A treadmill for toddlers seems a bit alarming, but I've seen some exercise videos for kids that seem like fun, as well as athletic videogames for kids, like Wii or Dance Revolution.

Unfortunately, kids aren't running around playing hide and seek or kick the can any more. The increasing emphasis on team sports for kids (even little kids) makes it hard for the extremely uncoordinated kid. Some kids take longer to develop athletic skills and coordination, and even in "just for fun" leagues, it's hard for the kid who is miles behind the other kids in terms of athletic skills.

I remember being forced to play sports when I was in elementary school, and I was the kid who couldn't run in a straight line without tripping and falling on her face, couldn't try to catch a ball without toppling over and falling on the ground, who was so slow and far behind that the teacher had to stop the game and wait for me to catch up. (My parents even had me evaluated to make sure I was OK, but the doctor just said I was a "slow developer" and I'd catch up eventually - which I did, more or less.)

The result was that I associated all sports and athletics with failure and frustration, with always being last and never being able to develop skills because I was so far behind the others. Even when the kids weren't openly mean, it was like a pee-wee player being thrown into a pro football game - my skill level was so far behind everyone else's that when the other kids were learning to kick the ball, I was still struggling to learn to stand on one foot.

Not only did I learn to avoid team sports as much as possible, but I never learned about other kinds of athletic activities that I might have enjoyed, ones that didn't depend on being "one of the team". The only athletic outlets available to me were team sports - soccer teams, little league teams, school teams, all the things that I failed at - and I think that's even more true today, when little Johnny and Janey are enrolled in soccer and T-ball when they're barely out of the womb.

I was never overweight as a child, but if I'd had the opportunity to try activities where I could play against a computer or measure my skills against myself (instead of always being measured against a real kid who would always be miles better than me), I might have learned to enjoy athletics, at least a little bit, and that probably would have carried over into adulthood.

Karen

Karl Rove may have taken "dirty tricks" to a new level. But he was a political operative, and winning was what he was hired to do. He wasn't hired to be a statesman. Most of his tactics were just a more extreme version of what both parties have done for years.

I don't think Rove was the real problem. The problem was what was behind him - the politicians who were happy to fall in line, the press that repeated his lies and innuendos without any investigation or criticism, the Democrats (in and out of office) who were too afraid of being called "un-American" to fight for the truth, and the voters who didn't bother looking further than slogans of "patriotic good... liberal bad".

Rove is just a symptom. The underlying disease goes deeper.

Most of these "Elvis specialties" are really just traditional Southern favorites. The peanut butter and banana sandwich may be associated with Elvis, but it was a staple of my 1960's childhood in Richmond VA - as common as peanut butter and jelly in other parts of the country. (I can't quite imagine my Mama learning the recipe from Elvis, so I suspect it existed long before Elvis made it famous.) Barbecue with cole slaw on top? A staple of my favorite hometown barbecue restaurant, served since the 1930's when my Dad was a child. Squirrel and chitterlings? Served at my grandmother's table too - a way for a poor farm wife to save money.

Anything associated with Elvis will sell books, even cookbooks. But most of what Elvis craved was the same thing you'd find in many Southern kitchens and restaurants. I was amused when I moved to New York and discovered that what I considered "basic Southern food" was considered exotic by most New Yorkers (who still can't make decent barbecue or macaroni salad). But then, I didn't eat my first bagel until I was almost 30.

When I was a student, a large percentage of the word problems in my math textbooks involved sports. Baseball, football, basketball, on and on and on. Not that girls can't enjoy sports, but I found the endless sports metaphors offputting. It made it seem like the only reason you needed math was to be a jock.

I haven't read McKellar's book, but I would have loved to see math problems that involved subjects that interested me, instead of the endless fascination with footballs and baseballs and basketballs. Is a problem that asks you to calculate the number of servings a recipe will make any more or less "frivolous" than a problem that asks how many home runs a player makes in a season? Why is one considered "normal" while the other is considered "inane"? Probably because the male authors of the textbooks think baseball is a worthy endeavor, while cooking or shopping is "too girly".

By the way, I actually liked math and ended up becoming a scientist, but it was in spite of the way math was taught to me, not because of it.