The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Harry Connolly:

My son was excited to buy a board game, and since he was barely three, we picked up Chutes and Ladders for him.

Ugh.

The game would be fine if not for the moralizing. It isn't enough to skip ahead or slide back in the game if you land on a certain square, each of the chutes and ladders has to teach a lesson.

If you land on the square with a picture of a girl pigging out on candy, you slide down the chute to the picture of the same girl with a tummy ache.

Ride a bike with no hands ---> Broken arm

Read a comic book when you should be reading a history book ---> sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap

The "ladders" are mostly better: When you plant a garden, you get pretty flowers. When you care for your pet, you get the pet's love.

The ones that really bug me the most are the Sunday School Exemplary Story Effects, just as you mentioned. Mow the lawn, go to the circus. What crap. I do not want my son to learn that he gets rewards for taking out the trash. Until he turns 18, taking out the trash is his whole purpose in life. Frankly, that's why I wanted a kid. I was sick of taking out the trash and doing the dishes. I don't need some board game that forces me to shell out for tickets.

Luckily, he doesn't pay any more attention to the games moral lessons than he does to mine. When I asked him about the pictures of the girl who carried a too-tall stack of plates and bowls at the top of the chute and sitting amidst a pile of broken crockery at the bottom, he told me that it meant you should never take a bunch of dishes on the slide.

Smart kid.

And here's an example right here, in an article about new ways of marketing a novel (which just happens to be released tomorrow.)

This entry has soured me on newspapers a bit.

Hardly anyone really wants to read large bodies of text on the screen. If you've got something that people will want to read if they get a serious sample of it, making it readily available electronically will cause many of them to go looking for a print copy.

Writers have been posting sample chapters on their websites for years, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't driven their sales up. If I'm wrong, please let me know.

What makes people want to buy a book that's entirely available online, when they're less likely to buy one that has a free partial online?

And here in Seattle, we get everything backwards. Here, 3 black soldiers were convicted of lynching an Italian POW, although later investigation shows they were almost certainly innocent.

And the incident occurred just over the hill from me.

Again, if you agree with Sen. Durbin and support him, write to him and say so. Takes just a minute.

Done.

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