Helium Party Balloons

On the long drive home from the Toy Fair in Manhattan I made a mental list of which products I’d like to write about. I’d seen many new toys and games and had a bag full of press kits and business cards. But which should I write about first?

The answer actually came fairly easily: the one product that had been handed to me, in a small booth at the fair, with a promise that my kids would love it. I’d seen this crazy looking plastic thing from a distance and my curiosity drove me straight toward it. When I got up close I saw pictures that led me to believe it was some kind of sled. In fact, it was called a Zipfy sled.

Photo: Great Circle Works

I explained to the polite lad working the booth that we went through sleds in my family like they were disposable, one time use products. I have three teens, and one almost- teen. Three of them are boys. Boys who thrive on adventure and build ramps and jumps for anything they can ride, including sleds. The regular plastic sled doesn’t last long in our house and the one that’s the “least broken” is the one they all fight over.

Read more over at our sister site, GeekMom, about how Judy’s boys felt about the odd-looking sled.

A political cartoon from 1802 makes fun of the anti-cowpox vaccine movement — some things don't change. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

I have to think this is a good sign. Could it be that fact is finally making inroads on emotion in the anti-vaccine movement? Maybe, as yesterday’s protest against Bill Gates for his remarks on the movement drew only one twenty-fifth of a percent of the number the organizers hoped for.

Yesterday I wrote about Gates’s remarks about how the anti-vaccine proponents “kill children,” and explained how this statement, while inflammatory, is nonetheless accurate. I had been alerted to the existence of the CNN interview in which Gates said this by a press release that was, ironically, trying to convince me to write about how horrible Gates was for saying this and about a planned “50,000-Parent” protest yesterday in New York City.

Of those 50,000 people the organizers had expected, witnesses report that 18 showed up. Not 18,000, mind you: just 18 people.

I can only speculate, of course, on why the turnout was so low. Perhaps it was that the high temperature in NYC yesterday was only 44 degrees Fahrenheit, and people didn’t want to be chilly. Perhaps people who would otherwise have attended the protest realized that protesting Gates’s remarks at a Microsoft building in New York was a bit like protesting against President Obama at your local IRS office. Or could it be that the light has finally dawned on enough people that the anti-vaccine movement is dying?

A guy can hope, can’t he?

[Author’s Note: I realize that my source for the protest attendance figure is from a biased website. I searched extensively to find an unbiased source, but wasn’t able to. If you know of one, please email me or leave a comment.]

Dork Tower #922 by John Kovalic

Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad.

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