I routinely rope in commercial products for their educational value, including but not limited to computer games and simulations. It's important for our family that we have access to toyz. I actively stimulate the imaginations of toy makes with descriptions of what we'd likely buy, and charge on our Platinum Amazon Visa, which I just signed for while buying Tara a new robot dog with her own money (the 16+% variable APR is

promotional discount, which turned out not to apply, as this was a pass

From: kirby urner [mailto:kirby.urner@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2006 2:06 PM pretty outrageous -- thinking mainly of the through from Toys R Us, and therefore apparently >not qualified). Good American ;) Forgive me my relentlessly adversarial stance. But I was a misunderstood child, you see. My father was the poor boy, who was able to provide me with some advantages. Like nice toys. Would drive him crazy that I wouldn't "take better care of them". The evidence was certainly there - the toy in pieces. But the toys actually sucked - and the only interest I had in them was taking them apart, to see how they worked, and for scrap parts to build some whozeewhatsit (that never quite worked). The spirit isn't dead. Last month instead of showing up to the extended family holiday party with gifts, I offered to take the kids shopping the following morning. A cousin is a glassblower living a pretty Spartan/ low tech existence out in the country. His youngest insisted he wanted to shop at a hardware store - where he went through the isles picking out odd pieces of this and that - whozeewhatsit components, quite enviously. Not an electronic component among them. PyGeo is, I guess, by current whozeewhatsit. The fact that it happens to rely on some electronic underpinning being mostly happenstance. Art