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I have always been a fairly large fan of science stores.

At the Buckland Hills Mall, there used to be a store called World of Science, that was pretty much your standard science store. They had all kinds of polished rocks, chemistry kits, and plastic dinosaurs. I usually bought glow in the dark stars there, since I was a gigantic fan of them as a child. They had cool levitating magnet sets, grow your own crystals, and magically air-levitated beach balls. Every time we went to the mall I always stopped in, and most just looked at things, since they tended to be prohibitively expensive compared to my five dollar per week allowance. The stuff was always wicked sweet, and I really enjoyed playing with all the demos.

Today I went to the Natick Mall, where they have a Discovery Channel store. They had a lot of really cool, really useless, and really expensive stuff there. As cool as a digital picture frame, robotic dinosaur, or build-your-own-anatomically-correct-human-model kit is, they’re really not worth $120, $100, or $30 to me. My favorite things in these stores are usually the super-cheap things piled in the square plastic bins they have. The polished rocks, the rubber dinosaurs, and the spinning-LED-message signs. The fact that these toys costs under five dollars each is a sheer manufacturing wonder. As much fun as these stores are to wander around in, most of what they have has an amazingly low inspire-creative-play-in-small-children to price ratio.

The best thing they had were blocks.