I don’t find this trip down Memory Lane to be quite so … disappointing … as the food. May have something to do with the olfactory sense being the most acute.
Spirograph. I have a vintage set, the original #401, 1967. It has all the wheels and pins, but no pens. I use my beloved Pilot Precise V5s in different colors for this. Sadly, I am not very good at this and I have no imagination.
Loom and doom: The ubiquitous pot holder loom. Laugh all you want, but I need more of these things because, quite frankly, they’re better than any pot holders I’ve ever bought. The problem is, the good ones (metal) are freaking expensive now. $15 per pot holder? I think not. (Yes, there are less expensive ones on Amazon. Look at the shipping, though.)
Yeah, so it’s Fisher-Price. Big deal. It played Karen Carpenter and Donny Osmond a whole helluvalot more than it played Dick Wittington and His Cat, and Drake’s Tale and The Bremen Town Musicians.
Chinese checkers. My dad and I used to play almost every night before bed. I don’t know when we stopped but it was probably around the time I decided winning didn’t do anything for me and losing pissed me off. My grandmother taught me how to play gin rummy and checkers.
Except … there was Pit. Playing that game 1) was a valuable economic life lesson and 2) actually did get me pumped when I won and 3) didn’t depress me if I lost because that’s just how the market works. My mother, grandmother, great-aunt, and I would play on New Year’s Eve (my mom’s birthday) and of the four of us, I am the least competitive. It got loud. And nasty. It was glorious.
Dime store Halloween masks should not be left out. Store-bought costumes were out of our budget (because back then, sewing was more economical), but I wanted one of those masks in the worst way.
Does anybody actually know how to play croquet? There were balls and mallets. WHACK! That’s all I needed.
Trouble, Sorry! (not sorry), and Operation.
Old Maid, Go Fish, jacks, and kaleidoscopes.
Clackers. Oh, clackers. Talk about an onomatopoeia. And alternative uses.
The IceBird snow cone maker. I got this for Christmas one year. I don’t know what my parents were thinking. The flavor packets operated on the Gillette razor blade and printer ink model: Buy the toy for cheap and pay a fortune to be able to keep using it.
A Skipper doll. Barbie was a little too upscale for the likes of me.
Going back a little farther, then, we’ve got Bozo the Clown. I got this for my 3rd birthday and promptly popped a hole in him. Why? Because I had just had a vaccine shot and, because I understood the concept of vaccination all too well, thought Bozo should be as inoculated as I was. I got one of my mother’s sewing needles and carefully poked his arm. I was thoroughly bewildered by his inability to hold air after that.
And last but not least, See’n’Say The Farmer Says, and a busy doll for fine-tuning motor skills. Yes, I still remember it.
Testers don’t break the code.
They break your illusions about the code.
Morning Glibs, no doom or gloom despite the weather here!
Per our forecast last night, we sit in a pocket of indecision between sea and land based low pressure systems.
Mo in the Morning?
Things must be chaotic.
Pit is still in print, although I prefer Ponzi Scheme or Stockpile (recently reprinted) if I’m going for a stock trading game.
Have you played Black Friday
I have not, but it looks to be in my wheelhouse.
It is my least favorite FF game. Power Grid, of course, being my favorite.
Power Grid is as close to a perfect game as you can get.
Cool stuff, MJ. I remember having some of these, and some other ones at my grandparents’ house.
How many of the original editions were made in China? I’m going to guess 0. So, it is possible.
Also, stealing the quote about the code. Seems a good cudgel with which to beat programmers’ egos.
They were clearly testing outside of the intended use cases.
A testers job is to Prove the coffee doesn’t work.
I…. I’m gonna let the phone take the W on this one.
If you hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have known.
^^^ THIS ^^^
Which is why TDD isn’t a panacea. Just because your tests pass doesn’t mean your coffee works.
Yup. TDD can’t solve the “it’s just what we asked for and not what we need” problem.
Does anybody actually know how to play croquet? There were balls and mallets. WHACK! That’s all I needed – no flamingos?
😉
https://artistsuk.co.uk/acatalog/Sir_John_Tenniel_Alice_Flamingo_Croquet.JPG
I love croquet and play it at least 10 times a year. Wish I could more.
He didn’t ask if you played, he asked if you knew how to play.
Chasing your family thru the Overlook with a mallet is probably not in the official rules.
Yeah it is the best yard game, mostly because you can play with drink in hand and totally screw with your buddies. I would actually play golf if you could “send off” your opponent’s ball.
Dating back to college, I made a vow to only play games I could drink during. It made croquet, bowling, bocce ball, and horseshoes the go-to’s. A few years ago some friends wanted to play baseball (actually mushball, but basically the same), I insisted we add a cooler to second base and make it a mandatory stop.
I like yur style
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097493/mediaviewer/rm2493028609
My nieces and nephew always got a kick out of The Farmer Says when I could make it so “The Cow says… oink oink.”
Mo Monday Morning?! I’m down.
Did Bozo become an anti-vaxer after that?
That would make it mo-mo-mo, no?
“clackers”
I think that’s doubly racist
What was doubly racist was Funny Face Drink Mix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funny_Face_(drink_mix)
There was a more modern version of the clackers that popped up around 1990 where instead of string, they used hard plastic to fix the length and make it easier.
They were very popular in Baltimore. I distinctly remember rising my bike thru some sketchy neighborhoods where dozens of kids were out in the street clacking like some Children of the Clackers B-movie.
I still have nightmares.
If you could make the string version go, you could be heard from a mile away.
“Originally they were made of a single ball placed in the vagina, used to enhance the act of sexual intercourse”
Maybe I’m some kind of rube, but wouldn’t it get in the way? The idea of accidentally ramming Q Jr. into a marble during The Act is a bit unsettling.
Q Jr? PFFFFFTT!
Be more original man. Mine is called Rambo or Terminator….
Morning Mojeaux,
This is the first time I’ve heard/read “dime store” in decades. I remember doing all my Xmas shopping in the 5 and 10 when I was about 10 years old or so. Your pictures brought me back to when my own kids were, well, kids.
My folks taught me how to play cribbage when I was 8/9 so there would be a 4th when necessary. It helped with grade school arithmetic skills a lot. Now I haven’t played for 50 years or more but I still remember the rules, the counting, etc. Thanks for the trip, Mo.
Bridge is the only worthy card game. I have spoken.
does anyone play that? Or even know how to?
Yes and yes. Learn it and gain powers you can’t even imagine.
The ability to know how to play a game you’ll never have a group to play with?
Pick a night of the week. I can almost guarantee there is a local bridge club meeting on that night. About 15 years ago I would have got into regularly if I had had a regular partner.
Also yes.
I never joined the ACBL, but I had a few tournament points earned if I had wanted to pay the money to make them official.
We still have a 5 & 10 store in town.
http://www.sines5and10.com/
Mostly replaced (after a 20 year hiatus) by the Dollar Store. Boy, Sean, I haven’t seen that sign for many, many years. Anything actually 5 & 10 any more?
I’ll have to explore when the lock down ends.
When I was a wee nipper, Eagle Army Navy was my favorite store on Earth.
By our old Brooklyn apartment, there was a wee shop with a hand lettered sign proclaiming it the
It was a tiny, single-wide storefront but packed like a TARDIS. You could get anything from cast iron skillets to shower curtains to those giant blue plastic barrels for shipping overseas. Now it’s just another fucking Duane Reade/Walgreens.
Mornin’, Fourscore!
We had TG&Y (ours was a few blocks’ walk from my house), occasionally Katz (not that particular store) (you should see it now; it’d make you cry), and rarely Ben Franklin.
I loved this game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Trap_(game)
We had it. Did you fill the pool with water?
Totes.
There was a life-size version of that one year at Burning Man. It was epic.
That’s not life size. Life size would be scaled for mice, that’s upscaled to human-compatable size.
Oh, so like mouse-sized bathtub and bowling ball? I think not.
Today, in
RACISMShypersensitive douchebagsN)Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Sunday suggested that the underlying health conditions of Americans, in particular in minority communities, contributed significantly to the death toll from the coronavirus.
“Unfortunately the American population is a very diverse … It is a population with significant unhealthy comorbidities that do make many individuals in our communities, in particular African American, minority communities particularly at risk here because of significant underlying disease health disparities and disease comorbidities — and that is an unfortunate legacy in our health care system that we certainly do need to address,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
When Tapper pushed back, asking Azar if he was implying the reason so many Americans had died from Covid-19 was because they were “unhealthier than the rest of the world,” Azar said no, that wasn’t what he meant.
——-
When Tapper asked Azar if he meant to suggest that the death toll from coronavirus was the fault of the American people, Azar explained “this is not about fault.”
“Oh, no, Jake, please, please don’t — please don’t distort — no, this is not about fault. It’s about simple — simple epidemiology and stating that, if we have hypertension, if we have diabetes, we present with greater risk of severe complications from corona — from this coronavirus,” Azar responded. “That’s — that’s all I was saying. And you know that,” he said.
Azar continued, saying, “This is not — one doesn’t blame an individual for their health conditions. That would be — that — that — that would be absurd. It’s simply a statement that — that we do have greater risk profiles here in the United States.”
Trump’s Amerikkka. Blame the victim.
Isn’t what he’s saying the same as what the Food desert people say? Inner city kids can’t get healthy food. And we know Americans are unhealthy.
The desert is imposed upon them by heartless capitalism exploiting their vulnerability, asshole.
They’re not fat because of poor impulse control and/or habits, that’s not possible.
Poor people are skinny, can’t fool me, I’ve seen the pictures of Depression # 1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okie
Not exactly what you expect
Great hair, smoking and diversity, what’s not to like?
“Unfortunately the American population is a very diverse …” Well that sounds a bit racist .
“one doesn’t blame an individual for their health conditions. That would be — that — that — that would be absurd.” Seriously, go fuck yourself. Most of these health conditions are self inflicted and everyone knows it.
“one doesn’t blame an individual for their health conditions. ”
Then one will never help them overcome and get healthy.
We know it’s ok to say Americans live unhealthy. But we can’t say that a sunset live unhealthy for any reason because the only reason you’d say that it’s racism.
I keep asking but can’t get any of or wokesters to tell me how bad COVID was to the 52 government approved genders and if hospitals, first responders, and medical professionals gave them their due by calling them by their preferred pronouns. Cause you know, it’s wrong to microagress like the virus and these non woke medsters seem to have done trying to deal with the real world consequences instead of the lib fantasy world.
Maybe I should have posted this under the games thread considering it is a fantasy gaming subject…
If you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle with an unhealthy diet, that is in fact the individual’s fault. It’s bizarre that it’s considered bad to notice that.
When you want the collective to reign supreme, you need to destroy the concept of the individual.
Westworld Season 3 seems even more apropos now. Free will is dead.
Nuh uh, it’s because of food deserts created by the racist capitalist system.
Also the kids aren’t getting enough broccoli in their school lunches.
Diversity is our strength, shitlord!
From your list, I had: Spirograph (still have it), Chinese Checkers, croquet, Sorry!, Operation, and See-N-Say
Other stuff: Tiddly Winks, Brix Blox (the poor kid’s Legos), chemistry set with bunsen burners (almost burnt down the house with that one), the Game of Life, Simon, Hungry Hungry Hippos, Lite Brite, and the probably completely toxic, going to give me cancer someday Stretch Armstrong.
We had Loc Blocs.
Tinker toys
Lincoln Logs.
I had an erector set that demanded a blood sacrifice every time I built something with it.
Somewhat related. When working on things, my dad always said, “it’s not a project unless you bleed a little bit.”
I’ve found this to be very true.
Mom and grandma said the same about cuts when cooking.
I got the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle one year for Christmas.
It was fucking awesome!
How could I forget Hot Wheels and their reliably shitty race tracks?
No better toy ever created.
Nothing better than climbing on top of the roof, and creating a jump that would send Evel plummeting two stories into the bush.
The SST Racer.
The stunt cycle was an off-shoot/copy.
I got mine for Easter one year. I used to launch him down the stairs. It really was awesome.
I totally forgot about Lite Brite!
My friend’s LB caught fire once. Wrong bulb wattage?
Maybe? No idea.
Bet you could light that sucker up somethin’ fierce with high-lux LED bulbs!
Good morning, Mo!
Thanks for the great memories! I think we had almost all of those things growing up. I remember some cutthroat games of Trouble with my sibs and cousins. We also played a ton of croquet at my grandparents’ house. Although we knew the rules, it always ended up being more like violent Calvinball. Good times.
What a fun way to start the week! Why, you could say I’m on the top of the world!
Have a great day, you weirdos!
Kind of sensationalistic (it is the Daily Star after all), but cool stories nonetheless.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/worlds-most-amazing-miracle-face-21804943
gin rummy -never played that. we had a game called remi in Romanian but it was with tiles and some wooden supports for your tiles.
In commiedom not that many games were available, mostly various games with a standard pack of cards. Chess rarely, mostly backgammon. Also a game with 5 dice we called yams.
Go Fish like game for example was played with a standard deck but I can’t for the life of me remember how we called it.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Kaleidoscopes! I still love them; I’m worse than a cat with a ball of yarn when I have a good one. Endlessly fascinating.
For awhile I collected high-end kaleidoscopes, some with quality wood, brass, and other materials. And a bunch of different twists on the view, including one where you blew feathers around with a squeeze ball, and another with colored mixing oils almost like fractals. Lost the bug when new options started to become redundant. Still up in our house but my wife relegated them to several shelves behind an easy chair.
I know the masking thing is inside baseball to a lot of you (and the general population), but if this is true, it’s hard to overstate how enormous an overreach and 4A violation this is.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/17/bombshell-mike-flynns-name-might-never-have-been-masked-in-the-first-place-n398597
We all know they won’t, of course, but IC heads should roll after this.
Nothing will happen. We finally got the proof that they had no proof of Russian collusion from the beginning. Except Congressional GOP knew at the time and did nothing. They are complicit.
Wonder if that was part of why Trey Gowdy bailed?
I think the ones that where not part of the deep state machine (and anti-Trumpers) were at first unable to get anything from the weaponized bureaucracy that used the “national security” lie to hide the facts from everyone for a long time, before they were finally briefed on the game plan team blue had when it became obvious (to get Trump to order someone – anyone – to try and stop that chicanery so they could then impeach him for obstruction). Couple that with the national security implications of actually divulging some information that was classified (and that declassifying it too soon would trigger team blue’s plan to impeach), and the ones that knew, had to walk a fine line. Things are finally coming out because the long game was played (by design or pure luck) and team blue’s plan never panned out. So now, not only will we find out about the corruption that was SOP during the Obama admin years, but that even after he left the machine doubled down on more corruption to cover the criminality and to overturn an election. There was plenty of reasons to prove Obama was a criminal, and the deep state was just out of control, but the followup strategy – that “insurance policy” Strzok & Page discussed in their emails – now has all but played out, and the coverup is not just proof of how bad things were/are, but is left unpunished only if we have decided the republic is already dead and we should give up on it.
Every person who got up and said the Patriot Act was going to be weaponized and used to spy on American citizens is completely vindicated.
And it looks like nothing else will happen.
Rand’s amendment failed by one vote. Gahhh! At least this time McCain had nothing to do with it.
McConnell is a royal piece of shit.
His name was never masked but there were a shit-ton of unmasking requests for it?
Basically, Obama et al illegally got his name from either a CIA spying operation or from one of our allies’ intelligence gathering operations, then they had everyone submit an unmasking request to the NSA for parallel reconstruction purposes.
McCabe testified, under oath, in congress to this being the fact. They had one or more of our 5 Eyes partners AND the NSA listening in to Flynn. And don’t buy the bullshit about them listening to Kysliak all the time and that is how they found Flynn. Flynn was set up by Obama. They waited until they KNEW he was in the Dominica Republic on vacation to pull that fake Russians interfered with our election cap trap where they declared Russian intel people persona non grata and threw them out expecting Kysliak to reach out to him. The plan was to then ambush him – why Strzok & Pientka then asked him to talk to them without any counsel present – and force him to turn on Trump when they nailed him on lying. Unfortunately for them, Flynn never lied during the interview and the original 302 had to be “rewritten” to make that claim (order from Comey whom got it from Obama) before they could railroad the guy.
Flynn knows where all the bodies from the Obama administration’s weaponized bureaucracy were and he was going to not just hurt 8 years of Obama setting up a politicized machine, but expose the corruption and criminality of the Obama administration, so they targeted him to get Trump to react (and then go to phase #2 which would be to soft coup him under the guise of him obstructing them in their madeup case). It didn’t work. Now they are desperate to run the clock out in the hope Biden (or whomever they replace him with) can help the corrupt deep state hide the truth and save the left’s narrative of the transparent & scandal free Black Jeebus administration which actually was the least transparent and most corrupt one I can recall in my lifetime (and possible in our country’s history).
This is why I’m voting for Trump in November. No other reason.
If Trump doesn’t win, kiss all hope for rule of law goodbye.
There’s no guarantee even if he does win, but if he doesn’t, it’s done.
I’m voting Trump because the Deep State doesn’t get to exercise a veto when we vote for who they don’t like. (They obviously believe they do.)
Normally I vote LP but I won’t hold my breath and vote for another shitty Johnson/Weld. If there is a Hornberger or McAfee on the ballot, that’s a different story.
Hornberger, Kokesh, and maybe that Monds guy. Thumbs up. Jorgenson…maybe(Cato Libertarian type). Judge Gray? No.
What’s wrong with Gray besides Johnson ’12? Don’t know much about him besides OC and pro-legalization.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
From TOS.
Yup.
Nope.
Protests votes mean nothing. Win hearts and minds, bitch.
“I am me. I am an incrementalist and a pragmatist”
Read “I don’t have convictions”. Being “pragmatic” only matters when you have power to effect change in your favored direction. You should be willing to engage people from where they are coming from, but never be afraid to state what your real beliefs are if asked.
His answer to everything in the debates was, “Well, we’ll audit that”. Ummm, OK. Do we really need to audit the department of education? Just cut it.
This is the only thing that gives me pause about my plan to not vote. Trump, the president, doesn’t get me out of my recliner on election day. Trump being the target of every unconstitutional fedgov program gets me frothing mad.
Do I vote to punish the political party that crossed more than one line in weaponizing the fourth branch of government, or do I stick to voting only when a candidate excites me enough to get me off my couch?
So far, I’m still in the latter mentality. You don’t fix coups with ballots. You fix them with lead.
I don’t even think Black Jeebus masterminded any of this, I think the bureaucracy longed for the day they could be weaponized and Obama was gullible enough to go along with every one of their asinine suggestions.
It’s possible, but Obama is a Chicago machine politician. I think the bureaucracy was completely ready for it and all it took was a willing leader.
This was a scandal twenty-five years in the making.
“It’s possible, but Obama is a Chicago machine politician. I think the bureaucracy was completely ready for it and all it took was a willing leader.”
^^^^DOUBLE THIS^^^^
I think Obama knew and was fine with it. However, I don’t think he led or ran the operation. I think he was a lazy man who was fine with what was happening, but didn’t want to put in any actual effort . . . into anything.
Whether he was the leader or easily led, either way he’s the one who has the responsibility, a la Enron.
I’m not so sure he’s gullible, just ambitious but lazy. He strikes me more as the type whose ego is satisfied by playing the big man, by having grand schemes run by him so he can nod his royal approval and fool himself into believing he’s the mastermind, maybe adding some insignificant tweaks to the plan so he can put his name in the credits.
Dan Bongino thinks it was a set up from the start – via Bracken:
Bongino posited a fascinating possibility about the Flynn-Kislyak phone call on his podcast last Friday. It smacks of a set-piece intel op by Brennan/Strzok et al. Flynn was on a much-needed vacation in the Dom Rep following the constant stress of the campaign. This was well known to the black hats surveilling Flynn. So this is when they announced that 30+ Russians were being PNG’d (persona non grata) and sent home, and 2 Russian consular facilities were being closed down.
Doing this while Flynn was out of the country meant
1. The CIA was free to monitor Flynn, he was out of the USA.
2. Kislyak was sure to call Flynn, the incoming Nat’l Security Advisor to ask him “WTF, Mike?” about 30+ Russians being PNG’d and the consular facilities being closed down just weeks before Trump takes over.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy, like a fast break layup in B-ball. Piece of cake. Total setup, easy day.
https://soundcloud.com/dan-bongino
Sorry to go off topic so early, but according to reports, Zardoz is landing on Hulu June 1st.
That is all.
It’s been on Amazon Prime forever. I have it on my watchlist and have been skeert to click that button.
Yeah, you can rent it/buy it on Amazon Prime, but if you’ve got a Hulu subscription, you’ll be able to watch Zardoz for no extra charge.
PIT IS THE MOST AWESOMEST GAME EVER!!! That was a favorite of my two sisters, our might-as-well-have-been-another-sister neighbor, and me. That and marathon Monopoly games that went on for days – or until a cat came along overnight and did a Hurricane Cat-rina (without actual liquid, thank goodness!) on the board. And Authors. (This one looks very like the one we had. My grandfather had an even older deck.)
Had Spirograph and also Lite-Brite. Had Clackers, which were probably as dangerous as Jarts.
A few years ago, one of my sisters absolutely made my Christmas by giving me Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, which we weren’t allowed to have when we were kids. I love her best!
A kid was pegged in the head with a Lawn Dart,
And now they’re off the shelves at the K-Mart
Monopoly.
*sigh*
No one to play with, no one to teach me the rules, just an intriguing box sitting there with intriguing parts.
Your brother was the wrong age?
My next youngest brother is 6 years younger than I, and my youngest is 8 years younger than I. I was essentially, according to birth order theory, an only child, which explains a few things.
I was young/old enough to demonstrate what happens when you cross dad so my brothers watched and learned.
Don’t worry, almost no one follows the written rules for Monopoly anyways. No, you aren’t supposed to pile up fines and other spent money in the middle of the board. Free Parking doesn’t give you anything. You need to have all of the properties of a color before you build houses on them. If you land on an unpurchased property, and don’t buy it, it goes up for auction.
I was with you until that last rule. I know it’s an official rule, but it sucks.