Harriet the Spy

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Is this really an appropriate toy for a kids' meal?

I drove through Chick-Fil-A yesterday for a late lunch and I ordered a 4 pack kids nugget meal. I almost always order off the kids menu, because (1) I really don't need 8 nuggets and medium fries, and (2) it's way cheaper. Like by half. Anyway, if you order off the kids menu, you get a fun little prize in your bag. Sometimes, the prizes are pretty good. I collected all four foreign language CD's (Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Russian, if you must know.....and yes, I did listen to them). The prize yesterday left me scratching my head, though. It was a "Between the Lions" bookmark with a magnifying glass at the top. Seriously, whose idea was this? I mean, if you're old enough to read, but young enough to still be ordering off the kids menu (myself excepted), should you really need a MAGNIFYING GLASS to be able to see what you're reading?!? Maybe they're catching on to the fact that it isn't just the 5-9 year-old-group that's ordering off the kids menu these days....

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Time to bring back the blog?

Yeah, so it's been a while, huh? I think I might bring this blog back-- more for myself than anyone else, as I'm sure I've lost nearly all of my "readers."

Anyway, so I was listening to The Decemberists this evening and I bought a couple of songs from the Live iTunes thing that they did a while back. That got me thinking about the way we buy music these days. It's such an instant gratification thing now. I remember "back in the day" when you actually had to go to the store to buy (insert generational physical manifestation of music here). For me it was tapes, and then CDs. I can still recall the first CDs I bought. (The Meat Puppets and the Les Miserables soundtrack, in case you were wondering). One could easily spend hours in a music store browsing through everything. For me, Sensuous Sound was the place to go. "All CDs just $10.99!" In reality, they just wanted to get you through the door to look at all of their really high end audio and home theater stuff, but man, you couldn't beat that price on CDs. I kind of wonder what interesting things I'm missing by just dialing in whatever in iTunes now. I definitely love being able to get what I want when I want it, but I kind of miss the whole music store experience. Where am I going with this? I'm not really sure... but man, the Decemberists need to tour again soon. They put on a great show.

Interesting side note (or maybe not)-- The Decemberists' "Crane Wife" is based on a Japanese Folk tale that was once featured on Reading Rainbow. So if you listened to it and found yourself going, "man, I know that story from somewhere" maybe you have Lavar Burton to thank.