Early Modern Whale Boy

My last posting about demonic children naturally led my thoughts on to the apple of his father's eye, Timmo, and here he is in the hirsute form that, to his chagrin, had to be chopped back for the start of school term. My judgement is of course biassed, but here's a young man who is going to be rated cute, and perhaps already is. My eyes, but his good looks from his mother.

I was a bookish child, but suspect that if I'd been born in 1993 like Tim, I would not now be heading that way. He reads, but I can understand his fascination with on-line games like 'World of Warcraft' and 'Guild Wars', and console games like the much-esteemed Zelda series. His school was telling parents this last Wednesday that we must tell them if anything at home was going to be disrupting school work: I almost piped up and said "8th December: release date for the Nintendo Wii and 'Zelda: Twilight Princess' - so after that, expect homework with extra short-cuts applied". I'd imagine 50% of the parents of these 13 year olds would have groaned with recognition. But the school is so solemn about work, I kept quiet. No, it can't wait till Christmas, the much-postponed game has been waited for for something like 18 months already, and every delay has been bewailed. I'm just going take the easy (and only) way, and lie down in front of the Juggernaut.

Tim needs the present devices that read e-books to move on apace: yes, the straight e-book text, but with an instant manga button, which converts some plodding canonical masterpiece into graphic form, or, better still, can scurry off at any point and gather snippets of moving pictures from across the net to create a video mash-up (with a 'more ridiculous' dial that he can twist up to 11). It should work very well, and then he can talk about Sir Walter Scot with his Grandma (" I liked the bit where I galloped to Ivanhoe's rescue", he will say, bewilderingly, for what use is a narrative into which you cannot insert yourself, or chosen avatar?)

Come on, Sony, catch up with Sonny:
http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/pa/prs/reader_features.html