Toys

Linden Ponds residents gathered to collect toys for the Hingham police and fire departments at the annual Trim a Tree Party in the Derby Clubhouse. All participants brought a new, unwrapped toy to help support the annual effort, which provides toys to families in need. The event collects hundreds of toys every year, Linden Ponds staff said. Police and fire officers will collect the toys and distribute them. - Jessica Bartlett

Excerpts from the Innovation Economy blog. If you have kids, you've probably gotten used to handing them your phone so they can play games or watch videos. So what about handing them your phone so they can insert it into a Nerf-like ball and toss it around? That's the idea behind a new product from Physical Apps in Hollis, N.H. TheO Ball is a foam sphere with a pocket in its center to keep the phone safe while allowing players to see its screen. Some of the initial games will be bowling, hot potato, and a question-and-answer game called Interrogo, but the company also plans a software...

NEW YORK - Scholastic Corp. , the US publisher of the Harry Potter books, has come under criticism from a children's advocacy group for using its vast, venerable network of school-based book clubs to market toys and other noneducational items. The world's largest publisher and distributor of children's books, Scholastic earned nearly $337 million last year from the book clubs, which it inaugurated in 1948. The company estimates that three-quarters of US elementary school teachers - and more than 2.2 million children - participate annually in the clubs.

By Patrick D. Rosso, Town Correspondent After the hard work of a few individuals the 5-year-old victim of a car accident in Dorchester on Sunday will have a few new model Coast Guard helicopters to play with as he battles to recover from his injuries. At approximately 11:45 a.m. on Sunday, according to the Globe , a young boy, who was not identified by officials, was struck by a mid-sized Chrysler vehicle on Whitten Street in Dorchester. Staff from the Boston Medical Center after the initial rescue effort, informed Lieutenant Scott...

The Wareham Police Department collected over 1,000 toys during its annual "Stuff-A-Cruiser" event on Dec. 11. People donated toys of all sizes, from Matchbox cars to bicycles, and filled up the police cruisers that were parked at Target and Walmart that day. Officer Karl Baptiste organized the event, and the toy drive locations were manned by Officers Dean Decas, Blaise Lalli, Joseph Cardoza, and Chris Corner; Sergeant Walter Correia; and Lieutenants Kevin...

BROCKTON - Take a guy who loves hot rods, blend him with a guy who spends hours in his woodworking shop, and purify the mix with an artist's imagination and obsession with technique, and you've got Michael Cooper. The works in "Michael Cooper: A Sculptural Odyssey, 1968-2011," up at the Fuller Craft Museum, resemble giant toys fashioned from wood and metal. They're fantastical, visually alluring, and sometimes mind-bendingly complex in their making. Yet some of them are quite dark.

WALDOBORO, Maine - Growing up in the 1940s in Watertown, John Fawcett spent a childhood in downtown Boston theaters watching Disney movies. He would return home to sketch what he remembered. He was also drawn to radio shows like "The Lone Ranger," swept away to adventure in other places and times. Fawcett started collecting memorabilia as a teenager, then began in earnest in the mid-1960s with the birth of the Pop Art movement. His passion for the art behind American popular culture grew during his 32 years as a University of Connecticut art professor and collector.

PAWTUCKET, R.I. WHEN IT comes to the new, improved Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven, what gets the most attention is the light bulb. For decades, a 100-watt bulb was used to cook mini cupcakes. So when those tree-huggers in Washington started phasing out the incandescent bulb, Hasbro had to redesign the iconic toy, sending some conservatives aflutter: Horrors, now the nanny state is taking over toys! But, as it turns out, the folks at Hasbro didn't mind. This gave them another chance to reboot the oven — which gets periodic redesigns, anyway — and aim it...

WASHINGTON — Are the toys in your children’s Happy Meals making them fat? The Center for Science in the Public Interest says they are. The Washington-based consumer advocacy group threatened to file a lawsuit against McDonald’s yesterday, charging that the fast food chain “unfairly and deceptively’’ markets the toys to children. “McDonald’s marketing has the effect of conscripting America’s children into an unpaid drone army of word-of-mouth marketers, causing them to nag their parents to bring them to McDonald’s,’’ CSPI’s...

A US Marine Corps officer loading a Toys for Tots van Saturday evening stopped and restrained a suspected car thief, police said yesterday. At about 5 p.m. Saturday, Boston police said, officers responded to the area of 120 Water St. and found a uniformed Marine restraining Albert J. Donizio, 48, of East Boston. Police were told that as the owners of a parked car approached the vehicle, they saw a man sitting in the driver's seat. The owners said they yelled at the suspect, who jumped out of the car and ran toward the Marine, who was loading a nearby van for the...

NEW BEDFORD - At 12:49 on Friday afternoon, the large metal door finally opened and the students from the Massachusetts College of Art squealed. It was time. Emily came out first, moving about as quickly as an elephant can move. Ruth was hot on her heels. All morning, these two Asian elephants at the Buttonwood Park Zoo had been behind the metal door, knocking on it with their trunks, pacing back and forth inside, desperate to know what all the commotion was outside in their habitat.

Ditch the office, get more done Many employees are interested in telecommuting, especially in congested cities like Boston, but employers are often skeptical about telecommuting's benefits. In a recent experiment, call center employees at China's largest travel agency were randomly assigned to work from home or at the office, with no other differences in their working arrangements, for a nine-month period. The performance of telecommuters jumped by 12 percent, of which 9 percentage points were from taking fewer breaks and sick days, while 3 percentage points were from higher...

Folks who celebrate Easter should expect to see a bumper crop of chocolate and toy bunnies this weekend, according to a new report from Panjiva Inc. Maybe tough times had penny-pinchers cutting back, but after several down years, bunnies (including chocolate bunnies) seem to be back big time --- shipments of bunnies to the US were up 22 percent in early 2012, Panjiva said. With offices in New York and Cambridge, Panjiva uses technologies developed under the leadership of company cofounder James Psota, a computer scientist from the Massachusetts...

SAN FRANCISCO - Children in California will still be able to get toys with their Happy Meals. A judge has dismissed a proposed class-action lawsuit that sought to stop McDonald's Corp. from using toys to market meals to children. The suit was filed in 2010 by Monet Parham, a California mother of two, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group. The suit claimed the hamburger chain was violating consumer protection laws and exploiting children's vulnerability to lure them into eating nutritionally unbalanced meals that can lead to obesity.

RE "BLOCKED paths: Frilly Legos won't encourage girls to enter scientific careers" (Op-ed, Feb. 14) by Joanna Weiss: I was a girl in the 1970s who reread biographies of Madame Curie and Galileo, started a nature club in my backyard, and was an avid consumer of Ranger Rick and any other sources of facts about the natural world. There were no toys for me then - I hated Barbie dolls, and used stuffed animals to play veterinarian. Apparently Lego is making sure there are still no toys for girls like that today.

Wobbling the whole way, a people-pleasing Pekingese made quite a walk down the green carpet at Madison Square Garden. Malachy the Peke drew cheers that grew louder with every tiny step Monday night and repeated as the top toy at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. Pink tongue peeking out from his black face, he beat a prize affenpinscher called Banana Joe in a most competitive group. "He doesn't run. He has a dignified Pekingese gait," handler David Fitzpatrick said. Malachy also has 114 best in show ribbons on his resume, and is aiming to add the one from America's...

NEW YORK - Walmart Stores Inc. has lower online prices on a selection of toys this month than Target Corp.'s website and Amazon.com Inc., according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis. Prices for a group of about 80 toys including Hasbro Inc.'s Easy-Bake Ultimate Oven and Leapfrog Enterprises Inc.'s Leap Pad Explorer are 1.8 percent higher at Target and 0.7 percent higher at Amazon, according to a report led by Poonam Goyal, a Bloomberg Industries analyst. Walmart's toys also were cheaper than those on the websites for Toys "R" Us Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp.'s Kmart, according to the Nov. 9...

THIS WINTER, Lego, the toy company that has inspired many an engineer, unveiled a line of blocks called Lego Friends, aimed specifically at girls. The bricks come in pastel colors, the figurines go to beauty shops, and the concept is straight out of market research. Lego executives say girls play differently from boys. They don't want to build complex fighter jets like the ones on the cover of the Lego Star Wars boxes. They want to tell stories, instead. I have no doubt that girls in focus groups were interested in putting little Lego flowers on little Lego treehouses.

The Lorax, perhaps the most famous anti-industrial crusader from children's literature, is getting support from companies that are willing to go green. With a host of commercial tie-ins — albeit for eco-friendly products — Universal Pictures will begin promoting "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" this month. The animated movie, set for release March 2 in North America, is about a creature who "speaks for the trees" and fights rampant industrialism in a retelling of the Dr. Seuss children's book first published in 1971.