Even

INCREDIBLE MACHINE: EVEN MORE CONTRAPTIONS
$34.99
I got this Rube Goldberg-esqe game for a buck at Target last year. My 4 year old wanted to play it, and enjoyed it, but it seemed really difficult... until we realized there was a tutorial. The tutorial is EXCELLENT! It speaks to you so even kids who can't read can find out how each and every item behaves. Once you know that, the rest of the game is pure fun! The puzzles are quirky and punny and silly and most importantly - make you think! Once he stepped through all the tutorial, he moved on to the EASY puzzles. He has conquered most of those with a little help and has moved on to MEDIUM. We like to sit and play the DIFFICULT and EXPERT puzzles together. And if you want - and my son does - you can build your own.

For every puzzle, you can adjust the music (much better than most kids games), the background colors, the gravity and other stuff. It really is just a wonderful game.

My only gripes are these:
My son plays it too much! (and I would, too, if I let myself.) and...
You can't get their solution to the puzzle until you have solved it yourself. So when you are truly stumped, there is no help.

We also own "The Incredible Machine Returns: Contraptions" which, I believe, was made before this one. But they both have the same tutorial, so you don't have to have one before the other.

Even Money
$26.95
I've been a Dick Francis fan for years, having read every mystery he's written.

In the past, Francis has been the cause of many a tired morning, as I simply could not put the book down and turn off the bedside lamp - each page drawing me further into the story and the characters, the end of each chapter a hoped-for stopping point, but in reality a tease to get me to just start the next chapter... and start the cycle over...

Not so Even Money.

I will not fault Felix, as the joint father-son venture in other recent books was quite good. But, one wonders if the editors at Putnam did not have the fortitude to ask for revisions, given the number of repetitious sections (almost verbatim in different parts of the book), and the downright boring flow - until the last 50 pages of the 350 page book.

Even the ending is sort of a miracle-in-3-pages thing that attempts to tie up all loose ends, but actually raises as many questions as it answers.

A true Francis fan will want to read it nonetheless ... it is what fans do after all. Perhaps a new reader will enjoy it, not being prejudiced by the excitement and delight of earlier offerings.

Ernie Ball 2626 Not Even Slinky Custom Gauge Nickel Wound Guitar Strings (.012 - .056)
$9.00
I play Progressive and Thrash metal, and these strings hold out nicely. Tuned them down to A sharp (b flat?) and they sounded sweet. Back up to E (standard) and they provide nice full sounding tone.

Even (A David Trevellyan Thriller)
$24.95
Grant doesn't know from thriller pacing. He stops and starts, and re-explains, and then stops again for interminable observation of things that rarely amount to anything in the plot and don't lead the reader to heightened understanding--he just doesn't seem to be able to stop himself.

Chapters begin with fairly intriguing stories about special forces training, but they're pretty much the high points.

There's a torture scene that goes on for pages, minute detail after minute, mechanical detail--Grant probably thought of it as "exquisite detail", but after a while you get bored and want to skip past it (yeah, yeah, torture, torture, I get it), which is the equivalent of wanting to skip the steamy stuff in porn to find out whether the horny housewife actually paid the swarthy plumber. What you're skipping ahead to isn't that interesting, but the writing is just good enough to make you hope it might be. Eventually. Luckily, it's not a long book.

He doesn't like the women characters at all, which makes it hard to believe his hero could be affected by anything that happens to them--it began to seem obvious that a final female betrayal was inevitable, since treachery was all the women could be trusted for, and I was bemused to find that Grant wanted us to take the hero's devotion seriously.

He shares with Lee Child a casual acceptance of vicious brutality, but doesn't make it particularly compelling, and intersperses it with those obsessive look-at-the-rivets-in-the-wall passages. Is even he interested in the story?