EBay Shifts Policies To Favor Buyers, Casual Sellers

Wired.com has an interesting piece up today about significant changes in eBay's feedback policies and fee structure, an article with a gentle buyer-centric slant. They're doing their due diligence in countering the corporate spin, but based on our own experiences on eBay I'd say they're giving the company's stance on feedback less weight than they should, and they failed to mention another significant change that will have a huge impact on the experience of bidding on the site.

Fee Changes

EBay will be lowering its "insertion fees" by 25 to 50 percent and increasing its "Final Value" fees, which are assessed when items sell. The clear beneficiaries of the site's fee shifts will be casual sellers; assessing fewer fees up front and more when items sell shifts the bargains towards people who list items that don't sell. While an inexperienced eBayer might take an unconsummated listing to be a sign of an item's objective "saleability" on eBay, the many who make their living from the online auction service will tell you that, beyond certain obvious product areas to avoid, most items that go unsold are improperly priced or poorly sold by their placement, timing, or descriptive text. This means that new and casual sellers will have cheaper chances to try out the service, and fail, without feeling burned, which seems like an obvious growth strategy for the company. Quibbles between eBay and its power sellers boil down to whether this adjustment results in greater overall costs or not - buyers estimate a 33% jump in fees, and eBay somewhat disingenuously claims a 40% dip.

Feedback Policy Changes

More interesting to us are the changes to the site's feedback policies, which we feel will have a dramatic impact on the buyer's experience on the site. EBay has always offered rating mechanisms for both buying and selling behavior on all eBay members, but will now virtually eliminate feedback on buying activities. In other words, sellers will no longer be able to post negative or neutral feedback on a buyer's profile if they have a bad experience with a buyer.

While this may on its face seem "imbalanced," it in fact redresses an imbalance that has plagued eBay from its inception. As an eBay spokesman explained to Wired.com:

"We've seen a four-fold increase in unwarranted negative feedback left for buyers in a retaliatory way. Buyers have told us consistently -- that one of the strongest reasons for not using the site is retaliatory feedback," says Lieberman. "If buyers have a bad transaction, that won't drive them away. What does drive them away is retaliatory feedback."

We experienced this firsthand, and it did in fact mark the end of our consistent use of eBay. Jenni bought a pair of shoes that were misrepresented as being of a particular brand, and when she received them she discovered they were in fact a cheap knock-off brand. Communicating with the seller did us no good, despite the clearly fraudulent nature of the item's description on eBay, and when we contacted the company's mediation arm we learned that the only way to initiate the process for getting a refund was to pay an up-front, nonrefundable fee of $25 - more than half of what we had paid for the item.

Our only recourse was to leave negative feedback on the seller's profile, describing our problem; the seller retaliated by leaving negative feedback on our own profile, after explicitly threatening us with it if we filed our own negative review. What struck me most about that situation was that the seller, who had feedback from hundreds of buyers, had the same "A++++" style feedback in droves, so our one complaint, which we considered a serious breach of ethics, had virtually no impact on his standing; we, in contrast, rarely sold on eBay and had only purchased a handful of items, so the negative feedback rating knocked our satisfaction rating down by more than 10%. This experience explained a lot about that "100% positive" rating that so many power sellers have; the costs of crossing them, by a dissatisfied buyer, may have simply been too great. It will be interesting to see how seller feedback ratings shift after the new policies are implemented.

The company says it will be introducing alternative methods for buyers to protect themselves from deadbeat bidders who bid up prices and then don't follow through with payment when they win, a leading cause of seller dissatisfaction.

Discouraging Bait-and-Switch Seller Pricing

Perhaps the single most significant change eBay is implementing may fix something that had been laughably broken on the site for a long, long time - the use of high shipping fees to allow ridiculously low sale prices that have allowed sellers to game the eBay search engine for years. The situation was so bad that it could be almost impossible to compete with honest listings in some areas, as they were buried under an avalance of "99-cent" items with exorbitant shipping fees to make up the difference.

We noticed a while back on one of our rare visits to the site that eBay was finally listing shipping charges in its search results, but still didn't combine them with sale or bid prices into a "total price" that would allow for legitimate price ranking. EBay now says it will take new steps to favor "honest" pricing in its display of listings. We look forward to seeing how they implement it.

Further Reading

• eBay's press release about the changes
• Wired.com's "seller backlash" article

Breaking News: Boiling Water Increases BPA Leaching By Factor of 55

From today's Globe and Mail:

Adding boiling water to polycarbonate plastic bottles causes a dramatic spike in the amount of bisphenol A, or BPA, leaching from containers into drinks, according to a U.S. research team.

The finding suggests that parents sterilizing polycarbonate baby bottles by heating them in water or in a microwave may be inadvertently increasing the amount of the estrogen-mimicking chemical leaching from the containers. It also indicates hikers who use the bottles as a thermos to store hot tea or liquids may be doing the same.

The addition of boiling water increased BPA migration rates by up to 55-fold compared with water at room temperature, according to experiments run at the University of Cincinnati. A paper outlining the findings is being released today in Toxicology Letters, a peer-reviewed journal. [Link|Via]

Want to protect your child from BPA? Check out our Z Report on BPA in bottles, sippy cups, and pacifiers, or our critique of the Environmental Working Group's report on BPA in infant formula.

Another Take On Non-Violent Conflict: "Medabots" Giveaway

A couple of days ago I posted about Little Capers' attempt to strip superhero play of its traditional overtones of conflict and even violence. Another interesting take on action without violence is Medabots, the 1990s Japanese cartoon series in which kids pit robots against each other against the backdrop of a larger battle between good and evil. Every robot has its own special powers and there is plenty of conflict, but the kids just control the fighting robots, who duel it out in a mechanized fashion.

This classic anime series was revived on Fox Kids and last week Shout! Factory released the first season of Medabots on DVD in a two-disc four-disc set. It lists for $35 and sells on Amazon.com for $31.

Want to win it? Comment on this post with your best tip for conflict resolution among young children. We'll accept entries until 11:59 p.m. CST Feb. 5, 2008, and announce a winner the next day. Leave an email address so we can contact you, or plan to come back after the giveaway ends to see if you won (we list winners in our "Claim Your Prize!" section of ZRecs' lefthand sidebar).

Don't miss your chance to win up to four Little Capers outfits from ZRecs sister site PRIZEY in the Little Capers Super Force! sweepstakes. Bloggers have a chance to win an extra outfit set aside just for them by posting about the giveaway. Enter by Jan. 31.

This giveaway is part of Bloggy Giveaways' Winter 08 Carnival. Kudos to Shannon for a great event, and we encourage you to dive into the master list of almost 800 giveaways and counting, or check out PRIZEY's "best-of" picks from the carnival.

Designing An Easier Belt For Young Children

Myself Belts are fabric or leather belts that use Velcro rather than the traditional pin-and-holes design so that young kids (or older ones with special needs) can fasten and unfasten it themselves. A worthwhile part of dressing oneself in its own right, such a device can have profound implications for potty training. When we were helping Z learn to use the toilet we went a long time without pants that required belts, which meant completely passing over some really cute hand-me-downs.

The company sent us the style at left to try out, and we liked the idea. The design feature that makes this product a standout is the snap that secures the "tail end" of the belt to one of the belt loops, locking it in place so that securing the belt involves the manipulation of one belt end rather than two. Z instantly understood how to fasten and unfasten the belt.

The downside to this independence-boosting design is that the belts have a fairly short lifespan, at least for an individual child. One of the nice things about that pin-and-hole system is that the belt fits for a long time.

Z's size S (3T-equivalent) belt seemed to run a little small for her, and she isn't a big girl. At three she had basically outgrown it. We would have done better with one size up, but a kid's belt with an inch or so of Velcro is going to get outgrown quickly no matter what.

The company makes a wide variety of styles for boys and girls. They sell for $15, unless you're into having your kid's name embroidered on stuff, in which you can drop $25.

We'd recommend the Myself Belt for children who are in the late stages of potty training and are working on getting into the bathroom and doing their business without assistance from parents, or who are facing challenges getting assistance with potty training at daycare. The Myself Belt is also a great development for older children and adults with special needs (yes, they sell them in adult sizes, too).

We're curious to hear from more experienced parents out there. How old was your child when they learned how to fasten a traditional belt? That general age would constitute an upper limit for this design's usefulness for most kids, and I personally have no idea what that age is.

You can buy Myself Belts on the company's website or at brick-and-mortar retailers you can locate using their directory.

Win our Myself Belt! We're giving away our pink Myself Belt, size S (3T). To enter, comment below about something your child is proud to be able to do "all by themselves." We'll accept entries until 11:59 p.m. CST Monday, Feb. 4; leave your email address or plan to check in our "Claim Your Prize!" list in the ZRecs sidebar next week; the winner will have five days to claim their prize.

The Superhero Thing: Little Capers, Hegel, and the Sound of the Moon

Our 3.5-year-old daughter Z is into pretend play, no question. She prepares a feast for her stuffed animals and her "babies" every night, down to the cloth napkins, and complained to me in a plaintive voice the other morning while playing with one of her imaginary friends that "Sylvie" had pushed her. (You try modeling conflict resolution strategies under those circumstances with a straight face.)

But it took a Little Capers shirt and cape to remind us of the limits of her current vocabulary of pretend-play roles. After days of wearing her new half-outfit while remaining the not-so-mild-mannered Z herself instead of transforming into a couch-jumping, distress-call-responding heroine, we finally put two and two together and realized that Z has no earthly idea what a superhero is.

It's ironic, because the concepts we have sheltered her from are precisely those that Little Capers are designed to subvert. Superheroes have not yet made it past our parental goaltending because of their inherent violence, conflict, and their genre's conception of evil, which is (in our view) a reality to be confronted at the mature age of four or five, at which point we'll pull out our stack of PowerPuff Girls DVDs. I'm guessing that if Z were a boy, she would have sucked all of this stuff in by osmosis by now, but last Halloween our little one still stared blankly at the preschool Supermen with their foam six-packs and the infants in Spider-Man outfits, and identified Disney Princesses based on their presence on her Pull-Ups.

Little Capers have a printed-on belt, strong but simple Velcro attachments for a bright cape, and a symbol on the chest showcasing one of several generalized, Zenlike forces - love, lightning, peace, concern for the planet - intended to help wean kids from the idea that superheroes are fixed personas they ape from television and the action-figure aisles. At its core, the semiotic adjustment is really an attempt at revolution, disentangling heroism and its superlative from violence altogether.

It's hard for me to envision what the success of such a coup might look like. Can the concept of the superhero survive being stripped of conflict? Is such conflict supposed to live on in strictly metaphorical terms? I can see how mental and interpersonal "superpowers" have gotten short shrift and could be used in a "super" way, but they still have to be pitted against something, don't they? Isn't strife - Hegel's dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis - the very foundation of Western civilization, or at least with so much of our current definition of it that to fail to embrace it, at least on a symbolic level, is to miss the boat on much of the good that pop culture has to offer?

Grrr! Hegel stole it all from Heraclitus, you fool!

Perhaps what makes these well-designed, well-constructed dress-up garments so great is the fact that they haven't mandated a peaceful encounter, but that they invite its natural development. There's nothing stopping a couple of kids from declaring intergalactic war between the superheros of Saturn and Earth, and there's nothing keeping Heart Girl from marrying the power of love with a kung fu grip. Such contradictory impulses can hang together only in mythology, in dreams, and in childhood.

Years ago I worked at a daycare. One day, while playing a listening game with a bunch of three-year-olds, a boy whisper in my ear that he could hear the moon, which was visible overhead. Good child care workers are sometimes born, sometimes made, and I was definitely one of the by-the-book school, fumbling my way through most of the head games I had no idea kids that young could play with adults. So one of my fondest memories from that period of my life is the knowledge that I had not been exposed to any percept of training that forced me to correct this kid on which sense was what. Instead, I listened with him, silently, hoping to hear that world.

If anyone can show us how to break free of supposedly ironclad dialectics that define heroism, superhuman achievement, and power, I'd put the money on my kid, not me.

Want to win up to four Little Capers shirts and capes for your children, their friends, or the kids in your neighborhood? Don't miss your chance to enter our sister blog PRIZEY's Little Capers Super Force! giveaway, which is accepting entries through Jan. 31.

The 21st Century Toothbrush

No, it isn't driven by lasers or sonic pulses. It doesn't brush your teeth for you, time your tooth-brushing regimen, or turn plaque into energy. It's 100% recycled, and when you retire it (dentists recommend replacing toothbrushes every three months - a lot of landfill) the company wants you to send it back to them, at their expense, so they can grind it up to be used to make plastic lumber.

The Preserve Jr. kids' toothbrush is nicely-designed. Its handle has a molded "peapod" grip that eliminates the need for an additional type of plastic to be used as a gripping surface, which is what makes most toothbrushes unrecyclable (the combination of plastics that are uneconomical to separate). You can download a postage-paid shipping label from the company's website, and they'll grind your old toothbrushes up, bristles and all, to make a strong, durable plastic they'll sell to companies that make stuff like picnic tables and decking materials.

Z loves her dark brown Preserve Jr., so we just bought her a new one on a recent trip to Whole Foods. Toothbrushes are one of the few areas in her life that has traditionally been dominated by licensed characters - we enjoy letting her pick out her own toothbrush from a few "options." But she is thrilled with this toothbrush, we aren't sure why. It may be the shape, which is very easy for her to hold, or it may be the fact that it came in the mail instead of buying it at the store.

Online, four of these babies cost $11; with $4.50 shipping, that means they're $4 apiece - a bit more than regular toothbrushes, but less than the premium you probably already pay for some environmentally-friendly alternatives, and the shift can have a big impact. The company behind the Preserve Jr., Recycline, also sells toothbrushes for adults, which we bought two of on our shopping trip as well. They also make recycled and recyclable razors, tableware, and more.

As an added bonus, you can have your four toothbrushes shipped to you at intervals of your choice (every 2, 3, 4, or 5 months).

If you're interested in the details of their plastic sourcing, production process, or environmental priorities, you can read up on their website. Sounds interesting to me - I think they should put a video up on YouTube. Then again, it may just be that I like the idea of watching plastic get ground up.

You can buy Recycline oral care products at the company's online store or on Amazon.com.

ZRecs Hall of Shame's Ministry of Safety Winner

With 122 readers casting votes, Sunshine Kids beat out Dara Linda Baby Bling and Jewelry Design's crystal-studded pacifiers with their aftermarket car seat accessories in our second ZRecs Hall of Shame matchup. We clearly had a good matchup, as the most common complaint among voters was that they wished they could induct both of our candidates into the ZRecs Hall of Shame. The vote tally was 56 Sunshine Kids, 46 Dara Linda.

Sunshine Kids will join the Time-Out Teddy in our growing pantheon of miserably misguided or just plain wrong children's products. We'll have another round of voting for two new illustrious candidates next month - subscribe to ZRecs and you won't miss a thing!

Congratulations to Mei Lee, whose name was chosen at random to win $30 in prizes from our stash of books, CDs, and DVDs. Mei, email us at zrecommends (at) gmail (dot) com to claim your prize and we'll send you a list of options!

Have an idea for our next ZRecs Hall of Shame matchup? Email it to us at zrecommends (at) gmail (dot) com.

Free Online Household Management Aids

Here's a shortlist of online stuff, all of it free, that could help you organize your life, manage your household, or declutter. Some of them we have played with, one we use routinely, and others just look promising.

Chores

Childzilla is an interactive chore chart to sic on your kids. You assign, track, and offer rewards through its interface, and kids access their own chore chart to check off chores. If you don't mind using reward systems to reinforce chore-completion, this might be a good solution. It's currently in beta mode, which you can sign up for on their site. No word at this point on plans for revenue - membership fees, advertising, or what? Get in and poke around. [Link]

Chorewars: We love this application. Routine tasks get assigned point values, and players compete to "level up" their character, randomly encountering monsters along the way. Characters can also earn "gold" which can then be "spent," meaning you could design an agreed-upon reward system based around the accumulation and dispensation of the virtual currency. The best thing about Chorewars is that user assigning of point values to tasks means you can balance them however you like, and make sure people are "sharing" the workload in a way that accounts for all the stuff that has to get done but allows for individual choices to work towards that "credit." For those who like bizarre extrinsic motivators, Chorewars is likely to be a hit. And it's free. [Link]

Chore Buster takes chore assignments a bit further - it does it for you. Create chore listings and designate how "hard" they are and Chore Buster will assign them "fairly" to however many individuals you like. This would work well for siblings within the same age range or for parents to divvy up chores with a bit of a twist, ensuring that no one has to do the same things all the time. You'd probably want to leave certain chores out of Chore Buster that you do like to have certain people do routinely, and create a "shuffle" mode for those you'd like to randomize. [Link]

Scheduling

Cozi offers a family calendar, shopping list, messaging system, and "family journal" that will sync with email application Outlook and has a PC-only desktop version. One benefit of using their calendar system is that it, like Sandy, accepts and interprets natural-language typing - instead of clicking a bunch of buttons to place an item in the calendar before typing the description, you just type "Dr. appointment for Z on Feb. 5 at 8 a.m." and it will drop it in place. [Link]

Sandy is an email reminder system that is simple and easy to integrate into your online life. All you do is set up an email address through their free service and then email the address whenever you want to be reminded of something. It's like Remember the Milk except you can cc Sandy on emails you send to others - setting up an appointment, confirming a reservation, outlining a task, et cetera - and say something like "Sandy, remind me on January 31 at 5 a.m. that I said I'd eat lunch with John." At the appointed date and time the service will send a reminder to your inbox or even your cell phone if you're into the text thing. You can also email Sandy with a note like "Send me my reminders" and you'll get back a list of all the things in your reminder list. Remember the Milk has a dizzying array of additional features - mapping, list management, scheduling - but sometimes simple is what works best. [Link]

Decluttering

Craigslist: Go on, just give it away. [Link]

Lala: Get rid of your old CDs. Warning: You may have to keep them around a long time while you wait for someone to request them. [Link]

Paperback Swap: A great place to exchange books and now CDs as well. We use it frequently to get rid of books we don't want and get great kids' books in return. [Link]

Swaptree: Exchange books, movies, CDs, and more. Swaptree (an advertiser on Z Recommends) has a new feature that allows you to swap stuff within a local "friends" list - your office mates, play group partners, etc. - for a more customized swapping experience. [Link]

ZRecs Key Finder Showdown

I am a person who loses things. Many things. Frequently. I am also a person who believes that the road to Hell is paved with cheap, unresponsive technology, or, in this case, that we will be forced to use it incessantly to get there, so I have never bought anything sold directly on TV, in SkyMall catalogues, or through unsolicited mailers that convey the solutions to life's problems with a sticky caps lock key. So it was with great interest that I took on the challenge of evaluating three affordable key-finding devices, of which I was highly suspect, as is my nature.

The three key finders we evaluated were Brookstone's Smart Find, The Sharper Image's "Now You Can Find It!" (henceforth dubbed NYCFI), and the Find One Find All (FOFA). The former two companies should need little introduction, but the Find One Find All is made by a single-product company, Melbourne Designs, that is run by a husband-and-wife team in Arlington, Texas. (I know, we're all suckers for the little guy. Just wait.)

The Smart Find and NYCFI both feature a base unit that calls out to receiving units. The Smart Find, at $60, has four - two key fobs and two flat lozenges to stick on other items; the NYCFI, sold for $50, has eight, all of them key fobs. FOFA units are sold in two-key-fob packs ($24) and individual credit-card ($12) versions, and every unit both sends and receives signals, which means once set up, each unit can call every other one. All three systems are manufactured in China.

All of each system's parts functioned fine on an initial check at close range, except one Smart Find lozenge, which we eliminated from the running as a lemon. The Smart Find was already operating at 75% effectiveness.

Playing With the Units

The first order of business was to get a general impression of how each model worked - in other words, to play with them. To accomplish this, we turned to our trusty assistant Elmo.

Our three-year-old daughter Z and I took turns hiding Elmo in various locations in our living room and then watching each other try to find him using each of the key-finding devices. All three models performed well at ranges under 10' with the single fob we tested, even when Elmo was covered by a blanket, but we immediately noticed that the FOFA's signal was much easier to hear. Whether this was because of the pitch or the decibel level, we can't say, but the improvement was obvious and helped when searching for an Elmo who was covered by a blanket. Since the FOFA units can all send and receive signals, the developers also added a nifty bonus feature: When a fob is called, it responds with a signal of its own, and the "calling" unit beeps once and flashes an LED light when it receives this signal; the time it takes for this acknowledgment can help you determine the distance of the object you're looking for.

So far, so good. It was time to get serious with the testing. Life conveniently intervened, and all three sets lived happily in a box for a while, except one fob of each type, which we affixed to keys we use regularly to evaluate their carrying weight and bulk over time.

Testing the Units

We tested each model's performance within a 40' range under three conditions:

• Laid out in plain sight on the seat of a chair,
• In the pocket of a heavy wool WWII-era Swedish army jacket, facing the tester, and
• In the pocket of the same jacket, draped over the chair back so the pocket is covered by the rest of the coat.

Our "easy" test was easier for some than for others.

At a distance of forty feet, all NYCFI units chirped happily in response to our calls, regardless of where the base unit was pointed; at shorter distances, it worked even when we turned away from the fobs.

The Smart Find gave us a rude awakening, as its second lozenge had perished of loneliness during its month in The Box. Smart Find had another man down. Additionally, we quickly discovered that the Smart Find's ability to successfully call its fobs depended on some combination of luck and careful, remote-control-like aim, both of which defy the logic of a key-finder's intended function. At times, the Smart Find's fobs quickly responded to the call, even when we had our back turned and were holding the base unit upright. At other times we stood 15' away and pointed the thing directly at an exposed fob, and received not a peep in response. Since the Smart Find also advised users to depress the call button for a full five seconds to receive a response, this made for some tedious and frustrating button-pressing, and that's without actually trying to find something you've lost.

The FOFA again distinguished itself by its mysterious establishment of a "link" of some kind from one unit to another. Upon an initial call, it could take up to a few seconds to generate a response from the receiver, as was the case with both the Smart Find and the NYCFI; but once that first FOFA call had been received, subsequent calls placed less than a few seconds after the first response had ended led to an instantaneous response from the receiving unit. There is, of course, a technical explanation for this phenomenon, and that explanation is this: Magic. All magic aside, the effect could be quite helpful in finding lost objects. FOFA again proved that its design had its lone LED eye squarely on the ball.

We were pleased to see that while covering the fobs with one layer of wool (the pocket front) or an entire wool coat had the effect of shortening the working distance of all models - none performed with greater than 50% consistency beyond 25' - all performed equally well under both conditions. If we had to pick a loser in these events, it would have to be the Smart Find, which again infuriated us with its inconsistency, which was present at almost every distance measured. One surprising revelation was that the FOFA wallet fob responded much more readily in its "covered" state when one side was "up" rather than the other, with a distance differential of a full fifteen feet.

Conclusions, Accusations, and Recommendations

First off, the Smart Find is for suckers. It's the most feature-deprived, the poorest-functioning, and the least reliable brand we tested. It's also the most expensive, at $60 for a base unit and four receivers, which may or may not work right out of the box. Throwing your keys down a well would be cheaper.

The Sharper Image's "Now You Can Find It!" was a solid performer. All parts functioned out of the box and a month later, and it responded consistently at distances up to our measurement limit of 40'; beyond that distance, a key finder isn't going to help you much anyway. The $50 price tag still seems a bit steep to us, but you get eight receivers for your money, which is probably more than you need. The set comes with sticker labels you can put on the base unit buttons to designate which fob is attached to what, and includes all manner of unlikely items like remote controls and, inexplicably, sunglasses, to which you are supposed to affix the fobs using small pieces of Velcro. The receivers were reasonably-sized as keychain attachments.

The NYCFI's base unit comes with a magnetic mounting bracket; the natural place to put this would be a refrigerator. The remote also has both numbers and Braille, but I will go ahead and make the perhaps unfair generalization that blind people generally learn how to put things away in their proper place. Overall, the NYCFI is good enough that I am tempted to keep it and implant the eight receivers in Z's eight most-sought-after stuffed animals and dolls so that she could find them when needed and use them to play RF-enabled hide-and-seek. Instead, we're going to give it away to a ZRecs reader.

The Find One Find All was the clear winner in our book, and we're going to keep it. The credit-card version is too thick (the minimum width of a technology like this is, at least for now, dictated by the width of a slim watch battery, which all of these brands' receivers use), so we will probably treat that one as a base, hang it on our fridge somehow, and use it to find lost keys. We're impressed with its feature set, its consistent performance, and its price - you can get a pair of key fobs for $24 plus shipping, which is a great deal. This makes the FOFA system the only one you can try out without spending $50 or more, and we think it's probably the least frustrating way to find something that is lost.

There is a new, powerful device now on the market that we were unable to get our hands on for testing. The Loc8tor has an LCD display and can measure distance as well as direction, and generated significant buzz in its launch by claiming you could keep track of your kid in a crowd with it, one it has wisely since removed from its website. The Loc8tor costs over $100 for a base unit and two fobs, and the company was unresponsive to our requests for a unit for testing.

We think the next great leap forward for "finding" devices requires not just advances in location sensing, but a reduction in the size of the power supply. Whether this advance will come from a new form of battery or from some other technology, it is the key to helping people who lose stuff find it - not just keys, but all of the things the NYCFI stickers claim you should stick your fobs on. OK, that just sounded obscene. Can I stop saying "fob" now?

In the spirit of Home Organization Week, we must point out that all of this technology begs the question of what lengths a person will go to in order to avoid the difficult task of changing habits so that they put things in places where they can find them. At our house we have "the rooster," a small black box that sits on a shelf in our living room and has a painting of a rooster on the lid. Keys, wallets, and sunglasses are all supposed to go there and only there, and both Jenni and I have each had periods of militancy and of lassitude in this regard. For keys alone, a row of key hooks could work just as well - it just takes a little discipline. For now, we'll rely on a system like FOFA, but ultimately, I'd rather wean myself of the need for it altogether. Even then, we'll probably still leave the fobs on our keychains - for "emergencies" - or who knows? Maybe we'll operate on Spot yet - we are down to one, after all.

Want to win the Sharper Image "Now You Can Find It!" system? Comment on this post with a "LOST:" classified ad for something you have lost but think is around somewhere, with the format as follows:

LOST: [Funny description here.] If found, contact [your email address or name].

Enter as many times as you like; we'll pick our favorite original entry on Feb. 6 and ship the winner our $50 NYCFI testing unit, sans excess packaging. If you prefer not to include an email address in your entry, plan to check back at the "Claim Your Prize!" section of our sidebar after the giveaway. The winner will have five days to claim their prize, and we will name a few runners-up; if the winner doesn't come through, the first runner-up to have contacted us will score the prize.

Deadline: 11:59 p.m. Feb. 5, 2008

Thanks to the Sharper Image, Brookstone, and Melbourne Designs for supplying units for review.

JULIAN & Co. Bracelet Winner

Congratulations to Leighann Calentine of Illinois, winner of the JULIAN & Co. sterling silver children's bracelet. Her entry was selected at random from the 139 valid entries we received. Leighann selected the Heart On Her Wrist bracelet.

Two Paper-Based Organizational Aids for Families

We've been using BusyBodyBook's Fridge Grid Pad for a few months now. The pad has a strong magnet on the back to hang on your fridge, and it features seven columns for different family members or responsibilities and seven undated rows for numbering the dates in a week.

Since we're a small family with a lot of things going on, we appreciate the information-rich, easily-personalized format. We used one for each of the three of us - Jeremiah, Jenni, and Z - one to plan out content on Z Recommends, one to plan out content on the giveaway hub PRIZEY, and one for each of our non-day job careers (Jeremiah, writing; myself, fine art photography).

We were using the Fridge Grid Pad heavily in the run-up to the holidays and my yearly printing trip (I print my own color photographs, from negatives, in a rental darkroom) and in the run-up to the launch of PRIZEY. We had a lot going on. We were able to keep track of who was supposed to be where when, what I needed to accomplish, deadlines for keeping the PRIZEY launch on schedule, and which part of Jeremiah's book he was supposed to be editing. If it sounds exhausting, it is. But the Fridge Grid Pad was well-designed to keep all of those disparate tasks together and to make things a bit less overwhelming.

The columns in the pad can be used to suit your own lifestyle - to track events for members of a larger family, or of your kids' many extracurricular activities, or of chores or dinner plans, personal goals, you name it. Each page also has a space to make notes or write honey-dos.

BusyBodyBook offers a number of dated grid calendars as well.

A few years ago, we made a massive overhaul of our filing system. At that point, we were reading David Allen's Getting Things Done and we organized our files simply A-Z (we separated personal files from business files and did A-Z for each set). It's a quick and dirty filing system but it typically means that like information is not together (e.g, we have a file for each car - Mazda and Honda, filed under M and H respectively). We recently tried out the JOYS organizational system (JOYS stands for "Just Organize Your Stuff") and see some significant benefits.

The JOYS system of filing keeps all of our information easily organized into five categories which are further divided into subjects. The Filing Products set comes with tabs that are color coded for five friendly but sensible categories (Everyday, Wealth, Wellness, Home, and Interests).

To make your filing system, all you need to do is decide which category and subject your file fits in, make a tab and start filing. It's a little tedious to set up (any filing system is) but easy to maintain (many are not). The JOYS system also comes with a nice booklet that walks you through the steps of setting up a filing system (including setting up four different filing locations - one for each of Everyday File, Reference File, Important File, and Vital File). Filing Projects also comes with a set of stickers for creating monthly Tickler Folders and Action Folders. There are also color- and graphics-coded tabs for additional information such as Emergency Support, Health Insurance, Kids' Records, and Manuals along with an extra set of coded blank tabs for adding elements specific to your own life.

But our favorite part of the JOYS system is the Notebook. A few years ago, we were told to prepare for the storm of the decade (Hurricane Rita), and were advised to copy our financial papers, stock up on food and water, tape up windows and wait it out. We had, ahem, no emergency plan. No emergency food and water, no central location of our financial papers, no copies of our passports. Nothing.

I spent an entire day weeding through websites trying to figure out and produce a "family binder" of sorts that would list who we needed to call if the gas or electrical line broke, where the breakers were to turn them off, other emergency numbers, copies of our financial papers, a CD back up of our important computer data, etc. It was a lot of work, and work best not done when there's a storm looming on the horizon. (The storm made it to the Texas coast, but not to us.)

The great thing about the JOYS Notebook is that it's organized in the same manner as the filing system, which means that once you have one set up, the other should be a breeze to establish and maintain.

The categories and the subjects of the JOYS Notebook are immensely helpful, but what really sets it apart are the tips that come with each subject. There's a list of suggested items to accumulate and keep in your binder, tips for where in the JOYS system to file them, guidelines on how often to update and keep the records, and tax tips. Each new subject (the broken-down section of the category) also has tips for beginning-of-the-year actions, anytime actions and year-end actions. Each subject comes with worksheets you can fill in or use as a guide for your information. Added to our long list of things to do is to transfer the information and details from our family binder to the JOYS Notebook.

That said, we do have a few reservations about the JOYS system. We wish that you could purchase a PDF of the main Notebook module. The company does offer a Family Module (which we have not seen) with a PDF that is about half the price ($12.50) of the printed edition ($25). At $69, it's a steep investment for the main system's set of inserts, and we'd love to see it in a $30-$40 price range in a PDF format.

Of course, with a PDF you would not get the premium quality of the print materials, which are printed on cardstock with tabbed dividers, but if a page was included in the PDF for the divider headings, it would be easy for budget-conscious people to print out the materials and build their own handcrafted set at home. It would also allow for easier copying of some of the templates for people who need more space to fill in their "Yearly Wellness Log," job history or contacts. (Currently, only one of most of these pages is provided.)

The binder we received arrived with a broken ring; although we're confident the folks at JOYS would have replaced this if we'd asked, it only reinforced to us that it isn't necessary - unless you really love the design of the binder, save your $10, buy the main set for $69 instead of $79, and reuse a binder that you have at home already or buy one when school supplies go on super-sale in August.

That said, we recommend both the JOYS organizational system, particularly the Notebook, and the BusyBodyBook Fridge Grid Pad for families who need a bit of help getting and staying organized.

Home Organization: Digitizing Your Receipts With NEAT Receipts

With three different small businesses in our family, we have a lot of receipts to track and store for the IRS. We've been test-driving a NEAT Receipts receipt scanner for the past few months, and it has made managing the our financial paperwork considerably easier. (Sorry for the lack of photos that typically accompany ZRecs reviews. Jeremiah dropped our Sony Cybershot camera in the Caribbean during our Christmas vacation... our new camera, a Nikon digital SLR, should be in our hands by Thursday!)

Our routine for tracking business expenses has always been fairly organized but requires concentrated bursts of labor-intensive attentiveness around tax time. At the beginning of each calendar year, I created individual manilla folders for each of our business expense areas - Jeremiah's writing, my fine art photography, our blogging ventures, and, once upon a time, agriculture (we were market gardeners for a couple of years). Over the course of the year, any time we spent money on one of these projects, we'd write what the expense was for on the receipt, date it if necessary, and stick it in the appropriate envelope; depending on the year and the enterprise, probably 70-95% of our eligible receipts for the year made it into those folders. Then, when we pulled our hair out doing our taxes in March or, ahem, April, we had to manually tally up all of these receipts, including splitting many of them between multiple businesses or between business and personal expenses, or add up only the individual items on the receipt which were circled, and so on. Very tedious, very time-consuming, and very stressful, and we have to store those folders for seven years.

Things are different now.

Once a week, we scan our receipts and use NEAT Receipts' software to quickly categorize them based on the business, or assign them to a personal category for budget tracking. If we make a purchase for two businesses on the same receipt, splitting the receipt item by item is a piece of cake. A dropdown menu allows you to categorize the expense by expense type (meals and entertainment, supplies, and so on). If the purchase is for something we might need to return, we put it in a "holding pen," which we periodically browse through to throw away receipts for items we know we're keeping. If it's for something we don't need to retain the actual receipt for (PRIZEY prize shipping, photo printing services, and other service purchases) we trash it.

The scanner itself is quite small (10.8" x 1.6" x 1.3") and is powered by a USB port. To process a receipt, you just insert it into the scanner and push Scan. NEAT Receipts scans the receipt, reads it, rotates it if necessary, adds the date, purchase and sales tax amount, vendor name, and payment type to a database, and takes a frequently accurate guess at the category of purchase as well. All of this information is stored along with an image of your scanned receipt

Scanned receipts put a lot of power into our hands. We can sort, search, or export data to a variety of file types (Excel, Quick Books, Quicken, and MS Money are a few). We also use NEAT Receipts to save PDFs of receipts for important purchases; the scans are approved by the IRS as legitimate copies of receipts for tax purposes. NEAT Receipts will even generate reports with totals suitable for filling directly into your tax forms. If you do your own taxes, this can save you major headaches. If you have someone else do them for you (we made the move two years ago), you can save a lot of money on preparation time.

You can add your own vendor information for frequently used vendors. You can scan business cards and create your own database of contacts. You can also scan in any other type of printed matter you want to create a database for - recipes are one obvious example. The NEAT Receipts scanner won't read every item type, but it will create a scan, allow you to categorize it, and let you add notes and labels.

The one observation we'd make about using this technology is that the longer your receipts (in inches) the more tedious this process can be if you build up a good batch of receipts before processing them. The scanner isn't slow and it helps that you can scan in receipts sideways but you still max out at about 8.5" so those post office receipts might have you drumming your fingers, and if you use NEAT Receipts scanning to budget out your life you are going to be hating your grocery store receipts. Scanning receipts on a weekly basis helps, and you definitely wouldn't have much fun with the system if you purchased it at year's end simply to do your taxes.

We highly recommend NEAT Receipts to help you organize your personal or business-related receipts. If you're like we are, and are patient when it comes to nifty ways to digitize your life (we once set up about 75% of our extensive collection of books on a Mac program called Booxter using a USB-powered barcode scanner), then you know who you are and really have no business not buying one of these.

NEAT Receipts is currently only compatible with PCs, but they plan to release a Mac-compatible version this year.

Home Organization Week On ZRecs

Tomorrow through the end of the week we'll be featuring reviews and roundups of great home organizational aids for families, from paper-based materials to online applications and tech gadgets. Don't miss it if you're anything like us and in need of some serious organizational help!

ZRecs Hall of Shame: Ministry of Safety

A few months ago, we introduced the ZRecs Hall of Shame, a pantheon of terrible children's products. We put up two candidates linked by a theme, and readers vote for the worst of the two.

Our first inductee was Time-Out Teddy, a teddy bear fitted with an timer to police time-outs with cheap gadgetry and mixed messages. That was a few months ago, and Teddy has been... lonely. Time for another round of polling!

For our second draft pick, we again ask you to pick the lesser of two evils. On the one hand, we have companies which turn parents' desires to keep their children safe into products which are quite likely to make them less safe. On the other we have companies which flaunt the spirit of regulation while sticking strategically to its letter, and thus endanger kids with impunity. Whether the below candidates are exemplars of either of these excesses, we leave to our readers, as well as the determination of which is the most onerous trend.

Exhibit A: Sunshine Kids

Sunshine Kids, manufacturer of our favorite new car seat (the travel-friendly Radian 80, a five-point harness seat designed for children up to 80 pounds that eliminates the need for a transitional booster seat) is better known for a variety of aftermarket products which are recommended against by independent car seat safety organizations. Untested by NHTSA, such aftermarket products are charged with putting children's lives at risk by changing seat belt geometry, introducing untested wear on engineered seat belt fabrics, and adding dangerous padding underneath and around children that can compress in an accident and create slackness in safety straps that could allow children to slip out. If you aren't convinced by the safety warnings of independent experts, note that the use of such devices instantly voids the warranty of almost any car seat, or just ask your local car seat installation technician, who will tell you the same thing.

Pictured above are two of their "safety" products, the Mighty Tite seat belt tightener (see CPSafety for a good rundown of this hazard) and the Soft-Ride cushion, which boasts of "soft, absorbent" fabric that ignores the documented risks of extra padding in car seats (read our recent review of the Car Seat Poncho for a discussion how to validate this risk yourself). If a "safety"-driven company can afford to ignore such readily-available industry expertise, who can't?

Exhibit B: Dara Linda's Baby Bling and Jewelry Design

Back in July 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued an unusual recall: pacifiers decorated with Swarovski crystals. Produced by several work-at-home-mom shops and selling for around $30 apiece, the modified brand-name pacis posed aspiration and ingestion hazards when crystals inevitably separated from their pacifiers. Swarovski crystals contain 32% lead.

Five companies (some little more than eBay shops) consented to a recall of their hazardous "baby bling" before any injuries were reported: Dara Linda's Baby Bling and Jewelry Design, Bling Toes, Baby Bling Things, PeaNaPod Bling and Accessories, and MJM Crystal Designs. Most of those cited took the expected route and discontinued the dangerous product lines. BlingToes, for example, maintains a recall notice on their website to this day, no longer sells any crystal-studded baby products, and surely took a financial hit in the voluntary recall process, although the shop still offers a wide variety of crystal-enhanced accessories for adults.

Dara Linda Baby Bling and Jewelry Design took a different route. The company's website is still brimming with the same crystal-studded pacifiers, pacifier clips, and a variety of other baby and toddler accessories, and although it hosts the agreed-upon recall notice for those products produced within a given timeframe, the company now shields itself with a lengthy disclaimer declaring post-recall productions "novelty items for display only":

CUSTOMER AGREES THAT JEWELRY DESIGNS BY DARA KROVETZ BLING PRODUCTS ARE NOVELTY ITEMS FOR DISPLAY ONLY AND ARE NOT INTENDED FOR USE BY INFANTS, TODDLERS OR CHILDREN OF ANY AGE. CUSTOMER ACKNOWLEDGES THAT RHINESTONES, CRYSTALS, AND OTHER DECORATIONS ON JEWELRY DESIGNS BY DARA KROVETZ PRODUCTS MAY DETACH FROM PRODUCTS AND POSE A CHOKING RISK OR MAY BE HAZARDOUS IF SWALLOWED.

That's right - the site's shimmering, fully-functional pacifiers, their handy and personalized pacifier clips, their rhinestone-studded children's sunglasses, and their hand-decorated shoes are not, in fact, for children. Of course, the new mother who receives such an unlabeled, hand-accented item as a thoughtful gift at her baby shower would not see such a notice, nor would the parent whose child received such an item from a grandparent or well-meaning admirer. Maybe Dara's "skull and crossbones" paci design would offer a hint.

The company failed to respond to a request for information ZRecs sent to the email address designated for the recall.

And so, fair readers, we once again turn the mic over to you. Which is worse? Did we unfairly put either company in the running?

Cast your vote in this post's comments for Sunshine Kids or Dara Linda to be inducted into our ZRecs Hall of Shame. Email entries cannot be accepted for this poll.

As an added bonus, we'll offer up $30 in prizes from ZRecs' stash of review items, with a variety of great kids' DVDs, CDs, toys and books to choose from, to one voter we'll select at random. The polls will be open until 5 p.m. CST Jan. 25, 2008, and we'll select one winner at random from everyone who commented with a vote for one of the two companies. We welcome you to comment and discuss beyond your additional vote - only your vote comment will be included in the drawing, so in your first comment please state the company you're voting for first, and then offer your impressions.

If you win: We'll list the winner's name in our "Claim Your Prize" section of ZRecs' lefthand sidebar, and announce it in a post as well, on Saturday, January 26; the winner will have a week to claim their prize.

Deadline: 5 p.m. CST Jan. 25, 2008

Official Rules

Have an idea for our next ZRecs Hall of Shame matchup? Email it to us at zrecommends (at) gmail (dot) com.

Toy Stories

From the recent archives of the New York Times' Well blog:

Simple playthings like balls, jump ropes, hula hoops and riding toys do more for encouraging physical activity than swings, jungle gyms and other stationary playground equipment, according to a new report in the January issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The findings are important because they show that schools and day care centers don't need expensive playground equipment to keep kids active. ... Surprisingly, stationary equipment, like climbing structures, swings and balance beams, were associated with lower-intensity physical activity, researchers said, but are beneficial to other aspects of child development, such as motor and social skills. [Link]

Today the Los Angeles Times reported on the death of Richard Knerr, co-founder of Wham-O and deliverer of the hula hoop and the Frisbee to kids in the U.S. and the world. He was 82.

With his boyhood best friend, Arthur "Spud" Melin, Knerr started the company in 1948 in Pasadena. They named the enterprise Wham-O for the sound that their first product, a slingshot, made when it hit its target.

A treasure chest of dozens of toys followed that often bore playful names: Superball, so bouncy it seemed to defy gravity; Slip 'N Slide and its giggle-inducing cousin the Water Wiggle; and Silly String, which was much harder to get out of hair than advertised.

When a friend told Knerr and Melin about a bamboo ring used for exercise in Australia, they devised their own version without seeing the original.

They ran an early test of the product in 1958 at a Pasadena elementary school and enticed their test subjects by telling them they could keep the hoops if they mastered them.

Knerr was an innovator and a master at leveraging PR and creating buzz in the mass toy market he helped bring into being. Read the rest of his story at the link.

ZRecs Giveaway: Sterling Silver Children's Bracelet

We're happy to have a unique opportunity to give a shout-out to one of our most loyal ZRecs advertisers, JULIAN & Co. Founder Tania Condon designs and makes high-quality children's jewelry as well as pieces for parent to celebrate their child's birth, using only precious metals for her jewelry. For maximum safety and quality, every chain link is soldered, also using precious metals (no lead here).

Every sale includes a personalized engraving, and the company also makes nursing necklaces, key chains, engraved portrait coins and more. Children's bracelets sell for $69 and come with lifetime resizing free of any charge but a shipping fee.

Given the company's longstanding advertising support of our work at ZRecs, we're thrilled to have the chance to give away one of these gorgeous bracelets. To enter, send an email to zrecommends (at) gmail (dot) com with "bracelet giveaway" in the subject line, and include your name, mailing address, and the style of bracelet you'd like if you win - the standard, heart charm, or medical alert bracelet. You can view the styles here. Tania will get in touch with the winner for engraving information, and no entrant's personal information will ever be used for any other purpose.

Deadline: 11:59 p.m. CST Jan. 23, 2008

U.S. In Midst of "Baby Boomlet"

In 2006 the U.S. had the largest number of children born since 1961, the Associated Press reported today. Contributing causes? "[A] decline in contraceptive use, a drop in access to abortion, poor education and poverty." From the article (emphasis mine):

"Americans like children. We are the only people who respond to prosperity by saying, 'Let's have another kid,'" said Nan Marie Astone, associate professor of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University. ...

Clearly, U.S. birth rates are not what they were in the 1950s and early 1960s, when they were nearly twice as high and large families were much more common. The recent birth numbers are more a result of many women having a couple of kids each, rather than a smaller number of mothers, each bearing several children, Astone said.

[Link]

Shape Identification Games: Store-Bought and DIY

Let's Go Shopping (HABA)
[$25, Amazon.com]

Another very nice game from HABA, Let's Go Shopping combines a "deck" of cardstock cards that match up with gorgeous wooden food items, which must be identified by touch only by sticking your hand in a cloth grocery bag and feeling around. A great tactile and logic game for preschoolers.

As always with HABA games, this is gorgeously executed. You and/or your child may be tempted to play with this wooden food in a play kitchen, which would threaten to destroy your game.

What Is It?
[$8-$15, IKEA + craft store]

We play a couple of homemade versions of this game. We got a very nice cloth bag with a drawstring from the kids' section of IKEA last year and use it below to identify a bunch of small toys Z is very familiar with. Depending on your child's abilities, you can either select the toys with them at the outset of the game, or select them secretly yourself for an added challenge.

The homemade game allows for a greater variety of objects than one with all wood pieces, bringing in considerations like materials, texture, hardness or softness of the object, etc.

For a more "finished" version of the game suitable for gifts to other families or for certain parental temperaments, we like small wooden shapes. These can be purchased from craft stores in the woodworking craft section - you should find everything from spheres and cubes at various sizes to hemispheres and flat cut-out shapes like hearts and stars, for $1-$2 a bag. There are several levels of play:

• Early toddler: One set of objects in the bag, one out, child finds an object in the bag, pulls it out, and matches it to the one on the table.
• Intermediate toddler A: One set in, one out, child selects shape in bag, points to shape out of bag they think is a match, pulls it out and checks
• Intermediate toddler B: Two sets in, toddler uses both hands and tries to pull out a matching pair.
• Post-toddler early learner: One set in, child finds one in the bag and names the shape (sphere, hemisphere, etc.)

Keeping Kids Warm, and Safe, In Car Seats

We sent Jeremiah's sister, Bethany Wallace, a sample Car Seat Poncho and asked for her thoughts from the colder climes of Seattle, Washington. Below is her guest review.

Hats and mittens are a joke in our household. Our 17-month-old, C, treats taking them off and throwing them out of the stroller (despite freezing temperatures) a fantastic game - that is, until C gets cold, at which point he starts screaming and we have to cut our walk short. So I was excited to try the Car Seat Poncho, a wearable, machine-washable poncho for children. Car Seat Ponchos are currently produced in 6-24 month and 3-4 T sizes.

The idea behind the Car Seat Poncho is a marriage of convenience and safety. Safety experts and car seat manufacturers caution against placing children in car seats wearing bulky clothing like coats or bulky sweaters, as the material has significant give and the difference in tightness of the car seat straps could allow your child to slip out of their car seat in an accident.

(If you need a visual on why you should never buckle your child into a car seat while wearing a jacket, try this experiment: Bundle up your child and put them in their car seat. Buckle and tighten securely. Take your child out, but do not readjust the belt tightness. Remove their coats and put them back into the car seat and buckle them up. See the slack? That slack is keeping your car seat from properly protecting your child. This goes for adults too!)

The poncho works like this: when you are ready to leave the house, pull the poncho on to keep your child warm from the house to the car, when you get in the car you can buckle your child into the car seat without ever removing the poncho. Simply lift the back of the poncho up over the car seat and buckle the car seat straps under the front of the poncho - your child stays warm and safe.

The poncho covers C's head, hands, and body from the knees up while riding in a stroller or the car, and is almost impossible for him to remove due to its cleverly designed flaps, which fit over the stroller straps or car seat back. Made of extremely soft fleece that is much warmer than many of C's coats, it has a zipper up the front you can adjust for fluctuating temperatures, and for car seat use you can easily put it on your child after securing the car seat straps. I did have some trouble with the zipper, much to C's frustration.

For C, the poncho does not take the place of a coat, since active play on the playground caused our 17-month-old to trip over its ends. This means at least some parents will need to pack both a jacket and poncho or leave the poncho in the car. I probably won't use it much for the stroller because it's inconvenient to pack a coat as well.

Stylistically, C looks a little babyish in the sky-blue poncho with its Kewpie-doll hood. C is still somewhere between a baby and a toddler in my mind, so it doesn't bother me now, but I would likely reach for a coat and blanket next winter. (A variety of styles are available on a rolling basis.)

In general, I found the Car Seat Poncho to be extremely useful in specific situations (namely long walks in the stroller, which we do a lot of); to use it in the car, leave it there and treat it as a blanket you leave there.

The Car Seat Poncho is available from the company's website.

CPSC Toy Tester Retires

Robert L. Hundemer was as much a myth as a man, insofar as he was held up by the press as the Consumer Products Safety Commission's only full-time toy tester, the Washington Post reports:

The agency has other employees, including chemists who test toys for lead, spokeswoman Julie Vallese said. But when the Times story ran in September, Hundemer was identified in a photo caption as "the sole full-time tester for toys on the market in the United States." There he was, one genial, shortish, gray-haired man standing between the children of America and the rising tide of imported toys.

Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D.-Ill.) enlarged the photo of Hundemer standing in the closet-sized office that was his lab and brought it to a hearing two weeks later, where he quizzed CPSC acting chairman Nancy Nord about it. "Bob's our small parts guy," Nord said.

Bob the toy tester was born, to the chagrin of agency officials who tried unsuccessfully for weeks afterward to explain that Hundemer was not the CPSC's only toy tester.

"Unfortunately, Bob has become an urban myth," Nord said during an October appearance on the "CBS Early Show."

He retires as the CPSC is about to get an $80 million inject of fresh Congressional spending, which should help them increase testing in a variety of product areas. Nord has suggested that retailers be held responsible for testing.

Some Interesting Toys and Games, Deeply Discounted

As is always the case with our deep-discount searches on Amazon.com, we haven't actually used any of this stuff. But it all looks interesting, and it's very cheap!

Some of these sales might be part of Amazon's Friday Sale and thus might expire at the end of the day. But many of these discounts will stick around for a bit, although some of the stuff is low on stock and probably won't be coming back.

This game looks kind of fun. $10, down from $25. Amazon.com has a demo video you can watch. [Link]


Is $20 too much to pay for this shuffleboard game? I don't think so - it'd be an expensive DIY project, and games like this are a lot of fun for young kids. Comes with eight solid maple pucks. Down from an odd $40 price tag. [Link]

Good price for a nice-looking cherry toy box. $90, down from over $200. I'd use the top as a bookshelf instead of seating - the rail makes nice built-in bookends. [link]

The same company also makes a cute set of puzzle-piece bookshelves, currently marked down from $126 to $49.

This game for 12 and up sounds like it has a few bugs, but it is an intriguing concept and people seem to enjoy it despite its flaws. About $14, down from $30. [Link]


This might make a better DIY project if you were inspired. (Anyone have good ideas for making homemade kids' golf clubs?) But I'm mostly linking to it because I think it's so funny that the set comes with a wedge. Or is that a driver? $15. [Link]

Let the record reflect that I actually find a cross-marketed, flash-in-the-pan, opportunistic, bastardized version of a classic game appealing. And I didn't even like the movie! Wait, did I even see the movie? Regardless, I didn't like it. But this truly ROCKS. Includes special Transformer powers! $7.50, down from $15. [link]

I don't even know what "Tarrytown" is, but these blocks would make a nice addition to any standard block set. $3.50, down from $7. [link]

Does your child have an abacus? If so, do they actually use it? I really want to know! Our 3.5-year-old Z has one, and although we do all kinds of "counting play" in our household, her abacus gets exactly zero use. Anyway, here's one from trusted brand Melissa & Doug (some of their die-cut puzzles are lousy, but otherwise they make nice toys) for $6, down from $12. [link]

PRIZEY Sweepstakes For Kids Six To Eight

We have a great lineup for our latest PRIZEY sweepstakes - cool bedding from Olive Kids, a Polaroid Pixie digital camera, and a great-looking game from HABA. Enter on PRIZEY by January 22.

Z's Latest Obsession

Toilet paper.

Three Recent Kids' CDs

Debi Derryberry, Very Derryberry
Best unknown as the voice of cartoon character Jimmy Neutron, Debi Derryberry [link warning: automatically loading music] has lent her voice to minor characters in a host of animated movies, from blockbusters like Aladdin to what the Onion once referred to as the "straight-to-landfill" market. Like her voice, which contains both a Kristin Hersh-like huskiness and the high register of the perfect Boy or Girl #1 for your next cartoon, Derryberry's sensibilities walk a fine line on her second kids' album, but her sweet tooth has enough of an edge to keep Very Derryberry from descending into the saccharine cesspool of forced jollity and feigned innocence.

Blending rollicking rearrangements of traditional tunes like "Animal Fair" (you know it: "the big baboon by the light of the moon/was combing his auburn hair") and "Skinnamarink" with great originals like "The Tonsil Song" and "I Bit An Apple," this album is perfect for two- to five-year-olds, offering a blend of tunes and lyrics that invite singing along and gently encourage an approach to life that starts and ends with a sunny, inquisitive disposition. Derryberry's "The Very Very Song" is one of the best question-and-answer songs I've come across in a long time, and her "I Love To Share" showcases her ability to serve meaning on multiple levels of her audience range; the pro-sharing song ends with a verse about sharing broccoli, second only to brussel sprouts as a stand-in for all the foodstuffs adults assume kids hate, but she never states outright that this "sharing" is a self-interested act - a nudge-wink joke that will sound gleefully subversive to five-year-olds while their younger siblings sing cluelessly along.

This is one of Z's favorite and most-requested albums she has heard in the past few months, and while it isn't exactly the kind of music we'd put on if she wasn't around (and yes, there is some kids' music that is) it isn't hard to see why she loves it so much. [Amazon.com | direct]

The Quiet Two, Make Some Noise
The Quiet Two rescue satire from the jaws of cynicism, their English accents and acoustic guitar parsing out comic riffs on the random exuberance of the childhood imagination. Many of the songs on Make Some Noise are peppered with nostalgic, truly adult phraseology - the singer croons in "Polar Bear," a song about an under-informed desire to be said animal, "No fussin' about, that's what I want to be," and we never mind that we are listening to an adult channel childish thoughts without ever fully transforming into that inner child.

The density of great acoustic pop songs on this album are a gentle reminder of the standards to which we can and should hold music designed for kids. From the hopped-up, vaguely menacing implications of "You Can't Hide Your Bike" to the satirical superhero song "Ultrafoot" and the brilliant flights of fancy that are "Magic Banana" (the banana can do anything) and "Invisible Trousers" (running joke: the kid's not wearing any pants), Make Some Noise is one of our most-spun children's albums of 2007. This album was originally released in 2005 under the band name "The Quiet Ones," and barely registered; don't miss it with its 2007 re-release. [Amazon.com | CD Baby | direct]

Recess Monkey, Wonderstuff
Wonderstuff is a loosely-formed concept album written in collaboration with a schoolful of kids, and the fact that it was a double album helped garner some additional sweethearts. We found the effort to be a disappointment on several levels. A playful tone and freewheeling spirit masks a narrative so loose it disintegrates in the telling and a mishmash of musical styles that lack any aural core we could peg as Recess Monkey's heart and soul. A few great tracks can't justify this tale's double-disc treatment, and listeners are dragged through the story by a narrator of muddled pomposity and bluster whose chief attribute is his grandiloquent and meandering prose - hardly the model of a character that will fascinate young children. Many others have loved this album, so it may be for you. To our ears, it falls flat. [Amazon.com | CD Baby | direct]

Two Reading Games

We are big fans of the Golden ABC Card Game, which builds words with combinations of cards that also feature puzzle-like picture sequences. A number of helpful features make this a very friendly word-building game for the youngest readers, including unique colors for each word's "set" of cards, an alphabet that runs along the bottom of the cards, the matching pictures, and a display of the full word next to each letter. Our only design quibble is that the letters of the full word should not appear alongside the main letter, but in some other position, as they visually interrupt the spelling of the word and could cause confusion. For its price, this is one of the best word games we've seen for kids who are taking their very first steps in reading. At three and a half, Z enjoys it too, and can use the deck with others or by herself. The game, like other Golden card games, features instructions for several levels of play. [$6, direct]

Word Chase is an enjoyable sight-reading game by Beyond Learning, the first company we've seen to develop explicitly "eco-friendly" board games. Using soy-based inks, 100% recycled paper products (including those in packaging materials), and water-based varnish, all materials are high-quality, with a thick board and a nearly bulletproof box.

As for the game, Word Chase focuses on so-called "sight words" that form a foundation for reading. The original sight word list is a 220-word set developed in the 1930s and made famous by Dr. Seuss, who restricted himself to it for the vocabulary in The Cat In The Hat. Word Chase uses 25.

This is a very flexible game for a variety of ages, and is rated for ages four and up. The basic game play consists of matching words on cards to the same words on the board; to move to a space, you have to have one of the space's words in your "hand" (we use the term loosely, as we play "open" hands consistently with our three-year-old, and swap cards between players liberally). Sounding out or reading the word can be a discussion for the youngest players, but older children can be required to do so themselves, making this game more about actual reading and less about matching the shapes of letters. The latter, appropriate for very young players, clearly seems to be of value as well, as it invites players to pay close attention to the shapes and sequence of letters in words and invites discussion. As an added bonus and a great gesture, the game also comes with an additional set of the same 25 word cards for use in a board-free card game of word-based Go Fish.

Beyond Learning's website also offers a directory of brick-and-mortar stores that carry their games. [$20, Amazon.com]

XO Laptop Giveaway: Final Day

We're accepting final entries today for the XO laptop giveaway on PRIZEY. With daily entries an option since November 20, we've had under 1,200 entries so far, which means even a single entry today offers far better odds than most sweepstakes - not bad for a highly-coveted piece of new technology for yourself and your kids to play with! Head over to PRIZEY for today's secret word and email it to prizey.laptop (at) gmail (dot) com for your chance to win.

We still haven't received our XO laptop yet, so it won't be shipped until at least the end of the month (you'll see a ZRecs review when it's ready to ship), but the giveaway closes tonight at 11:59 p.m. CST, so hop aboard!

Hisss: A Domino-Style Tile Game

Hisss is a clever domino-style game that works well for young children. Players build snakes in turns by drawing tiles from a deck and matching their colors with ones already placed; tiles could also be passed out with draw and discard piles for a competitive version of the game for older children.

Z really enjoys this game. The possibilities for varying snake lengths and the high number of concurrent "unfinished" snakes makes the game one that offers visual complexity with a simple logic governing it. This is a key to many of the best games for young children.

The game's fifty tiles are heavy, durable card stock with bright printed colors and nice detail.

The game is rated for ages four and up, but at three and a half Z found it a great match. [$10, Amazon.com]