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BlogMy reading list seems to grow longer each year. It seems impossible to read all of the intriguing titles available; the Library of Congress alone has approximately 838 miles of bookshelves.
Continue Reading about Explore Your Reading List with These Video Games
My family was cutting-edge back in the 1980s. We had a TRS-80. My father subscribed to 80 Micro. He dabbled in BASIC programming. My parents and my sister played early adventure games such as Zork and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We were the most technologically advanced family on the block.
I was not impressed.
I hated computer games. I could not understand the appeal of sitting for hours, huddled over a glorified television screen with a tape player attached to […]
Continue Reading about The Perils of Rosella and the Genius of Roberta
Do you remember when there was a bit of mystery involved in answering the phone? When you’d pick up the receiver and not know who was on the other end of the line? (An act so intriguing, Lionel Richie even wrote a song about it!) As the youngest of three kids in a busy family, calls were rarely for me, but I never tired of answering the phone. Now many of us have caller ID on both our cell phones […]
Continue Reading about Hello, Vintage Phones? It’s You I’m Looking For
“For me, the Cube is a piece of art. It is more than an object with the shapes of a cube made of plastic, more than many colored stickers, more than a puzzle, and it is much more than a gimmick. Like other pieces of art, the Cube is more than itself. Though it may look ever simple at first, it is in fact rather complicated and complex at the same time.” -Ernő Rubik, 2008
Let’s face it: When you’re a grown-up, getting real mail can be terrible. (Look, another bill. Great, a reminder to get my teeth cleaned.) Occasionally you receive a nice letter-pressed wedding invitation or glossy gossip magazine. But when you were a kid? Getting mail was awesome. (Invitations to classmates’ parties! Birthday cards with a $5 bill tucked inside!) For many children, holiday catalogs provided endless hours of entertainment. As an elementary school-aged girl in the 1990s though, nothing beat the […]
Continue Reading about Learning American History from American Girls
Over the past two years, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) has been working to preserve pinball’s past by expanding its collection to more than 50 historic pinball machines—adding early “pin games” (flipperless predecessors to pinball machines) and electromechanical and “solid state” (electronic) pinball machines to the museum’s unparalleled collection of playthings.This summer (from May 24 to September 7), The Strong is showcasing some of these machines and related materials in Pinball Playfields, a temporary exhibit […]
Parody, a calculated form of play, has been around for a long time. Follow the word to its Greek roots and you dig up the meaning “against song.”
Continue Reading about The Funny Thing about the Funny Thing
When I give guests a tour through The Strong, I always plan to spend a few extra minutes in the museum’s Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden where approximately 800 butterflies fly around. I’ve noticed that if you move quickly through the space you miss many butterflies that are resting or feeding. But when you stay still, your perception sharpens and you notice more butterflies and moths perched on leaves, on branches, or on fruit. In general, the principle holds true that […]
On February 11, 2014, the staff at The Strong and the American public learned of the passing of Shirley Temple Black, actor, politician, diplomat, and former U.S. ambassador. Most Americans, however, know Temple as the most popular child star in Hollywood history.
Temple began acting in short films at the age of three. During the worst years of the Great Depression, her dancing and singing, her dimples and smile, and her cuteness and charisma made her the number-one box office draw […]
