Uncle Albert

Out and about today I stopped by a McDonald's restaurant. Besides refreshment I wanted to see if I could purchase a promotional "bobblehead" Happy Meal toy, this one depicting Albert Einstein. I thought it would be fun to have one in each of my office spaces. Asking at the counter, "do you have the Einstein bobblehead toy?" I was met with blank stares. "It's the Happy Meal toy from that Night at the Museum movie… you know!" More blank faces from teen- and twenty-somethings. The counter folk stepped over to the box holding available toys and offered up choices between a mechanical dinosaur skeleton and a "space chimp." I politely declined and ordered my Coke and soft-serve ice cream — the fixings for an improvised float. Thing is, this isn't the first time or place I've had this experience whilst seeking the Einstein bobblehead. Admittedly it's been a long time since I was a kid. When I was a kid (and the Earth was young) Albert Einstein was the iconic genius. Everyone, even the Three Stooges, knew who Einstein was (yeah, a one-name personage) and that he stood for extraordinary intelligence. That despite the fact that hardly anyone knew what he was really getting at with that E=mc² thingie. The equation itself became an icon for deep thought. Even today, in physics and astronomy, Albert Einstein stands tall and the shadows of his towering ideas cast forward waiting for science to catch up. But the "kids" at McDonald's don't know who he is, even when he's reduced to a toy figure in a movie. I'll bet if it was a Paris Hilton toy they'd know who it was. I think I'll curl up in a dark corner and weap.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend