New Year Musings

Ah, the New Year. A time when things get busier in the toy industry than during the holidays (as we gear up for the NEXT holiday season). As such, my blog has suffered -- this after the potential surge of readership that could have occurred after mailing my Christmas card.

For those faithful who waited patiently for some new content, here we go:

• Noggin, the pre-school channel, is now 24 hours a day. It used to just be 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Lucky me...I got to experience the first "overnight" Noggin as I was up New Year's Day around 4:30 with one of the kids. Yes, there is a market for 24 hours pre-school channels.

• Matthew has no desire to be potty trained. Before Christmas, I made a run to Target and saw how much pull-ups cost! So I've now decided to deduct the cost of the pull-ups from the monthly amount I used to set aside for his college fund. If he doesn't have enough to make it through school, well, it's not my fault.

• Giants vs Patriots....not as good as Red Sox/Yankees, but fun all the same, especially as we get to play the underdog for a change in the Boston/New York relationship.

• Getting a window seat in a row of three on my morning and evening train to the city is very important to me. 95 percent of the time, it means you have an open seat next to you as very rarely does someone attempt to sit in the middle seat. (Across the aisle are rows of two). I'll gladly sit in a row of three close to a stinky bathroom if it means getting a coveted window seat of a three. I'd rather put up with the smell than miss out on my desired seat.

• I feel like I've arrived. We're doing a worldwide Monopoly vote campaign right now (I'll write about that later, but visit www.monopoly.com) and I get to do a radio interview in a few minutes with the largest station in South Africa. I couldn't be more excited.

• My next talk in church is going to be: Lessons from assembling jigsaw puzzles that can be applied to home teaching.


• I think Environmentalism is the new world religion....or at least it's the replacement for organized religion in some people's lives.

• I can now add a new name to list of famous people I've worked with in my odd career: Miss Universe.

I'll try to write some more powerful insights in the next few days.

Mark