The Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights

Usually The Transit Museum is the first choice of Boy when Girl wants to stay home with Mom. But, today it was Girls choice for the whole family.

We have been there so many times we don't even have to show our membership card. But that membership card is great. It has gotten us into lots of other great places like, The Staten Island Children's Museum, The New York Hall of Science in Corona, Queens, The Liberty State Park Science Center in Jersey City, The Franklyn Institute in Philadelphia, the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore and Museum of Science in Boston. That is the list of the places we have been to for free with our membership card. The potential list is here. Big list. When you are a member you go more often. I do.

Every Saturday and Sunday they have some great stuff for the kids to do. Today was

"Saturday, April 11 at 1:30 pm
INSIDE OUTSIDE
After reading The Inside-Outside Book of New York City, we'll create colorful "inside-outside" picture books to express our visions of subway travel. Ages 5+"

They got to make a little book. The cover was the outside of a train, then the inside and the last page was what you see outside the window.

My kids are really great artist. Yea. But the cool thing is that they sat for an hour and focused one thing. That's cool.

Then we went downstairs and looked at the old subway cars. I think the Museum put some new "old" ads in the old cars. I noticed some had a political message.


The shaving cream ad tells you to Buy War Bonds. The campaign ad is wants to "Sweep the Communists out of our Government. Notice the wording in these ads. Berma-Shave is partnering with the government to sell bonds. Dewey and Warren (while misguided) are referring to the Government as "our Government". There was another ad with famous "Loose lips sink ships" saying on it. It seams that the "Government" was trying to get everyone to work towards the same goal.

I really did not think much of this to I rode home on the Subway and was in a car were all the ads were the same. They were all from Keep it going, NYC. It looks like an organization that exists only to tell New Yorkers how good the public school are.
The ads mention rates of improvement, growth in number of classrooms. Lots of statistics. What it the point?

When did the government change from "lets all work together to make this a better country" ad campaign to the self-promotion business?


I wonder why there has to be a multi-million ad campaign to tell me how good public schools are?

Don't get me started on how spastics can be manipulated. But why?

Any answers....

keep it going nyc
Originally uploaded by gguillaumee

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