ever broken a nail with a hammer? Or how many times have you sat on a chair and had the chair just simply break? I know! I know! How many times have you turned on a faucet and the water came out so fast that it put a hole in the sink? No, better yet, how many times have you read a book so fast that it broke?

Zero, right?

Then why, for the love, do you sell a product which allows me to turn up the volume so loud that it breaks my speakers? Why? Surely there’s a way you can prevent this. Surely you can put a line on the knob that lets me know “any louder now, Bub, and you might break your speakers”. I would obey. Promise.

Thank you for reading. Just do better.

Pete

****

PS – If you’re interested, I ended the affair. The End.

Review of the Critics of Transformers 4, By Michael Bay

The first Transformers movie will always have a special place in my heart. Instructor pilots of mine piloted the MH-53 that was the movie-opening Decepticon “Blackout”. Michael Bay even hand chose the pilot that marked me “unsatisfactory” once to be the hologram that “piloted” Blackout and later had a scene in the police car that interrogated Ladiesman217 (Shai LaBeouf).

I need a minute.

Okay, back to the review. Then came the second and third installments. Admittedly they were less than inspiring.

Then number four lost LaBeouf, but gained Marky Mark. Not interested enough to see the film in the theater, I started watching it four weeks ago, and finally finished it yesterday. Why did it take so long? And why did I persist, you ask? Because Optimus Prime riding a T-Rex Dynobot only happens once in a lifetime. And because that darn scene didn’t occur until the 133rd minute in the 165 minute film. But I still got goosebumps. It is awesome.

Here’s what some reviewers said about number 4 on Rotten Tomatoes:

“In the end, though, this is still a movie about giant robots fighting each other, which is to say it’s nearly impossible to take seriously on a narrative level.”

“Inflated, interminable and incoherent …”

“Transformers: Age of Extinction is simply more of the same mindless action, flat characters, and utter boredom that we’ve come to expect from these bloated mechanical sequels.”

And my personal favorite:

“Transformers have souls, this movie repeatedly tells us, but does Michael Bay?”

Know what I say? I say Michael Bay has a soul and it is the soul of a genius. Stay with me. I began watching this movie after listening to H- play for hours on end with a Beauty and the Beast doll set. The set included Belle and a few dresses, the human prince, and a Beast suit to put over the prince. (She hasn’t seen the movie yet.) These three characters became Belle, Belle’s father, and Beast (never mind he doesn’t have legs). And soon thereafter a lego character entered the mix so that it was an even two-on-two. Good guys became bad guys; characters that died came back to life; Beast was always asleep in the moments before only he could save the day. You know I love this child, but listening to her play can be mind-numbing.

Now, I can memorize a two hour movie’s story-line after one viewing, yet can’t follow, let alone repeat, H-‘s story-lines. Michael Bay, on the other hand, can. If you watch Transformers 4 as if you’re watching a four-year-old holding the actors and robots alike and performing all the voice acting, then the movie is perfect. Simply perfect. All the characters are yelling, injured, needing help, fighting, crying, whining, dying, or repeating some cheesy line they probably just heard the day before on TV. Even the scene where the boy and girl kiss after the victory seems like a child is forcing the two of them together while saying, “Mmua, Mmua” and thinking, “Eww gross”. The poor kid knows kissing is what happens when good guys win, but doesn’t understand why.

The genius of the movie and what the critics forget is that it is quite literally a movie about toys in the first place. Perhaps it is the 2007 installment that should be viewed as the fluke. But now with the fourth installment we’re finally getting to the heart of why Transformer toys and Transformers 4 are so great. And all these nay-saying critics probably don’t recognize that when they got big, they became the guy from Big who thinks that there’s something fun about a building that turns into a robot.