Baby Einstein

Little is known about the early life of Albert Einstein, other than that he was born in Ulm and moved to Munich at an early age. It is reputed that his parents fostered in the young Albert a love of classical music.

Some have postulated that this early tutoring may have had a formative effect on the young Einstein's impressionable mind, being one causative factor of his singular genius. The irony in this theory is that, from an early age, Einstein himself was familiar with the precepts of Kantian philosophy and the methodology of deductive reasoning - therefore, he would have laughed at the simplistic assumptions and myriad non-sequitirs which are required to sustain this theory of cause (childhood exposure to classical music) and effect (the phenomenon of "genius", however defined).

Nonetheless, this theory is the central conceit of the Baby Einstein Company (slogan: "Where discovery begins"). The Company was founded by Julie Ainger-Clark a decade ago as a start-up toy manufacturer and it has since mushroomed into a fully-fledged cultural meme in its own right. It was recently sold by its founders to the Walt Disney Company for a sum reputed to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly this is a venture which makes sense on a business level, if not on a philosophical one.

Indeed, President Bush is a big fan of Baby Einstein - and he's the president, so he must be intelligent, right?

Anyway, all of this is a prelude to telling you that, despite my misgivings regarding the misappropriation of the name of one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers as a marketing tool for chew toys, I myself am a patron of the Baby Einstein Company and a dedicated user of their products.

In the video below, you can see me enjoying their latest invention, the pithily titled Discover & Play (TM) Activity Center (sic), which happens to be one of my favourites. As you can see, it is an object I am able to appreciate with discernment, on an intellectual as well as a cultural level.