<html> Hello, Colin I thought Brian Chung's title <<Riding Mowers, Dinosaurs and the Art of War >> was very well chosen. I don't see the competition for time as war. Myself, I notice that I spend too many hours in front of a computer terminal, (like now) and that my reading time is way down, and I don't spend as long playing the piano as I used to. I noticed in his long list of child activities, that they fell easily into two major categories: physically active, mainly sports; and cybernetic-sedentary. Piano playing is someplace in between. Aerobic it's not. I can see why people want to get kids outdoors running around, since they spend so much time sitting down, staring blankly at stuff. As for the future: People are always projecting present trends, and then moaning about the results. Present trends only show the past, not the future. Projections are only useful if they take into account the big picture, and even so, something can happen (like 9-11) which nobody foresaw, and which changes the whole playing field. OT: --start soapbox mode-- Picture everything you do, buy, eat, enjoy, etc. Now, remove about half of the physical energy going into it. What is left? Are people just going to sit there and do nothing about it? Can you predict how people are going to react to $7 gas, knowing that the price and availability are only going to get worse yet? I can't. The city paving crew is resurfacing all the streets for a few blocks around my house, this week. They have some really big machinery, and they covered the street with tar, felt, and asphalt, after cleaning and scoring the old surface. They do it every few years, keeping the streets nice, but how many more times are they going to be out there doing that? What kind of sleepwalkers in Washington approved a bunch of new highway construction, when almost nobody will have the gas to drive the interstates? And the railroads are falling apart, just as the fuel crunch is starting to make the airlines impractical. (Airplanes use many times the energy of rail, and trucks use several times the energy of rail, to haul the same stuff.) Big new highways? Somebody on the web called them really spacious and luxurious bike paths. Read "Twilight in the Desert" by Matt Simmons, if you believe the Saudis when they say they have decades of supply ready whenever they want to develop it. --end soapbox mode-- I honestly don't know how kids are going to be spending their days in five or ten or fifteen years. All I can guess is that it's going to be way, WAY different than how they spend them now. At least our favorite instrument doesn't have to be plugged in. The best way to help kids enjoy music is for the parents to actively make music themselves. Susan Kline  </html>