I'll bet you there's an excellent astronomy club closer than that.

In my experience, these short, stubby tabletop reflectors are built like turtles, and can take an enormous amount of abuse without losing collimation. Your phrase "parent becomes the gatekeeper" is great, but it's got me thinking about the refractor you suggest, which is going to be physically big enough that a 9-year-old will probably need a parent to carry and help set up.

I spent a lot of time following the "start with binoculars" advice when I was a kid, and came away mostly disappointed. Tripods help, but even then, 7x magnification rules out all the planets and all but the biggest deep-sky objects. Small reflectors offer a nice middle ground between that and the obscene 200x magnification advertised by your average $50 Walmart refractor.

This sounds like a great way to discover alien civilizations too huge to give a shit about us, too far away to ever talk to.

Not that we should be picky, but this is punching above our weight.

It's not marketspeak, it's an old rocket scientist joke.

you can look at something under high magnification for a few seconds before it disappears, and then you have to figure out how to track RA with an alt-az mount under high power and find the object again

You shouldn't be using high magnification with a dobsonian. In fact, at the price point we're discussing here, you shouldn't be using high magnification at all.

Through a 4.5" f/6 Dobsonian with a decent wide-angle eyepiece, you can see Saturn's rings and Jupiter's moons plus a hint of cloud patterns, you can see open and globular clusters, and you'll have to push the telescope to re-center the object once every couple of minutes tops.

I haven't used this scope, but it checks off all the right boxes. Seems like a good choice to me.

No. People who give away telescopes to thrift stores are people who didn't think very carefully about their telescope purchase to begin with. You don't want their hand-me-downs.

The telescopes listed in your "one set of suggestions" link are good. To get a telescope that's intended for real amateur astronomers rather than cheap junk for hopeful clueless parents, get a small reflector, not a refractor. I teach at a college: in our class for nonmajors, we introduce them to the sky with Orion Starblast 4.5s, which are cheap, compact and easy to carry, bulletproof, and easy to use. The magnification is low for planets, but that means it's easier to find things, and easier to track them manually through the sky. Orion also sells the SkyScanner 100mm, a slightly smaller, significantly cheaper version of the same thing. Their XT4.5 dobsonian is a little bigger and more expensive, and will give a better view of the planets but be more difficult to use for deep sky objects.

What I'm saying is, buy a small reflector from Orion.

I can't say much for certain about Mythbusters, but I'm sure of one thing: Kari Byron's career is not over.

The explanation I've heard is that the show is shot and edited for Australian television first, where it takes the form of a half-hour episode (without commercials? not sure). For the American edition, they pad it up to an hour with commercials, but can't really add new content so it's just repetition.

I deliberately left out things that are impossible, useless, or poorly defined. I suspect most of the items you mention are in this third category, but time will tell.

The dreams of golden age science fiction came in two varieties: technologies that require massive amounts of energy and power (jetpacks, flying cars, space colonies) and technologies that require incredible control of matter on the microscopic and atomic scale (electronics, biochemistry, etc.) We've mostly failed to make progress in the first category, but we've surpassed the wildest dreams of every 1950s sci-fi author in the second.

Bitter tears of regret.

PHP Formal Specification:

1) Don't use PHP.

"The last time the Russians got this aggressive was their invasion of Afghanistan under Jimmy Carter"
I think you're forgetting that they invaded Georgia when George W. Bush was president.

Wow, I had no idea Jimmy Carter was the leader of Afghanistan, but if so it makes sense that Russia would follow up by invading his home state...