No, not LPs, though that's a half-hour discussion right there.

Hi, Frank!

Your little p&p calcs left a paper trail! Do calculators do that? ;)

For the record: in our house, the calculator is something you use to check your arithmetic. We also have typewriters, which the girls love. We call them acoustic word processors.

A recent Caldecott Award winning book (Caldecott is given for illustration) is called Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. The cows on a particular farm get ahold of a typewriter and use it to send their demands to the farmer ("The barn is cold. Please send blankets.") using a duck as an intermediary. It occurred to me that if I were going to use this book for a Story Time, I would need to bring in a typewriter and let the kids use it, just so they would understand the story.

The situation mirrored a similar problem a couple of years ago with another book, A Most Unusual Dog by Toby Riddle. The dog in question listened to Bing Crosby records on his phonograph. First I had to explain who Bing Crosby was. Next: explaining records and phonographs.