Ohdeedoh.com has some photos from a Star-Wars-themed nursery for a two-month-old boy named Rocky. (The parents are obviously big fans of 1970s movies.) The nursery is very tastefully done, and rather puts our poor efforts in this regard to shame.
It turns out R2-D2 speaks baby. YouTuber amcclay415 comments, "Please. Never *ever* allow this child to see the prequels."
From Unplggd:
Kayla Kromer's light up Millennium Falcon Bed is a Star Wars geek dream come true, complete with LED lights and and hideaway spot for a keyboard. Pair it up with the Millennium Falcon Mac Mini mod and you're ready to jump to light speed into the sector of Tattoinweenie!
If you've decided to infect your defenceless children with Star Wars mania, or if they came home one day infected through no fault of your own, you may want to have a look at ThinkGeek's latest Star Wars novelty item: a Star Wars remote controlled lightsaber night light.
As wee geeks, we were irrational little beings. It's no wonder, since the human brain is not fully developed until age 22. So we believed until just recently that monsters lived under our beds and that when the lights went out, horrible things could happen to us. We practiced hiding under our covers and breathing as shallowly as we possibly could so the monsters would think we weren't there. Did it work? Suppose it did, after all, we're here, aren't we?
How much more secure would we have been in our beds if we had this Lightsaber Room Light mounted on our wall? Press the button on the remote control and the hilt fires up and light fills the room. Certainly this would have terrified any monstrous creature and kept us safe. Why not give your wee geek the peace of mind you didn't have? This kit has everything you need to construct a lightsaber and mount it on your wall. Choose from 8 awesome color effects, plus auto-spectrum using the remote control!
ThinkGeek: Star Wars Remote Controlled Lightsaber Room Light
This is from 2008 but it was news to me and rather depressing news at that. A report from the UK National Trust found that more British children knew who Yoda was than knew basic facts about nature and the outdoors. From a piece covering the report at Canada.com:
The implications of increased screen time are spelled out in a new report by U.K. conservation agency National Trust, which reveals today's children are more likely to identify Star Wars characters by name than the insects, animals and birds in their own backyards.
Of the 1,651 youngsters aged 10 to 12 surveyed, half couldn't tell the difference between a bee and a wasp, less than half recognized a barn owl, and barely more than a quarter could spot a magpie. About 90 per cent, however, correctly identified Yoda and Jar Jar Binks.
"If you look at how much time kids spend watching television and movies versus how much time they spend outdoors or in the classroom concentrating on wildlife and nature, nobody should be really surprised (by the survey results)," says Debbie Griff, program manager of HWW, an initiative of the Canadian Wildlife Federation and Environment Canada.
Similarly from the National Trust web site:
We found that:
- Just 53 per cent could correctly identify an oak leaf – the national tree and a powerful symbol of England
- 29 per cent failed to spot a magpie, despite the numbers soaring three-fold over the past 30 years
- Only 47 per cent of children correctly identified a barn owl
- One in three failed to recognise a Red Admiral, Britain’s best-known butterfly
- Children in Northern Ireland – where half couldn’t recognise a magpie – were least able to identify common wildlife
- Children in East Anglia, meanwhile, proved to be most aware of their natural surroundings
When it came to identifying fictional creatures, however, children’s abilities suddenly soared with:
- Nine out of ten able to correctly name Doctor Who’s enemies, the Daleks
- A similar number were able to identify Star Wars’ Jedi Grand Master, Yoda.
Canada.com: Too much Yoda, not enough magpie: show tackles kids' weak nature knowledge
National Trust: Wildlife is alien to a generation of indoor children
ThinkGeek's got Tauntaun sleeping bags in stock. If you don't know about these, this 2009 story from the New York Times Magazine will fill you in. The bag started as an April Fools Day joke but quickly turned into an officially licensed Lucasfilm product. (What does that tell you?) From the article:
The funny thing about ThinkGeek’s prank products, however, is that sometimes they do get made and sold, basically because the public demands it. The most recent example is the Tauntaun Sleeping Bag, which appeared on the site last April 1 as a gag and earlier this month went on sale for real, at $99. The item recalls a scene in the film “The Empire Strikes Back,” in which Luke Skywalker is freezing to death on the frigid planet Hoth, and Han Solo saves his life by slicing open the stomach of a dead Tauntaun (which is a sort of giant, ridable horse-lizard) and stuffing him in among its warm guts. The sleeping bag has a cute Tauntaun-head pillow, and its lining is printed with an intestine-like pattern. It’s absurd, but if you remember the scene from the movie, it’s also pretty much irresistible. Thus a lot of ThinkGeek’s customers, fooled or not, didn’t simply want to appreciate the funny idea of a Tauntaun sleeping bag. They wanted to own one. And said so in tens of thousands of e-mail messages and phone requests.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 5:37AM