Handy Manny Is Ready To Fix

I've often wondered why is it I'm helpless around my Dad's toolshed.  The guy knows how to build anything from scratch.  


Sure, I know the names of the tools--the wrenches, the C-clamp, the vise grip, the rivet gun, the crowbar (or bareta), the plane (or katam), but dislodging a nail and straightening it out are about all the things I can do.  I often think with my eye for details I'd make a good carpenter, but then again the last time I made a screen lid for the compost bin, the thing collapsed after a few days of being lifted.


True, in Baguio me and Edge were able to make a tiny Japanese table out of bamboo, scrap plywood, nails and sturdy string, but I call it a miracle.  In the end, our lopsided table had one leg shorter than the rest, but still it served us well for a good many dinners.

* * *

Anyway, here's a guy who doesn't have to sweat out anything at all: Handy Manny!  His animated tools do all the job for him.


I saw an episode once on TV, where Handy Manny made a door for a butterfly conservatory, and I remember thinking, it's no fair: he's got tools that automatically help.  (If you'll notice in the pic below, Handy Manny's just using a pencil.  The saw does the sawing.)

Enter Fisher Price's Fix-It-Right Manny Repair Shop ($63 at Amazon)


It's the carpentry kit and workbench with an actual blueprint for creating various projects.  There are 20 projects to create, and some 40 parts to tinker with.  Nails, screws, saw, drill, boards--Handy Manny has got them all for your budding carpenter.


Exclusively for boys?  Nah.  Who ever said only boys can be carpenters?

Dogs That Make You Fetch and Dogs That Dont

In the plastic world of Mattel, the tables have been turned.   Meet Red Rover.

Red Rover getting emotional, sort of

Now electronic toy dogs bark the orders and make humans (namely kids and toddlers) fetch bones and in the process teach them a thing or two about shapes, colors, and numbers.  With a grand total of 12 color-coded bones (and twelve's mighty lot), expect the little ones to really know their colors.

Up to (4) four kids can join in this game of give-the-dog-a-bone.  The winner of course is the one who can give the right bones the swiftest.  Red Rover doesn't  sing or hum This Old Man (he's a toy dog, remember?), but he still barks encouragingly.

Nice: Kid-safe plastic parts, amusing and educational at the same time.
NOT Nice: Only nine (9) letters in the alphabet are used in the bones.  Not so educational after all. 

Red Rover is priced at $19.96 at Amazon.

Since we're on the topic of toy dogs, here's a nifty canine made out of tightly woven and corded recycled newspaper from VivaTerra.  The dog doesn't fetch or make you fetch and teach you stuff, but it sure knows how to sit and stay.

Two More Kaisiqi Puzzles

Because they're just PhP25.  :)
And they make nice keychains besides. 

The puzzle on the right, IMO, is ten times harder than the one on the left, which can be solved in about ten seconds on your first try, so just don't buy the left.  But you'll probably need it anyway to get the concept down pat.  Happy solving!

Tangled in Metal: Kaisiqi Metal Puzzles

Cubik's Rube

If you can solve a Rubik's Cube in a blink of an eye, then you're part of 6% of Earth's entire population who can solve the damn thing.  Actually, I just made that figure up, but suffice it to say up to now I can only do a single face.

Rubik's Cube for the blind

Here's a Rubik's Cube that relies not on color but instead asks you to arrange according to texture: stone, metal, plastic, wood, rubber, and textile.  

It's a Rubik's Cube for the blind.

* * *

Since its invention in 1974, Erno Rubik's humble Magic Cube has had many variations to further complicate the already complex, nose-bleeding puzzle, including a cruel 4 x 4 x 4 (called Rubik's Revenge), a crueler 5 x 5 x 5, a 6 x 6 x 6, a 7 x 7 x 7 (Sorry I ran out of adjectives), and a torturous Pentamix Rubix which has 975 parts and 1,212 stickers--which begs the question, do you still have a social life?

Should you get tired of the cube format there's a Rubik's Ball, a Pyraminx, a dodecahedron Rubik (with 12 faces) and an irregular Rubik's Cube (with irregularly shaped pieces that somehow still can be turned).

The first time I saw a Rubik's Cube I marvelled at it for hours.  I dismantled it, trying to figure out what engineering feat made it possible for a single piece of cube to be carried off so far and on a different dimension from its starting point with just a few twists.  Unfortunately that kind of curiousity and tinkering didn't make me any wiser.
  

Pantone Rubik's Cube for your geeky friend

Meanwhile, for those who just don't have the patience (or maybe those who have arthritis) but would like to feel at par with the hypothetical 6% of Earth's population, there's an Idiot's Cube (euphemistically called the Self-Esteem Cube) by CoolThings.  All the cubes are of the same color so it pretty much takes care of the solving process for you.

(Photo on right: A Pantone-based Rubik's cube for your interior decorator pal or your geeky web designer friend).

More creative takes on the Rubik's Cube here: http://www.oddee.com/item_96712.aspx

Tangled in Metal

The next time you're at National Bookstore check out the Kaisiqi metal puzzles (only PhP 25).  They've devoted (at least in the branch I went to) an entire island to the toys, so it's pretty hard to miss.

There are about ten different puzzles-- basically 2 identical pieces of stubbornly interlocked and hopelessly tangled hardened steel in various shapes (I bought the one that look like a pair of eights for infinity and beyond!).  They look deceptively easy and innocent enough, but I'm wrong. 

I wish I could tell you the secret of how to solve the Kaisiqi puzzle, but I've locked and unlocked the damn thing about ten times already and I still can't get the underlying principle.  I twist and turn nonchalantly and the whole thing comes off on its own accord.  When I concentrate all my powers, the metal pieces stays impossibly tangled.

Sometimes I think I'm just tugging.  Must exercise the right brain hemisphere more.

* * *

Did I tell you they're just PhP 25?  I should have bought two then, or three, or four (they'd make perfect Christmas gifts--I can go like, Here, I have a gift for you.  Go knock yourself out).  The solitary puzzle I bought is still puzzling as hell, so it's pretty safe to assume this Kaisiqi will pay for itself for the months to come.  In other words, sulit.

There's one thing though: the Kaisiqi puzzles are made in China.  It may mean nothing, but history has taught us that the poisonous melamine in milk came from China, that China-made toys were tainted with lead, and quite recently, Chinese rice has been deliberately faked by contaminating it with plastic resin.

At the back of my evil hypochondriac mind, I'm thinking the damn metal puzzles are tainted with radioactive material.  Which is why they're so cheap.  Every time I toy with it for a couple of minutes, I have to go to the faucet to wash my hands feverishly--which, should the metal toys prove to be radioactive after all, I know is quite pointless

Actually, the very chair we're sitting on can contain some radioactive material, as do the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the consumer products we buy.  I wonder how do we know whether something has unsafe levels of radioactivity.  I'm dying (pun intended) to have the Kaisiqi toys tested, and if they're clear then I'll buy the entire series and wrap it up for Christmas, never mind if it's still nine months away.  If we happen to share some kind of affinity and you're reading this, then you already know what you're getting.

P.S.  I'm uninspired.  I should have have watched Disney's Tangled. 

The Best Multi-Awarded Educational Toys For Kids [Part 1]

Magic School Bus Going Green Science Kit

1. The Magic School Bus "Going Green" Science Kit (from Young Scientists Club)

Toy Industry awards: 30
Age: 5 +
Amazon Price: $21.99  $14.32

Okay, this cool learning toy is geeky and all, but who cares? The fun it packs is downright superb, so go right ahead.  The Magic School Bus "Going Green" Science Kit unleashes the young scientist in your kid, letting your kid learn how to save the planet through a series of fun and exciting DIY experiments, such as:

    * Recreating the water cycle,
    * Building a compost tube,
    * Shrinking plastic,
    * Making styrofoam packaging cubes disappear,
    * Decomposing food with fungi,
    * Making eco-friendly paper

Every Magic School Bus Science kit is designed by Harvard graduates, scientists, acclaimed educators and parents, and what's more--they're tested and approved by kids themselves attending the Young Scientist Summer camps.










2. Blokus (from Mattel)

Blokus

Toy Industry Awards: 26, including a Mensa Award
Age: 5 +
Amazon Price: $24.99  $20.00

Blokus is an award-winning educational toy that both kids and their parents can enjoy.  It's a strategy game that hones your kid's logic and spatial skills by letting them figure out how to fit their pieces on the game board while blocking their opponents'. 

Sounds easy?  Yes, and no.  Blokus is easy enough to understand and learn, but the head-scratching (and fun) becomes greater as you progress into the game.  All in all, this is one great educational toy worth getting hooked into anytime.

For a more challenging game, there's Blokus 3D.

Qwirkle

3. Qwirkle (from MindWare)

Awards:
    * Games Magazine Award: Best Family Game Runner-up 2007
    * Mensa Best Mind Game Award Winner 2007;
    * Major Fun Award Winner 2007

      Age: 6 +
      Amazon Price: $34.99 $16.51

Tired of dominoes?  Qwirkle might just be the answer.  This is not just your average match-the-colors-and-shapes educational toy.  You never sit casually to a game of Qwirkle, you bring your best logical skills and strategy to the table.  Players try to score the highest by laying out their tiles according to the shape and color.

Sounds simple enough, but when you're in the thick of it, you'll realize that the best scores to outdo your opponent are achieved when you lay a wicked combination of tiles.

4. GloBonz (by Curious Toys)

GloBonz

Awards:
    * National Parenting Publication’s (NAPPA) Honor Award Winner,
    * Family Fun Magazine Toy of the Year Award Winner

      Age: 5 +
      Amazon Price: $29.99 $25.98 

      No matter what, kids will always be fascinated with dinosaurs, so Curious Toys takes this fascination to a whole new level with GloBonz's glow-in-the-dark dinosaur skeletons.  There's fun and learning with vertebrae, you know. 


With 32 swiveling and flexible joint pieces in each canister, and what's more, they can be interchanged with other GloBonz construction kits. They can be practically made into fabulous and weird creatures, not just dinosaurs.  The verdict: puzzle-solving skills and imagination, a big check. 

5. Stars, Planets, Forces Science Kit (From Young Scientists Club)


Awards:

Stars, Planets, Forces Science Kit

    * Dr. Toy's "100 Best Children's Products"
    * The National Parenting Center Seal of Approval,
    * Learning Success Institute "Outstanding Learning Success Resource Award",
    * National Parenting Publications Parenting Awards

Age: 9+
Amazon Price: $26.99 $24.97


The Stars, Planets, Forces Science Kit combine three nifty science kits in one package.

This multi-awarded educational toy deftly introduces your budding astronomer/physicist into the wonderful world of science governed with such curious forces as gravity, momentum, and Newton's Three Laws of Motion.

Packed with several fun interactive experiments, this science kit lets your kid build their very own star book and constellation box, a planetarium, and even their own DIY telescope.

I'd Like to Have a Word with You

In sixth grade, my classmate let me borrow her Word Factory--the Filipino patented version of Boggle.  (Boggle had only a 4x4 grid while Word Factory had a 5x5, although back then, I didn't even know about Boggle.)

Now, Word Factory wasn't a game I'd readily let a friend borrow no matter how close we were.  It had 25 letter cubes--a single missing cube will just be plain ugly.  And it had an hourglass too, which, to a 11-year-old, is highly breakable.  Still, that didn't stop my classmate from letting me take her Word Factory home for a night.  Which is why I'll be forever grateful to Ellaine, wherever you are.

I didn't break the hourglass; I didn't lose a single cube, I returned her game in perfect working condition, I was a good borrower.  A few days later my mom bought me my very own Word Factory.  Curiously enough, the sand in the hourglass was pink.


* * *

The first time I saw Boggle, I thought they must be joking--it had only 16 letters.  For someone who's used to Word Factory, Boggle seems ridiculously easy and rather limiting.  Were they just scrimping on the letter cubes?  Word Factory doesn't even believe in three-letter words.  Sure, we can find the usual dog, god, rats, star, etc. in Boggle, but when it comes to the long words that are supposed to score you big (doggedly, demigod, muskrats, startling, for instance)--the probabilities become pretty slim.

Just when I thought Boggle was just for kids, apparently you can actually play Boggle as if it had a 6 x 6 instead of the usual 4 x 4 grid, just with a little imagination and something called the periodic boundary conditions (or PBC), as seen in the picture.  You just imagine the grid extending one more row and column on either side.  The letters on opposite sides, you simply exchange with each other, as in the case of F & I, Y & Z, and so on.

This is a heady game.  I'd rather stick to my old Word Factory.

* * *

I recently broke my pink hourglass.  I must find a new one because my phone's timer is just not the same.