I don't want to grow up... But poor Geoffrey the Giraffe will have to, as Toys "R" Us bids adieu after a 61-year run. (Bankruptcy is causing them to close all of their stores.) I loved TRU as a kid, and my first and only magazine casual has a tie-in. Alas, all good brands eventually die. Something I did not know was that TRU's origin story begins in our nation's capital! (Who says #TheSwamp doesn't produce anything?) The blog Ghosts of DC reports:

Charles Lazarus, the founder of Toys “R” Us started out with a small store at 2461 18th St. NW. He had returned from World War II, and in 1948, at the age of 25, saw an opportunity to capitalize on the growing baby boom with a store to capture this market, Children’s Bargain Town.

So, every time you order another round at Madams Organ, think about all the happy children who used to roam the building, looking for new toys.

Yes, the first toy store run by the founder of TRU is now a bar. 

.GIF-based marketing is now a thing. I've made a lot of hand-crafted, artisanal .GIFs over the years. (.GIFs, for the uninitiated, are image files that depict motion. Silent movies, if you will...) Mainly, they're used for reactions on social media, and I've created ones from obscure movies, like PCU, that don't already readily exist on the 'net. Most people (except me, who has his own redundant cloud storage archives), go on .GIF hosting websites.

Twitter and Facebook now work with these sorts of sites to make inserting .GIF images into posts very simple. In the old days, people would have to search for, download the file, and upload it to respond. Now there are .GIF search engines, like Tenor. As BusinessWeek observes in an interesting report, #brands are now trying to get good placement in the search algorithms:

On Valentine’s Day, if you entered “love” into popular GIF search engine Tenor, the top results would have included a doughnut leaning on a coffee cup with the slogan “We’re better together” and a heart-shaped dessert with the phrase “Donuts before dudes.” While neither may represent most people’s idea of amour, they’re top of mind for Dunkin’ Donuts, which paid to have the GIFs created and placed in the hope that viewers would pass them along to friends.

Six figures(!) for .GIF product placement? Yikes.

Small world, China edition. A married couple in China has discovered that they both were in the same place at the same time, according to family photos. Neat.

How narcissism is killing democracy. Tom Nichols joins "The Opposition With Jordan Klepper" to discuss his instant classic book The Death of Expertise. I don't find Klepper's show very entertaining, but Nichols is always worth hearing and comes across even funnier than Klepper does. 

The Real Genocide. At the Washington Post, George Will has a must-read on the troubling growth in popularity of aborting children with Down Syndrome.

Family matters. The sister of racist mass murderer Dylan Roof was arrested and charged for bringing weapons and drugs to school. Her social media posts, too, have been utterly despicable. 

Save the date! Join us at the 2018 Weekly Standard Summit. This May 17-20 at the historic Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, join Stephen F. Hayes, Fred Barnes, and Michael Warren and special guests Bret Baier and A.B. Stoddard as they discuss the future of American politics. Book your tickets now.

—Jim Swift, deputy online editor.

Please feel free to send us comments, thoughts and links to dailystandard@weeklystandard.com.

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