THE FAST AND THE CONSCIENTIOUS
Engineering a speedy hybrid
The bleachers at New Hampshire International Speedway stand empty as a Roman ruin. A team of UVM engineering students sits in the infield eating sandwiches and watching a perky red car from McGill University weave deftly around orange cones. Their own sits motionless in a nearby garage. They have nothing left to do but go home.
After months of designing, welding, and assembling their hybrid racing car, and days of near-round-the-clock programming on the electronics, the UVM vehicle had finally fired up just hours before the endurance competition—only to go silent again a few moments later. A pair of fifteen-dollar switches had failed. It was too late to get replacement parts. They were out of the race.
A defeat? Only in the way the Wright Brothers’ first bumpy crash landings were a “defeat” on the path to human air travel. No, sir; this was a smashing success.
And the judges knew it. For their innovative “GreenSpeed” hybrid gas/electric racing car, students from the UVM College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences won four prizes at the International Formula Hybrid Competition in early May.
Designed and built by members of a new student organization, AERO (Alternative Energy Racing Organization), the car won Chrysler’s Best Hybrid System Engineering Award, the Best Hybrid-in-Progress Award, the Dartmouth College Thayer School Dean’s Award for Most Innovative Design, as well as second place in overall technical design.
“The awards ceremony was pretty much a UVM love-fest,” says Jeff Frolik, associate professor of engineering and the club’s advisor.
This was mostly because the UVM team designed “GreenSpeed” as an all-wheel-drive hybrid with front regenerative braking that returns energy to the batteries, two things never before done in the competition.
“It’s held together with black duct tape, but we got so many compliments from officials about our design,” says Andrew Laing ’08, the AERO team leader.
“We want to mix the excitement of driving a race car—fast!—with the fact that the climate is changing—and we can’t keep burning fuel like crazy,” says Thatcher Friant ’10, a member of the club who helped build the 679-pound vehicle with a forty-horsepower electric motor that works in parallel with a gasoline engine.
“Of course, it’s a little disappointing not to be able to drive our car today,” says Brian Leach ’10, who was in charge of designing and building the mechanics of the car. “But this is fun. Working on this car is what I do every day. It’s no different than a college sport.”
The UVM AERO team made its inaugural participation in the competition against teams from Yale, Dartmouth, and more than a dozen other universities from as far away as Russia, Canada, and Taiwan.
[EAT LOCALLY]
THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND, IT’S FOOD IS YOUR FOOD
Amy Trubek wants to get Americans talking and thinking about what we eat—not the familiar calorie chatter, but substantive discussion over complex issues of taste, place, and culture.
“We eat approximately a thousand meals a year, every year of our lives,” says Trubek, who teaches nutrition and food science at UVM. “And we’re having taste experiences but we’re just not having conversations about them. My feeling is that it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or you’re poor, the idea is, how do you develop a notion of what you’re tasting and link it to ideas about where you are?”
Trubek’s food and academic bona fides run deep and varied. Prior to joining the UVM faculty, she led the Vermont Fresh Network for many years, earned a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and trained as a Cordon Bleu chef. Her most recent work, The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir (University of California Press), is her second book on food and culture.
The concept expressed in the French word terroir (roughly defined: the complex of environmental and social factors that make a food taste distinctively of its place) is traditionally valued in Europe, but just emerging in the United States.
Trubek believes these European ideas can and should be applied here, around winemaking, which the term terroir is most-closely associated with, but also produce and small-scale meat production, hard cider, and cheesemaking. And it’s not just taste but relationships, with farmers, butchers, and bread bakers—and building a food system that gives producers, “taste makers” Trubek calls them, a chance to make a living.
Vermont maple syrup is one of Trubek’s strongest examples of how even food around which people have an extreme pride of place, understanding its essential role in the state’s rural culture, is underappreciated as a food.
“If you don’t actually think about what it tastes like,” she says, “you are neglecting an element of what makes Vermont maple syrup so great.” She demonstrated that point and the essence of terroir in a talk and maple syrup sampling at UVM in April.
Considering three Vermont-tapped syrups of the same grade, but from different geographic locations, Trubek notes the remarkable difference in taste. “When you talk to people involved in making maple syrup,” Trubek continues, “they’ll say yes, absolutely, these syrups taste different from place to place, from season to season. All that variability kicks in, it just isn’t something that consistently has been valued as a way of talking about or communicating or sharing food and drink in our culture. So it’s local knowledge that is in a sense suppressed. It never goes anywhere. It’s not institutionalized by the state, it’s not valorized, it’s not necessarily part of a cultural conversation that we have about food.”
Trubek hopes that her work can give voice to the small-scale, artisinal producers who have a lot of idealism but are deeply concerned by economic barriers to their work in a monumental industrialized food system. “I’m trying to represent these people’s experiences and their ideals and then how that touches the culture,” she says. “This is about discernment, taste, what happens in the mouth, and what kinds of variables affect your taste experiences.”
photograph by Sally McCay
[DANCE]
MOVING ON UP
The University’s young program in academic dance, launched in fall 2006, marked a milestone during the spring semester with the first presentation featuring student performers and choreography. Among the highlights of the show, a performance of “Dirthead,” a piece created and danced by senior Heather Cairl. The work was previously selected by judges as one of the ten best at the American College Dance Festival Association New England Conference in February. In the company of longstanding dance programs, including Harvard and Middlebury, this was a major honor for both Cairl and UVM.
The new dance program, which is working toward offering a minor, has drawn talented students from majors across colleges, young women and men who have danced through high school and seek a serious environment to follow their passion. The program is currently focused entirely on modern forms and thus the inaugural performance, titled “Dancing Uphill,” had a dynamic, contemporary thrust.
“Contemporary dance,” Paul Besaw, assistant dance professor, says, “isn’t looking to go with the mainstream. It’s dance that can be beautiful, but it can also really ask the audience questions.”
For her part, Heather Cairl’s favorite dance in the production wasn’t her own, but a risky work choreographed by Besaw titled “Bump.” The piece was performed by eight UVM students with music by a jazz quartet led by Patricia Julien, assistant professor of music. The live improvisational music required students to dance on instrumental cue and negotiate a sense of uncertainty that brought verve to the performance and, by Cairl’s admission, a bit of fear to the performers.
But that’s what makes the recital—and this dance program—a chance worth taking. “It’s cool in a university environment,” Besaw says. “I think, in the spirit of research, everything can be an experiment of sorts. Everything doesn’t have to succeed, but you should absolutely learn from everything you try.”
[PROVERB SCHOLARS]
STUDENTS FOLLOW LEAD OF PROLIFIC PROFESSOR
To bend a time-worn proverb to our purposes, “The class doesn’t fall far from the professor.” Wolfgang Mieder, professor of German and Folklore, is one of the world’s foremost proverb scholars and a prolific writer on the subject with work that ranges from academic journals to popular volumes at home in a Stowe gift shop.
During the past year, Mieder challenged the ten students in his proverbs seminar, a senior-level German course, to elevate routine term papers into essays worthy of publication. They rose to the occasion with thirty-page pieces—written in German— that were published as a book in the supplement series to the scholarly periodical Mieder publishes each year, Proverbium. (For German majors looking to brush up on their skills, the book is titled “Sprichwörter sind Goldes wert”: Parömiologische Studien zu Kultur, Literatur und Medien.”)
Mieder students have published on occasion in the past, but never an entire class. “This is ‘No Child Left Behind’ on a more scholarly level,” the professor jokes, adding that the idea grew from a combination of “nerves, guts, and a little bit of craziness.”
Among the topics: A pre-med student with a German major considers that prescriptive puzzler, “Feed a cold; starve a fever.” A Johnny Cash fan steps into the ring of fire and takes on proverbs in the lyrics of country love songs. Other sources explored range from the profound words of Rev. Martin Luther King to the not-so-profound proverbial wisdom in James Bond movies.
Dzeneta Karabegovic ’08, a double major in German and political science with a minor in holocaust studies, says that her paper on Rev. King’s use of proverbs took her research skills to a new level, something that will prove useful as she looks to graduate studies, likely law school, down the line. She worked from primary sources and then tackled the tough work of writing in German about landmark American speeches spoken in English. “By using metaphor and symbols, as well as proverbs occasionally, King was able to tap into a subconscious knowledge that we all share and can identify with, no matter the color of our skin,” Karabegovic says.
To Professor Mieder’s knowledge, this effort is the first time an extended volume of proverb scholarship is the work entirely of undergraduates. With a print run of eight-hundred, 250 of the books are bound for North American librarians, 250 will go to proverb scholars and subscribers to Proverbium around the world, and other copies will be available for purchase by interested readers.
[RECYCLING]
ONE MAN’S USED FUTON IS ANOTHER MAN’S TREASURE
These are not emotional goodbyes at the annual Spring Move Out Project’s Free Swap. New grads Tom Burdett ’08 and Cory Grimes ’08 carry a worn couch up Loomis Street and are happy to set it down, happier to see it passes inspection for drop-off. They’re Boston-area guys (Burdett wears a Red Sox T-shirt; Grimes, Patriots) who are heading back to Massachusetts. Their beige pleather couch is staying behind in Vermont. Brittany Hill ’09 and Molly Aubert ’09 carefully lower a rather large microwave to the curb. The appliance’s size has earned it an affectionate nickname, “The Time Machine,” but it won’t be coming to the friends’ senior-year apartment on Buell Street. They, too, are pleased to walk away lighter.
The rhythm of life in a college town is marked by marquee events, such as graduation, and less-obvious ones, such as the spring day when most local apartment leases end. Clearing out a student rental can put a lot of stuff on the fast track to the landfill. But over the past several years the Spring Move Out Project—a joint effort of the City of Burlington, Chittenden Solid Waste District, and ReCycle North, together with UVM and other area schools—has helped reduce waste while strengthening community through events such as the Loomis Street Swap.
On May’s swap day, Gail Shampnois ’81 and Alicia Turner ’05, stand near the traffic barriers that make Loomis Street safe for the block party/street market. The pair staff UVM’s Office of Student and Community Relations and helped to make the Move Out events happen. “The neighbors love this and get really excited about it,” Turner says. Shampnois adds there will a steady flow of students leaving stuff throughout the day, noting the effort of one intrepid soul who rode his bike to Loomis while carrying a futon.
Sara Puretz ’97 lives just up Willard Street. She knows the area from more than a decade back, the heady days of living on her own as an undergrad for the first time. And she also knows the different perspective of a young parent raising a family in a student-heavy part of town. Admitting that it takes some effort and humor, Puretz is a booster for the place: “I love this neighborhood.”
Events such as the Loomis Street Swap help to build the sense of community and connection with students, Puretz says. For her part, she’s snagged a candlestick holder and a chair (promising, if ragged). But she’s been one-upped by her pre-school son Rowan who spotted a student walking up with a foosball table and laid claim before it hit the ground. Rowan and his friend George are plopped on the grass of Puretz’s tidy front yard, spinning the handles on what is easily the Loomis Street Swap catch of the day.
[STUDENT RESEARCH]
FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE
Students wearing thick backpacks and professors carrying cups of thin coffee meander around the Sugar Maple Ballroom of the Davis Center, looking at a thicket of posters on easels.
This is the first comprehensive UVM Student Research Conference, and 146 presenters are on the program, many now explaining multi-colored graphs or busily rehearsing PowerPoint slides.
Laura Vogric ’08 stands in front of a large poster, “The Fight for ‘Enduring Freedom’: Presidential Rhetoric and the War on Terror,” smoothes her dress and continues with her presentation to a group that has gathered. “I’ve been exploring twelve speeches by George W. Bush,” she says, with a professorial hint of patience, “I took a line-by-line approach to tease out how the president creates a plausible world during times of crisis.”
Not far away, a poster covered with a mass of formulas reads: “Absolute Quantification of Protein Phosphorylation by Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry.” “You can’t even use these words in Scrabble,” says graduate student Michael Previs, with a confident smile that belies his self-deprecation. Within a moment of talking it’s clear that his research, far from “geeky” as he calls it, may play a part in a nearly universal human concern: understanding heart disease.
Amidst this cacophony of presentations and persuasions, it would be easy to miss a key fact: hundreds of students and professors are listening—learning, it seems, on their own time. And, in that, this new conference, with undergraduate and graduate presenters from every college and school at UVM, reflects the promise of the modern research university.
Perhaps the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between the sciences and the humanities that C.P. Snow lamented over fifty years ago has only deepened into thousands of disciplinary schisms within the sciences too. But you wouldn’t know it from the throngs of eager students and their professors that came forth from libraries and lab benches on a sunny Thursday morning in April—not just to bring their new knowledge, but to build bridges, too.
[STUDENT FOCUS]
photograph by Ned Castle
ETHAN BOND-WATTS ’09
Environmental Program major and accomplished glass artist
IN THE WORKS
Commission to create the Class of 2008 senior gift, a glass sculpture that will hang in the Davis Center. To learn more or contribute: alumni.uvm.edu/2008/seniorgift.asp
IN HIS WORDS
“Working with glass attracted me because it is so hot, so dangerous, so immediate—it’s the same reason young people are drawn to snowboarding, that instant gratification. You have the ability to experiment, to fail, to drop stuff on the floor and go back in and scoop out some more glass immediately and make ten pieces in a day…”
HEART IN GLASS
Time burns up. It goes up the chimney, man,” says Ethan Bond-Watts. Time—he’s talking about long stretches of it, up to nine hours straight immersed in his art. And the chimney? It’s the stack over the furnace where molten glass glows orange as the UVM junior practices his craft in a studio co-op on Burlington’s North Avenue.
Bond-Watts has meshed a glass-blowing apprenticeship with a college education and passionate focus on his work to make a quick start on a career as an artist. Though he has another year remaining at UVM, he’ll help members of the Class of 2008 leave their mark on the University. The Senior Class Council has commissioned Bond-Watts to create a glass sculpture that will hang in the Davis Center.
A four-year apprenticeship with Burlington artist Alan Goldfarb and travel to study with a number of the world’s top glass artists in Venice, Seattle, and Corning, New York, followed Bond-Watts’ high school graduation. “It became apparent at some point that I could spend my whole life in front of the furnace,” he says, “and I realized that an education was really important to me.”
As he enthuses about how the Environmental Program has deepened his perspective as an individual and an artist, he could be poster boy for the major and for the wisdom of taking some time between high school and college. Bond-Watts has every intention to spend his life “in front of the furnace,” but his artistic sensibility is increasingly shaped by his environmental ethic as his work has evolved toward large sculptural pieces.
In describing his concept for the Davis Center sculpture, he says that he hopes to evoke the intermeshed swirl of the natural world. The multiple hanging pieces united by thin steel aircraft cable may bring to mind the sweep of a flock of birds or a school of fish, Bond-Watts says.
“Art is not to be kept in this white box of a gallery so that academics and aristocrats can muse,” Bond-Watts says. “It is a really functional element of society that helps us work out our ideas, synthesize ideas, and communicate ideas that maybe transcend the limits of language.”
[NEWS UPDATE]
JURY CONVICTS MICHELLE GARDNER-QUINN’S KILLER
On May 22 in Vermont District Court in Rutland, a jury found Brian Rooney, 37, guilty of raping and killing UVM senior Michelle Gardner-Quinn in October 2006. The conviction carries a lifetime sentence without parole.
Gardner-Quinn met Rooney through a chance encounter in downtown Burlington on the evening of October 7, 2006, when her cell phone batteries failed and she asked to borrow his. When the young woman was reported missing the next morning, suspicion turned to Rooney. Gardner-Quinn’s call that evening was traced to his phone and a surveillance tape at a Main Street jewelry store recorded an image of Rooney and Gardner-Quinn walking past. An anguished six days followed for friends and family, the local community, and the University. The tragedy was confirmed when a hiker discovered Gardner-Quinn’s body in a rocky crevice at Huntington Gorge. The state’s case against Rooney was built on strong DNA evidence.
“I hope it brings some sense of closure for the family and the University, never forgetting what Michelle brought to us with her passion and spirit. At the University, we don’t forget that,” Annie Stevens, assistant vice president for Student and Campus Life, told the Burlington Free Press.
An environmental studies major, Gardner-Quinn’s values have lived on through a “This I Believe” essay written for a class assignment days before her disappearance. Published in the winter 2007 edition of Vermont Quarterly, the essay later became the basis for a film shown at the Live Earth concerts in summer 2007. Gardner-Quinn’s environmental ethic and activist spirit have also inspired Michelle’s Earth Foundation and a UVM scholarship fund in her memory.
[CAMPUS PULSE]
GRAND WAZOO, GRAND BALLROOM
The UVM Jazz Ensemble ranged a bit outside the canon in March when they took on the music of Frank Zappa for a concert in the Davis Center. The program drew the ensemble’s largest crowd ever and their performance earned a standing ovation. The set list: Zappa favorites such as “Montana,” “The Idiot Bastard Son,” “Peaches en Regalia,” and “The Grand Wazoo.” All of the arrangements were written by Ed Palermo for the Ed Palermo Big Band of New York, which plays Zappa exclusively.
“The orchestrations are beautiful,” said Alex Stewart, director of Jazz Studies. “They preserve the feeling of the original tunes but find and exploit the jazz character that’s in so much of Zappa’s music.”
Stewart added his thanks to Gail Zappa, the late musician’s widow, for giving her blessing to the event.
OBJECT LESSON
“These are the first people to lay eyes on the Green Mountains. You never stop looking for the oldest people; it’s always a focus,” says John Crock ’89, research professor in anthropology and director of UVM’s Consulting Archaeology Program. Evidence of these Paleoindians’ presence in the region some eleven thousand years ago was uncovered in the form of three fluted points and numerous other tools found during a dig at Okemo Mountain Resort in 1999. Crock and CAP colleague Jess Robinson believe that the present-day ski area in southern Vermont was along a natural east-west corridor and part of a seasonally traveled triangle touching New York’s Hudson Valley, parts of Maine, and Pennsylvania, where the material for the points seems to have originated. The pair recently reported their findings to peers at the Eastern States Archaeological Conference and theorize that those who left their tools behind were passing through in pursuit of big game. “They had to move with the resources,” Robinson says.
QUOTE UNQUOTE
Young people right now can shape their career, their lifestyle, their education, around some facet of this great question, particularly around the energy question. Be a teacher or communicator, an artist or investor. There are things you can do in your life to shift the balance toward new energy options or toward alleviating poverty. So they have every opportunity right now to make this their quest—and also to make a lot of money in the process. It’s a great time to be a kid.
Andrew Revkin, longtime New York Times science writer and also a recent author of children’s books, on what he says to kids about climate change. Revkin drew a capacity crowd to his UVM talk in March, part of the Burack President’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
[ARCHIVES]
WATERMAN TAKEOVER
April 18, 1988
As student protesters flooded into the Waterman Building executive wing on that April Monday twenty years ago, Provost John Hennessey asked, “Who are the leaders?”
“We’re all the leaders,” one student answered.
For the next four days, students would occupy the wing in an act of civil disobedience designed to push forward the University’s commitment to diversity. After negotiations among faculty, students, and administrators, President Lattie Coor and the protesters emerged from the wing on April 22 with a formal agreement to advance the hiring and recruitment of multicultural faculty and students and enhance the curriculum to build racial and ethnic awareness.
Twenty years later, the UVM community marked the anniversary of the Waterman Takeover in a number of ways. Today’s students signed thank you notes to the 1988 protesters; the Student Labor Action Project made clear UVM activism is alive and well with banners billowing off Davis Center balconies—the words of Thomas Carlyle: “Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct”; and a group gathered to watch a tape about the event and discuss diversity then and now.
The video is fuzzy, but the faces are familiar. Karl Jagbandhansingh ’05 talks with Hennessy. Diane Ziegler ’88 strums away and leads the singing on “This Land is Your Land.” Professors Leon Burrell and James Loewen, Mayor Bernie Sanders speak out on the steps of Royall Tyler.
While the effort to build diversity at UVM continues (and was nudged along by a second student takeover of Waterman in April 1991), the face of campus has changed in the past twenty years. Current ALANA undergraduate student enrollment has grown from 1988’s 440 to today’s 640; and the full-time ALANA faculty numbers have built steadily as well, from thirty-six in 1988 to 122 in 2008.
“It was a real catalyst,” says Pat Brown G’92, director of student life. “We wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are if the students didn’t do that.”
COMMENCEMENT
Farewell to 2008 Grads
The Class of 2008 was sent forth on May 18 with UVM’s 204th commencement ceremony. Writer Julia Alvarez delivered the address as the University conferred degrees on an estimated 2,596 graduates. Though graduation Sunday turned up sunny, ominous weather forecasts earlier in the week drove the ceremony from the green to the tennis facility for the second straight year.
[BOOKS & MEDIA]
STORY OF INVENTION
Alumna explores last years of Nikola Tesla
It wasn’t just Nikola Tesla’s status as the forgotten inventor of some of the most important technologies in human history—including AC electricity and radio (yes, that was Tesla, not Marconi)—that attracted Samantha Hunt ’93. The novelist describes the man as “more a starving artist than an engineer,” a “poet-inventor.”
To illustrate, at age eight, Tesla invented a motor powered by June bugs, later he proposed a machine capable of photographing thought, and wrote about constructing a free-floating ring just above the equator, enabling world travel at the speed of the Earth’s rotation.
When she discovered this side of the Serbian-American scientist, Hunt knew she had to write about him. The Invention of Everything Else, a blend of fiction and non-fiction, weaves the story of Tesla’s final years in New York City—where he was living with pigeons in room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker—with that of a fictional chambermaid who befriends him.
Much of Hunt’s extensive research for the novel happened in the customary manner—delving into the stacks at the New York Public Library, reading Tesla biographies, old magazines, newspapers, and letters. Hunt also engaged in experiential research, exploring the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla lived the final years of his life.
With help from the hotel’s chief engineer, who has collected stories, photos, and menus of the past eighty years, Hunt forged a relationship of her own with the inventor’s home. “He’d take me up to the roof, down into the sub-basements, through the kitchen, laundries and into the off-limits parts of the hotel like the now-closed, secret tunnel that runs into Penn Station,” Hunt says. “In this way, he helped me see what life in 1943 might have been like.”
Hunt’s hotel research didn’t end there; the persistent author also spent the night in Tesla’s old room and, in dedicated pursuit of every detail of the man’s life, took a bath in his tub.
“I enjoyed doing the research for Invention,” she says, “though there did come a certain point where I had to stop myself—research is easier than writing—I had to make myself stop reading, start writing.”
Writing a fictional account of a real person’s life can be a difficult line to walk. “The rule I followed for combining fiction and non-fiction was that I didn’t want to lie or fabricate the details of Tesla’s life.” She didn’t want, for example, to do what another book she came across in her research did: printed in kelly green ink, the book stated that “Nikola Tesla was born onboard a spaceship traveling from Venus to Mars.”
“I wanted a reader to be able to learn about this extraordinary man through my novel,” Hunt says.
“Still I’ve always wondered why we have to have such strict divisions between fiction and non-,” she muses. “Particularly now when it seems that what we construe as ‘reality’ (reality TV, cosmetic surgery, fast food) is phony. Fiction, even fantasy or sci-fi, always rings true to me in that a human thought it, wrote it.”
Amanda Waite ’02 G’04
[BRIEFS]
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe François ’90
Thomas Dunne Books
Oatmeal pumpkin seed bread. Onion Rye. Spinach Feta Bread. Ciabatta. Authors Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe François, a UVM alumna, teach how to make these (and more) delicious home-baked breads without spending all day in the kitchen. The book, which has garnered attention from The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Newsday, demystifies the notoriously high-maintenance genre for the average cook.
Making the Scene: Contemporary New York City Big Band Jazz
Alex Stewart
University of California Press
Although the term “big band” may conjure up images of swing dancers, zoot suits, and music halls of the 1930s and 40s, the ensemble style is still alive and well. Alex Stewart, associate professor of music and director of jazz studies, takes a look at the role of big bands today while offering a behind-the-scenes look at contemporary ensembles in New York City. Through historical narrative, interviews, and score analysis, Stewart charts the importance and value of big bands in the development of jazz.
Johnny Boo
James Kochalka ’89
Top Shelf Productions
Johnny Boo, the best little ghost in the world, and his pet Squiggles use their unique powers to help solve their problems, including a run-in with the Ice Cream Monster, in alumnus and off-beat cartoonist James Kochalka’s new comic. Kochalka’s unique style—featuring simple shapes, bright colors, and quirky characters—has earned him an international cult following. Tested on (and approved by) Kochalka’s own son, Johnny Boo is recommended for children four- to eight-years old.
