Sure, you could go on YouTube and see the original classic Who’s On First with Abbott and Costello, but it’s a lot more fun to read the new book with your child. They love reading
Who’s On First aloud and discovering the double meanings of common words. If you’re looking for an easy-to-read book for young readers (mine is 8), this is a good choice you’ll read several times. If you’re lucky, maybe you can run the skit with your child playing Costello (or Abbott) and get it on video. YouTube hit anyone?

I was ready to be disappointed when I saw the email heading on yet another statement on a school shooting. I was expecting the usual call to discuss violence in our schools and in our culture. However, the National PTA really stood up this time, making very black and white statements that clearly support what Joe Biden has been suggesting over the past few days after his meetings with civic leaders. In the National PTA press release on the Taft Union High School shooting, the PTA lists their top three priorities:

• Universal background checks for the sale and possession of firearms;
• A ban on non-sporting ammunition in high-capacity magazines; and
• The reenactment and expansion of an effective federal ban on the sale and possession of military-style assault weapons

Thankfully absent were any hollow statements about addressing our culture. The priorities of the National PTA are just common sense steps that all Americans should support, whether gun rights advocates or not. The most recent killings have nothing to do with Second Amendment or sportsman’s freedom. They are however, directly related to a gun industry that feeds on people’s fears while actively denying rules that would save thousands of very innocent lives every year.

The one thing I don’t understand is why they decided to release this statement on a Friday, rather than the start of the news week.

For what it”s worth, take a second to tweet this news and LIKE it on Facebook.

I’m loving the puzzle I got for Christmas. It’s a 1000-piece version of the New Yorker cover Maira Kalman did shortly after 9/11 called “Newyorkistan.” She translates the city of New York and it’s five boroughs into an exotic land filled with exotic names and a camel named Stan. My son and I have been working on it diligently, with the (sometimes) help of my wife and daughter. I love the way puzzles allow for parallel work and idle conversation. My son is 8, so a lot of his questions are just random things he thinks of during the day, or his pronouncements on Star Wars or Skylander Giants lore. He asks me a lot about vocabulary he discovers in Minecraft, but we mostly just marvel at the magic of finding the “right” piece and how it so satisfactorily fits into the open spaces. This is the same feeling we get when we do LEGOs together, recognizing the common memes, finding the right pieces, feeling that wonderful click that LEGO is famous for (and which Megablocks just can’t seem to get).

The puzzle is about a 1/3 finished with a lot of play value left, though I sense I’m the only one using it to avoid work, rather than as a fun activity that brings the family together on a long winter evening when dad has forbade iPad and TV.

This video is making it’s way around the internets with some proclaiming Missouri resident Emio Tomeoni, as the world’s greatest dad, ostensibly since he looks to be having fun with his son during his wife’s 110 minute absence. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a cute video, and hats off to Emio for making video memories he’ll treasure as his boy gets big. But let’s not lionize a man, or woman, beyond reason for spending some time with his kids. Until we get over this dichotomy of man hero versus absent dad, we won’t make any progress on convincing the millions of uninvolved dads that what Emio is doing is what every dad should be doing when he has a few hours with his baby son.

Fun video to watch. It brings back memories.

I’ve had it up to my spam filter with bright holiday graphics telling me to have a great holiday. I appreciate the sentiment and I’m an ordinarily cheery holiday person, not at all a bah humbug type. But do I really need 50-75 emails from companies wishing me a joyful holiday. I’d even take this to the next level, even if you’re a person, rather than a corporate entity, you’re not making a good impression by sending an impersonal greeting, especially at this time of year. The only people who get a pass on that type of group greeting are the ones looking out for a holiday tip from their hundreds of customers, like the paper boy (girl, man, woman). Okay, that said, I can go back to deleting all the holiday greetings from this morning. Only 4 more days to go and then we can start the gratuitous happy new year wishes.

Have a wonderful holiday.

I just got a note from the National PTA. They have issued statements supporting the families at Sandy Hook school. They will be issuing a longer statement in the coming days about gun violence and school safety. I hope that this statement will include some real calls for a renewed assault weapons ban and a return to commonsense laws about guns in public spaces. Anything less after this tragedy is just more blah, blah, and insults everyone who reads or hears the words. There is some hope finally, that the long silence on this issue will be broken. Several pro-gun Democrats (John Warner and Joe Manchin) are risking their NRA A-ranking to support gun control and even some Republicans are being forced to say what everyone knows: guns kill dads, moms,sisters, brothers, and even little 5 and 6 year old kids.

Some will say that this is a mental health issue. That is true. There is no other excuse than pure evil to do what Adam Lanza did. But it’s mostly an issue of access. Access to guns. An insane person with a knife might kill one person. An insane person with three automatic weapons can kill 20-40 in a short period of time.

Domestic gun violence is a larger threat than terrorism. Guns killed 31,000 Americans in 2010 in homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings. If Muslim extremists were doing this, we would start wars and spend billions on security systems as we did in the wake of 9/11. But our response to gun violence is to weaken our gun laws, and to promote their presence in more public spaces including churches, hospitals, bars, and even in schools.

Let us hope that our politicians will be forced to gain the courage they have lacked for so many years on this issue. The NRA is not as strong as the PTA. It is not as strong as the AARP. It is not as strong as all the moms and dads who gulped back a tear thinking about what might have happened if Sandy Hook had been their school. While some of us would like to see a wider ban of guns, we don’t even have to ban all guns to make an event like Sandy Hook dramatically less inevitable. If we don’t take action now, the blood of the children at the next school (and the next and the next) is on all of our hands.

Please voice your support of a strong national gun policy to whatever organizations you belong to, including the PTA. As Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) did in the ’80s, we can do today to restore some sanity to our daily lives.

There are so many great toys out there. I don’t know how anyone choose beyond what the kids say they absolutely must have this year. I can tell you what’s on my son’s list and that will give you an idea of your 8-year old boy:

1. Stylus – his sister has one. Her school gave out iPads in seventh grade, so she spends every evening doing math, English, and science on the iPad. I don’t know if my son really needs a stylus for his Minecraft obsession, but he does want to at least appear as pro as his sister.

2. Skylanders Giants – this is the big Wii and xBox game of the season. It feeds the pre-tween desire to collect figurines with a game that requires a special add-on attachment. $75 though.

3. Calvin and Hobbes Science Progress Goes Boink – All I care is that he’s reading, and if Calvin & Hobbes is the heights of his literary taste right now, so be it. It could be worse.

4. Any LEGO City collection. Yes, the maw of the LEGO god must be filled and my son’s latest obsession is with the worldly objects of the City collection, as opposed to his dalliances with Ninjago and LEGO Star Wars.

2. Fuze Wheel Writer- I love this modern variation on the card-in-the-bicycle-wheel. This small device easily mounts directly not the spokes and shows 12 animated designs as you bike. It even includes a speedometer mode, though that is more for showing off how fast you’re going since it’s kind of hard to read from where the biker is sitting. Works on most bikes wheels 20″ and above. $20 on Amazon.

3. New Perplexus Twist – The family has spent hours on the Original and the Epic trying to get the little ball from Number 1 to Number 80. Now Perplexus as a new twist on the game: you literally have to twist the two halves of the globe at certain points to make the paths line up. I love this game, not only because it reminds of hours spent with my Brio Labyrinth as a child (admittedly pre-video games) but also because it’s a challenging game that doesn’t involve electronics. There’s nothing wrong with video games per se, but it’s fun to see a child again immersed in a problem without attendant beeps of synthesized sounds. The Perplexus Twist is on my wish list. Maybe my son will give it to me and then I won’t have to pass it to him when I lose. $25 on Amazon.

4. Nerf Lazertag System – I’ve wanted this ever since I saw it at Toy Fair a year ago. These guns can be played with as a pretty decent laser tag game, but are best when you add in augmented reality, the future of electronic gaming. To take advantage of this feature, players must insert a WIFI enabled iPhone or iPod Touch into the special cradle in the gun. Then players see reality around them and enhanced reality through the iPhone’s camera. “Enhanced” because the iPhone screen shows real live video combined with animations of aliens or explosions around friends. I can only imagine since I do not have one… $55 on Amazon for a 2 Player Pack.

5. Air Hogs Battle Tracker Helicopter – Could we even have Christmas gift lists without an AIr Hogs helicopter on the list? After the fun we had with Heli Replay earlier in the year, I want to graduate to this helicopter/target setup. The Missile station tries to shoot you down while your helicopter tries to hit it with missiles. Now that these helicopters can do more than just go up and down, this is the next generation. $100 on Amazon.

With even a few of these under the tree for my son, and I’ll be as excited as he is on Christmas morning. What do you think odds are my wife will get any of them for me if I put them on my list?

The LEGO books from No Start Press are just a joy. If my son could, he would own them all. He can spend hours just looking at the pictures and dreaming, I suppose, of sets he could have and build.

The LEGO Adventure Book is a bit different than others. This book is about the creations made by the best LEGO builders. With step by step instructions on how creations were built, this is a view into the process of a master builder. Special notes on tricks or concepts are added within the instructions to provide added insights on how real people actually build all these things

While this book isn’t as much a catalog of cool LEGOs, it makes a great addition to the library of the LEGO builder who aspires to create things from scratch that look like the things you buy in a store. Not all kids want to do that, preferring to build abstract machines with imaginary doors and armaments. But for the budding engineer who is trying to marry construction and workable design, this is a good book for them to pore over.

If your little engineer wants to go further and is into more technical detail, consider The Unofficial LEGO Builder’s Guide. This book is less sexy and has far more words, but digs in deep in how to build using diagrams and much text. You’ll find here on how to successfully build a house or plane, but also how to create LEGO depictions of clothing and sculptural versions of less angular structures such as the Sphinx. I particularly liked sections in the back of the book including the Brickopedia, a partial catalog of LEGO bricks and how they can best be used. Near the back are also the basics of grid planning to help LEGO builders plan out their new creations.

GreatDad.com Review Policy: The featured product for this review was provided to us, at no cost, by the manufacturer or representing PR agency for the sole purpose of product testing. We do not accept monetary compensation for reviewing or writing about products. We only review products that we have personally tested and used in our own homes, and all opinions expressed are our own.

This is the first product I’ve seen all year that has gotten me this excited. As opposed to other fun toys and gadget, the Belkin @TV. Belkin @TV will literally change the way you watch TV. The Belkin @TV is that good, and I say this having bought and used a Slingbox, the leader in this category, for the past four months.

Belkin @TV Plus – Mobile Television Anywhere

The Belkin @TV is a device that sits between your Cable box (Comcast in our case) and the TV. It “sees” and “hears” whatever is going through the cable box and sends it via WIFI or ethernet and back out to you and your computer, iPhone, iPad, or other . This is similar to the Slingbox, except in a few critical areas.

1. The Belkin box setup is dead easy. The directions looked simple, but I emotionally steeled myself for a multi-hour fun fest of jumbled wires, tears and an off-hour call to customer support. This was my experience with Slingbox SOLO, which eventually worked, but took a while. The Belkin @TV setup was fast and easy, and when it started up, a mere 23 minutes after I started, I was blown away by its miraculous appearance. It really shouldn’t be this easy since it raises the bar for other like devices. I should mention that I did learn a bit from the Slingbox experience, especially where the cable box IR sensor is.

2. The reception was crystal clear on my iPad and on my computer. WIth the Slingbox, I was used to a grainy, stuttering image figuring that was the price I had to pay for TV on the run. You grin and bear it when you’re 2000 miles from your TV and you’re still able to watch a rerun of Homeland. With the Belkin @TV though, TV is clear and crisp with only minor starts and stops. I know the compression technology for this is changing all the time and the new Slingbox just out may be far better than my personal experience, but the comparison between the Belkin @TV and the Slingbox SOLO is not even close.

I have no knowledge of why the Belkin @TV works, but I have two theories. On the computer, you launch a special @TV app rather than watching the TV in your browser. That likely protects memory resources better than inside a browser. Likewise, an app on a tablet works the same way. I never bought the Slingbox apps for iPad and iPhone because each cost $30 partly because I’m cheap, but mostly because I was insulted that I had bought an incomplete product that didn’t work without add-on costs.

3. Finally, and maybe the most magically, the iPad app for the Belkin @TV is free with purchase of the box. This means that when you set up your Belkin @TV, your first test is with the device you are going to use most to watch: your tablet. And what a love affair it immediately is. As I walked from room to room with my iPad watching a news show, I marveled at how we finally have arrived at what MOBI TV was trying to do 10 years ago. Now with a WIFI connection, you really are untethered not only to TV, but to YOUR TV, which is what we all want. I don’t want to watch whatever’s on; I want to watch what’s in my queue.

With a good WIFI connection, you go outside, you step away when the kids are talking over the news, you might even be tempted to take your @TV with you during private moments. There is just no reason to put your TV on pause anymore. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. But it feels pretty damn cool when you’re doing it. I have to say that with the Slingbox, I never even thought about using it in my own home.

As a side note, Sling Media still charges $14.99 for apps for iPad or iPhone, after cutting prices in half last month. This has to be one of the stupidest marketing decisions ever. I’ve read dozens of reviews by Slingbox owners who basically love the product but are insulted and incensed that they have to pay extra to make the thing work.

Of course, there are some drawbacks. For one, Belkin gives you the app for the iPad, but you have to pay $12.99 for the app for iPhone. This is pretty stupid, but not as stupid as what Slingbox does. Unfortunately, I had trouble setting up the Belkin iPhone app, but did get it sorted out after several calls to customer service and a lengthy process opening up ports on my router and Comcast modem. This apparently is very easy on simpler setups where the opening of ports is done in the background without needing to get under the hood. I’d have to warn users who might have a modem and other firewall that this will be a bit of process if you have to go this route. Once up however, you do get very good images on a 3G network while you’re sitting in the dentist’s office waiting for your kids, which I was doing last night. It sure beats reading old copies of Time.

The @TV’s maximum resolution is 480p, which is standard TV resolution (not HD). On an iPad screen, it looks pretty good, though really finicky viewers may beg to differ. Slingbox’s new Sling Media 350 re-broadcasts to your device at 1080p high def.

Additionally, while the @TV app on the computer uses an image replica of your familiar cable (or other) remote to control your home cable box, on the iPad the remote is less intuitive and hard to use for scrolling through TV guides for current programming. You have to program specific buttons to work in the Belkin remote, which means yet another remote to learn. The experience watching from a computer is better in this regard, since there you are looking at a replica of your familiar cable remote.

Still, I am in love with my Belkin @TV. I’m not watching more TV, but I am watching it in a different way.

GreatDad.com Review Policy: The featured product for this review was provided to us, at no cost, by the manufacturer or representing PR agency for the sole purpose of product testing. We do not accept monetary compensation for reviewing or writing about products. We only review products that we have personally tested and used in our own homes, and all opinions expressed are our own.

Why is this toy/game so hot? My son drags his Skylanders portal, nunchucks, and Skylanders characters on every playdate so he can play with his friends. It’s a pain in the tail, and he leaves them all over town all the time, imploring me to take special drives to pick them up. Skylanders Giants is SO hot because it combines the kind of stuff that 8 year old boys love: fantasy action and collectible figurines. Why boys like to play with this type of toy, intricately painted and not at all real life-like, is anyone’s guess, but toymakers have it figured out. Skylanders Giants is the game for young boys to lust after this holiday season. Skylanders Giants was released in the US on October 19, 2012.

Skylanders Giants Starter Kit

Skylanders, and the new Skylanders Giants, is a unique game. Like some other interactive games for Wii, to play you need to have a special device, a “portal,” which looks like raised circular platform. The Portal reads the Skylander character you’ve chosen to play with. Along with the figurines, 50 more characters are available for purchase.

The game itself is made for kids, rather than for all ages, and is pretty simple. The basic story, building on the original Skylanders, “Spyro’s Adventure.” The objective here is to help the expelled Giants return to their home while fighting the villain, Chaos. If your kids loved Skylanders, they’re sure to love Giants since it’s more a continuation of the original story than a completely new game. While the story is shorter than the original, you’ll be happy that progress made with the old figurines is saved in the new game, and levels have been increased so old figures now go to 15 levels of powers (versus 10)

Parents should know that the game will fuel more consumerism. In fact, that’s the very basis of the Skylanders franchise; to build an obsession with collecting more figures both to play the game and to have them all! Your kids will want more characters, and jealously guard, or trade those they have and yearn to buy more a la carte for about $10 each. As we track back the many many seasonal fads like this, we can debate whether this is a horrible thing or not, but parents should be aware that they are buying a collectible toy wrapped inside a video game. For this reason especially, Commonsensemedia.org recommends Skylanders Giants for kids 10+. While the cartoon violence is frequent, it involves no blood and isn’t any worse than other games of this type for ages 8+.

Skylanders Giants starter pack is $74.99 at Amazon. Lower priced options are available if you already have the portal.