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Disney, which had to drop the word "educational" from its marketing of Baby Einstein DVDs following complaints from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), has now had to back down further and offer a refund.

The New York Times reports that the $200 million a year business, which is predicated on the idea that DVD-watching is beneficial to infants even though the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time of any kind, television, DVDs, or computers, before age 2, is so pervasive that as many as a third of all American babies have seen at least one of these DVDs. In what the company is calling an "enhanced consumer satisfaction guarantee" and the CCFC is characterizing as capitulation, the company will refund $15.99 for up to four "Baby Einstein" DVDs per household, bought between June 5, 2004, and Sept. 5, 2009, and returned to the company.

I have been a furious opponent of Baby Einstein and the other DVDs for infants since I published the one of the first exposes of them as a racket in the mainstream media, a 2005 article in the Chicago Tribune. When I was working on the article, a company representative's absurd response to my question about academic studies showing no benefits in learning from their products that their DVDs were "not research-based." The New York Times story reports that even though they had to remove the word "educational" from their literature following CCFC complaints and a Federal Trade Commission investigation, the website still promises "number recognition" and introduction of shapes. And, of course, the name itself implies that the products increase knowledge or intellectual capacity.

The academic studies show that what infants learn from watching a family member once takes them four times as long to absorb in a DVD. And the very act of watching a DVD with the pulsing refresh rate of the screen can be at the same time soporific and stimulating, making it more difficult for them to get restful sleep. The only thing they learn from these DVDs is how to watch television. Susan Linn of the CCFC was a terrific resource for me in my work on this issue and I am delighted to see her success in bringing to parents' attention how useless these DVDs are.

The savagely funny Washington Post television columnist Lisa de Moraes takes on the Heene family's lust for reality television fame. The Heenes and the family behind the balloon boy hoax and subsequent media blitz. Slate's Culture Gabfest noted that it was not until the post-rescue effort interviews that law enforcement suspected that the whole thing was a publicity stunt.

de Moraes notes that Lifetime has decided not to air the Heene family's previous attempt at reality television fame and fortune, an appearance on the "Wife Swap" series. I like the way she makes it clear that Lifetime should have pulled it from broadcast based on its exploitative and overall disgusting content, completely apart from the subsequent discrediting of the family's authenticity.

Lifetime...had no problem with Dad, a.k.a. Richard Heene, observing that "once a woman hits 25, it's all downhill from there," creating a "meter" to gauge his temporary, pretend wife's behavior and when she asked him to help around the house, shouting at her, "You're a man's nightmare! I'm so glad my wife was born in Japan. Nag, nag nag! Over 25 years old. You sag!"

Which we believe qualifies as not only sexist and ageist, but maybe also racist, which would make it a veritable Hat Trick of Prejudice.

It's one thing if the so-called adults in the Heene family want to humiliate themselves for fame and fortune; it's another to take young children into the media circus with them. We should think carefully about whether the Heene parents's behavior constitutes child abuse. And we should think even more carefully about the extent to which the robust ratings for this kind of reality television make us all enablers.

Huffington Post has got a list of the nine worst surprise endings in movie history (well, in the past few years). I was pleased to see three of my Gothika Rule picks on the list, "Perfect Stranger," "23," and "The Forgotten." (For newcomers -- the "Gothika Rule," named for a movie with one of the worst endings of all time, means that I will give away the surprise to anyone who sends me an email to save them what I had to suffer in watching it.) Be sure to check out the comments from readers with their own suggestions. I'd add "The Pink Jungle," "Desperate Measures," and, of course "Gothika." Any others?

The theme of Blog Action Day this year is Climate Change. Observe this day by watching one of the many documentaries about the environment like An Inconvenient Truth , FLOW: For Love of Water, "No Impact Man," or Wall⋅E.

And then do two things: First, make a change in your own home. Eliminate drafts. Turn off the water while you brush your teeth. Recycle. Compost. Take reusable bags to the grocery store. And second, write to your representatives to tell them that this issue matters to you and that you are watching to see what they do about it.

In Washington DC's City Paper, Tricia Olszewski cites my fellow-Beliefnet blogger Michele McGinty (who has not seen the film) and me about the surprisingly lukewarm reaction to the anti-religious elements engendered by the Ricky Gervais film "The Invention of Lying."

I believe the reason that there has been so little objection to the film is that the film is not anti-religion. On the contrary, the alternate universe of the film has no lies but it is also depressingly literal and concrete. There is no fiction, no compassion, no imagination, no faith, no abstraction. No kindness. No love. Marriages are based on genetic compatibility. And as a result, the lives of the characters are empty and without meaning. Even the fictional religion thought up by Gervais' character to comfort his dying mother has enormous appeal because the citizens of this spiritually impoverished world sense that they need something more to believe in.