It’s a Simple World After All

Lilly’s grandma has given her a subscription to National Geographic Kids, which sounds good to me even though the first issue hasn’t arrived yet. Lilly’s generation will not know, except maybe faintly, the anticipation and occasional thrills involved in receiving magazines in the mail, but it still has to be good for her to get magazines about geography.

Today we got the sign-up gift, an inflatable globe. We used to have an inflatable one that had the place names in Japanese, a cool item indeed, but at some point along the way it was destroyed by little hands. It’s a nice inflatable, this new globe, but not quite cluttered enough for me. It only has country names, ocean names, the Equator, and the tropic and polar circles.

That’s it. No cities, mountains or rivers, and no Prime Meridian or International Date Line. It doesn’t have to be a Replogle, but I’d think the National Geographic Society wouldn’t want to dumb the world down quite that much.