29 thoughts on “Spreadin’ Love 559”

  1. I’ve gone through belleville & clickits with my girl. She liked belleville, and kept it for a while. It actually included quite a bit of lego-like building in a girl-oriented theme. I thought it was pretty good at combining the lego/girl theme. The clickits didn’t, ’cause they were highly limited and really only allowed decoration, rather than building.
    But, fundamentally, my girl was not a lego kid, and they did not inspire her to become a builder. It’s not really my boy’s thing, either, so I don’t blame lego.
    (I do think the HP themes cross genders, and I think that’s the way to go, more so than “girl legos”).

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  2. I remain skeptical about all this “reverse gender gap” stuff. As I have noted before, the gap in college graduation rates is all at the bottom of the scale. The top ten colleges (in anyone’s ranking) graduate more men than women, and so do the top 50. The heavily female colleges are at the bottom: the sorts of places that advertise in the subway that you can get a degree in medical office billing. There’s nothing wrong with having an associate’s degree in medical office billing, but the male who went to a trade school and learned welding will earn more.
    Likewise, it seems like a suspicious culling of data to announce that in a number of cities, childless women under 30 are out-earning men. Maybe these cities are attracting low-earning men (e.g., immigrant laborers)? Maybe the high-earning men are somewhere else (e.g., working on oil rigs)? I would need to see statistics on the nation as a whole before I believed that there was a trend.

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  4. “I remain skeptical about all this “reverse gender gap” stuff. As I have noted before, the gap in college graduation rates is all at the bottom of the scale.”
    Right. Females are more average then males, with fewer lower performers and fewer higher performers, which means that at the low end, the women perform better than the men, but at the high end, women perform worse than the men. That’s undoubtedly part of the problem with lower-middle class family life.

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  5. The rabid gendering of Lego is kind of sad, given that when I played with legos (late 80s-mid 90s), they were kind of unisex (I define lego hospitals, castles, and space stations as unisex, because there’s absolutely no reason girls as a gender wouldn’t be interested in that stuff.) There was however, a slightly gendered lego product called Fabuland, which was never sold in the US and is now discontinued, and my sister and I loved it. It had little animals which were slightly larger than lego people but with the same build, and it basically allowed you to make a town, and it had little refrigerators and motorcycles and tables and chairs, etc, but it was still in primary colors and didn’t totally read as “feminine,” and included things like a police station or other “boy” type interests. It’s too bad that nowadays something can’t be for girls without being pastel colored.
    http://www.fabuland.net/

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  6. “It’s too bad that nowadays something can’t be for girls without being pastel colored.”
    If it’s boy or girl color-coded, you can sell each family with a boy and a girl two sets, rather than just one.

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  8. Lego isn’t eveil. It’s just toughening things up as part of a general Danish plan to regain Schleswig and Holstein.

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  9. Legos are great. Unfortunately, they don’t decay. Thus, decades-old legos compete with today’s legos. That’s a problem for a company which wants to sell more legos.
    We bought the neighbor boy’s legos at his garage sale. About $1 a pound.

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  11. I’m in my thirties, and my kids are still playing with the Legos I had as a kid, which my mom kindly saved. I didn’t realize how much Legos had changed until other kids started coming over, and they were amazed at what we had–things like road plates, green plates, and blue plates that you could use for grass or water. The older Legos were not only gender-neutral, but a much better canvas for imagination, in my opinion.

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  12. At Lego.com, you can still buy the blue, green and road plates. If anyone’s looking for older legos, they seem to have a large selection.
    Anyone know the backstory on the end of the online game, “Lego Universe?”

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  13. My kid plays with my old Legos and I’m in my 40s. But, the older Legos that were heavily used don’t seem to lock together as well.

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  14. “It’s just toughening things up as part of a general Danish plan to regain Schleswig and Holstein.”
    Did someone resurrect Palmerston?

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  15. I ran a Lego Club for a couple of years at my kids’ elementary school, and 2 things jumped out at me. 1. You don’t need sets. The kids had no sets, just Legos and green plates. They could do just about anything with them and 2. they LOVE LOVE LOVE minifigs. I used to buy them 20 at a time and then have to replace them in a few weeks because they’d disappear or got torn apart or whatever.

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  17. Reason # 281 why I enjoy this blog – people not only refer jokingly to “Schleswig-Holstein”, others will get it and pick up the banter….
    Thanks for the laugh of the day!

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  19. We’ve got Legos for girls. It’s called the “Buzz Lightyear” set that we bought for youngest Raggirl, who is a huge Buzz Lightyear fan and needed lots of Buzz paraphernalia, including the Lego kit. Then, there was the “Lego Olympics” set and the Lego “Mickey Mouse’s Birthday” set. . .
    By now there’s just a huge box full of random Legos (and Buzz Lightyear’s disembodied head) that gets dragged everywhere that there might be an hour of downtime.
    The Raggirls might be interested in one of the girl-themed kits, but they’d be more likely to get them hooked if they teamed up for a Mythbusters Lego kit.

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  20. Denmark, my sincere apologies….if it makes you feel any better, I think YOU should have it, not the Germans.

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  22. Actually, if the UN had made S-H the Jewish National Home at the end of the war, a lot of trouble would have been avoided. The argument that Germany owed them a home is a lot stronger than the argument that it ought have been carved out of the Ottoman Empire. Regrets are vain.

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  23. y81 and Amy
    depends what you mean by middle. All state flagships, which are the highly selective colleges that graduate really large numbers of future lawyers, doctors, business execs, etc, enroll substantially more women than men, and graduate women at a higher rate than men. Despite most of them (it seems to me, and this is confirmed anecdotally both by chatting to admissions people, though not here, and by chatting to students who know what happened to their high school class mates) practicing significant affirmative action for men.

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  24. harry b:
    But what do the numbers look like if you add Virginia Tech to U.Va., Georgia Tech to Georgia, etc.? You may be right, but I would like to see a more careful analysis than one generally encounters in the popular press. For myself, I went through the top 20 universities in the U.S. News ranking (a level which concededly doesn’t reach the state flagships), and there isn’t a surplus of female students.

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  25. “…depends what you mean by middle.”
    Yes, indeed. I think there are oceans of solid, competent, trustworthy, smart-enough women (hence the imbalance in university enrollment you mention, as well as the gender imbalance in rates of incarceration), but once you get up to the more rarefied levels of intellectual life, things look different (as I’m sure you’ve experienced the last time you sat on a hiring committee). There really aren’t as many freakishly smart women as there are freakishly smart men. Or, looking at it differently, the sort of narrow, obsessive personality that is willing to spend decades picking away at something nobody else cares about is much more common among the male sex (although I suspect y81 may be married to one of the exceptions). Women are by necessity, as well as often by nature, generalists.

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  26. y81,
    I read that again and it sounded nasty. Sorry, no disrespect intended to your wife. Some of my best friends are narrow, obsessive personalities.

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  27. Actually, if the UN had made S-H the Jewish National Home at the end of the war, a lot of trouble would have been avoided.
    And if we had bacon, we could have bacon and eggs. If we had eggs.
    I doubt a Jewish National Home anywhere but Palestine was possible, but the timing for putting one in Germany was so far removed from anything plausible that it was never discussed to the extent of other failed locations (Manchuria, Uganda, and probably at least one in North Dakota). The U.N. didn’t exist until 28 years after the Balfour Declaration. By 1945, 1/3 of the population of Palestine was Jewish. In addition to the timing, you can imagine the practical difficulties of moving people back to the country that recently tried to kill them all, not matter how defeated it was.
    Also, to the extent that Slesvig-Holsten is really Danish, it doesn’t even solve the moral problem.

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  28. harry b,
    On reflection, I’d really rather have a competent but not brilliant person teach my daughter than have her be in a class taught by the scintillatingly brilliant but infamous SK (you know who I mean).

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