This guy is not my favorite internet personality, but he has a point about the inappropriate nature of this kids' toy.

Dear President Obama,

I think that this year you will have to do a lot of work. One thing that you will have to do is to make school more important for everyone. That way, kids will always do a good job. If I were the president, I would work really hard to change Boston and other cities. I would make the world very smart. I would make all of the world work really hard and always do the best job that they can.

Gabriela Quezada, age 7, Boston

From a funny new book I read about at McSweeney's, called Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids' Letters to President Obama.


"I really hope you put America back together. No pressure though."
— Sheenie Shannon Yip, age 13, Seattle

Every so often when I make my kids' lunch to take to school, I cut their sandwiches into the shapes of their initials. I felt pretty good about that extra effort, and then I saw Cooking for Monkeys. Below you'll see three examples (pirates, goodnight moon, and Scooby Doo), but you should check out the site to see more.

Names have been censored to protect the allergic. This is a real notice from camp last summer regarding one of our campers. I just dug it up to share it with a friend, and now you get to enjoy it as well.

My fourth-grader has just been telling me about a game they play at school, organized by the teachers on yard duty: "Paparazzi vs. Movie Star." Whatever happened to vampire tag? I asked her to type out the rules for me, so that I could share them with you, the faithful Toner Mishap readership. Enjoy! (And please note that I first taught her the correct singular for the plural word "paparazzi"; apparently that's not within the vocabulary of the yard duty teachers.)

To begin, make a group of four people. Make one person the paparazzo, one a movie star, and the other two bodyguards. The bodyguards and the movie star form a circle facing the movie star away from the paparazzo.

The object of the game is for the bodyguards to keep the movie star from the paparazzo.

The paparazzo tries to tag the movie star, because in the game tagging the movie star will give him or her a picture. The bodyguards move the movie star in a circle to keep him or her away from being tagged.

Play rounds until everyone has been everything.

I gave my kids a bunch of pretzel sticks after dinner this evening and challenged them to make something interesting; my five-year old made this awesome pretzel robot (with mini marshmallows as part of some processing unit, I think).

UPDATED

Whoops! This was my seven-year old's creation. My five-year old spelled her name, and my nine-year old spelled out a sycophantic comment about me being cool in order to procure more marshmallows.

You wanted more, and you've got it -- I've scanned in full-size versions of nine more pages from the 1983 Star Wars Activity Book I posted about the other day; you could print them out and fill them in if you wanted, but I think the real pleasure to be taken is in just
looking at them.

You'll see Yoda's head replaced by a crossword puzzle, a Tusken Raider's face covered by a maze, and more! And don't miss the geometric beauty of "Who's Tailing Luke?", "Take Cover", and "Not Wanted" (color it in to figure out "something that is not wanted in Endor Forest").

Yoda Crossword Clues



Yoda Crossword Puzzle



Who's Tailing Luke?



Take Cover!



A-mazing Tusken Raider



Doodles of Droids



Find The Hidden Objects



What's In The Forest?



Not Wanted

Apparently my in-laws' garage is not without hidden treasure -- I just stumbled upon two great Star Wars activity books from 1983, and I had to share.

The publisher partnered with Lucasfilm -- they have a copyright notice and everything! -- but even so, this is the possibly the worst collection of officially-licensed Star Wars-related kids' materials I've ever seen.

For your pleasure: the official Darth Vader Dime Bank!

If you're a parent with children between the ages of 3 and 13, you're no doubt familiar with "High School Musical." If you're Jewish as well, you'll probably get as a big a kick out of this joke as I did. My kids loved it so much they had me make shirts for them to wear to camp.

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), artist

I was shocked to see this story. I thought we were the only teenagers innocently dumb enough to play this -- the choking game. Suffocation, which includes hanging, overtook gunshot in 1997 as the No. 1 way 10- to 19- year olds take their own lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as reported in the New York Times today.

Back in my day, about four or five of us would go up into a friend’s room and Mark (not On The Mark), who was the strongest in the neighborhood would take turns choking one of us so we could pass out and the others could watch the person twitch and jerk around. I only did it once; being choked was not to my liking.

According to the article: “Asphyxiation games have been with us for generations, but what makes the current generation’s execution of this game different is that more kids are willing to play it alone,” said Dr. Thomas Andrew, the chief medical examiner in New Hampshire, who has consulted on 20 cases around the country where the game was suspected.

We also experimented with hypnosis until we showed off to a friend’s mother that we could make the neighbor kid smell ammonia and he thought he was smelling perfume. I am sure the mother saw a massive lawsuit and huge liability insurance claims. That pretty much ended our fun; it was back to balloon water fights.