And Lego, of course. And for my sister: Stuffed animals. Simple toys, with nothing to plug in, no batteries required — these are the ones I remember really playing with.

Gibbs writes:

The best toys transcend, their survival a testament to their purpose and power. The Babylonians played board games; the ancient Greeks had yo-yos. The Chinese were flying kites 3,000 years ago. Crayola crayons were first produced in 1903. In 1916, Frank Lloyd Wright's son John, inspired by the way his father had built an earthquake-resistant hotel in Tokyo, invented Lincoln Logs. And many great toys are accidents or improvisations, a serenade by kids whose first drum set is a wooden spoon and a tin pot. Play-Doh was invented as a wallpaper cleaner. In 1943 a Navy engineer trying to smooth the sailing of battleships found that a torsion spring would "walk" when knocked over. If you stretched all the Slinkys sold since then end to end, I'm told, they would circle the earth more than 125 times.

I can't lie and say my brother, sister and I didn't play the hell out of video games growing up (Intellivision, because my Dad loved a bargain) but we spent a large amount of time playing with Lego, Matchbox cars, Play-Doh and, yes, Barbie dolls. And I don't know about this year's "hottest" toy, Zhu Zhu hamsters, but Play-Doh had the added benefit of being delicious! (What? Isn't that what they want you to do with it?)

The Power of Play-Doh [Time]

[Image via National Toy Hall Of Fame]

Rainbow Brite, aka Wisp, fashion icon and color-protector, has been re-imagined by Hallmark and is apparently now a Manga character. As Hortense points out, she and the Color Kids now bear an uncanny resemblance to Sailor Moon, who also defends the cosmos, but is a teenager and has nothing to do with colors. In fairness, Brite's makeover is not as reprehensible as is Shortcake's, but she is definitely sleeker and taller and, well, prettier, whereas Rainbow Brite was always cute.


Let's face it, even by 80's vaguely-galactic-pastel-cartoon standards, Rainbow Brite was slightly cockamamie: the plot, involving as it did the Colorless World, the Sphere of Light, the Color Belt, the Color Kids, the Sprites, Color Crystals, Color Caves and the Star Sprinkles, was basically incomprehensible, Kosinksi for the Romper Room set. And her look - which echoed the snowsuits of the times - was pure Reagan-era. They've already resuscitated newly-gaunt care bears and My Little Ponies; do we really need another wrong-headed sop to the Nostalgia Mart?

And here's what's always confusing: if it's all about playing into parental nostlgia - why are they turning everything into Bratz? Back in the day, little kids and cuddly animals could change the world as easily as a glamorous Jem. Nowadays, anyone under 5'10" need not apply, apparently; I'm braced for a modernist Sylvanian Family housed in Frank Gehry. And for that matter, if they want scrawny and big-headed, why not just bring back Rose Petal and friends? They were before their time.


The only toy with guaranteed immunity? Cupcake Dolls.


That is, unless she's rendered fat-free.


Rainbow Brite [Hallmark]
New Rainbow Brite [MyLittlePony]

I was a very avid journal keeper, but don't seem to have many of the early ones. Still: I was prolific. My mom has a few, and in my bookcase I counted 33 journals (from various years). The one above, has, yes, a silver unicorn on it. And here's what I drew on the inside cover:





It was the mid-'80s. I was 12, going on 13. And heavily influenced by Miami Vice, Desperately Seeking Susan and Valley Girl.


Inside? Well, paging through, all these years later, felt really odd. I read lots of gossip about people I can barely remember. So-and-so was being a bitch; whatshername was seen holding some guy's hand; someone snuck out of the house and went to third base. There were parties, movies and homework. There were intricate social structures. Everything the older kids (9th graders!) did seemed so mysterious, and college seemed ages away. It seemed like I had a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm, and a fair amount of sass — plus the strange urge to write it all down.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Send us a page from your old diary. A clear photograph or a scan would work best, and please make sure the image is no smaller than 500 pixels wide. Much like our Past Fashion galleries, we'll collect them all and display them. The post will go up next month, so send images to photos@jezebel.com by Friday, August 21. Please include your name (or commenter name), the year the diary was written, and how old you were when you wrote your salacious gossip.

The Amy Diary [Shameless]
The Amy Diary

[Lead image via The Amy Diary]

First there's "I'm A Better Dad Part-Time," by Richard Seely , who claims that from the moment his daughter was born, she and her mother were forming a bond "and I was, to some degree, excluding myself." As she grew older, Seely's daughter would go into "theatrics" in the absence of her mother. Seely writes:

I lost patience with this behaviour, and ultimately with many of her imperfections.

I became more and more of an ogre. I would snap at her. Tell her "no" sometimes for no other reason than to distinguish myself from her mother. If she got an A on a report card, I'd ask why it wasn't an A-plus. Unconsciously, I would intimidate her. Once - I can't even remember what she had done - all I had to do was look at her and my expression sent her running to her room, afraid of me. I never hit her, and have never contemplated any form of physical response toward her or anyone else, but what mattered was that I made her afraid of me.

And so, when he and his wife got divorced, he was fine with the mother getting custody of the child. He says of his daughter:

Because I don't see her every day, I have much more tolerance for the behaviours that used to frustrate me. I offer comfort instead of scorn if she misses her mother when she's away on a business trip. I celebrate the time we spend together, be it an hour or two after school or a weeklong camping trip in the summer.

I'm happier and more secure in my role as a parent than I ever was before.

But: Does any of this seem like a cop-out? Of course it's easier to be "tolerant" and happy when you've only got to deal with a kid part time; instead of being awakened in the night by fevers or managing tantrums, you're only there for ice cream and games and camping. Fun! But is that parenting, or is that just "hanging out" with a child, like an Aunt, Uncle or family friend would do?

The guy referenced in Strollerderby's post A Dad's Point of View: Am I Selfish? Or Just a Jerk? at least seems self-concious enough to realize he's selfish. Bruce Sallan writes about a ski trip taken with his wife and 12-year-old son. Blogger Keri summarizes his story thusly:

Son got a bad nosebleed. Dad tended to him, called the hospital, found out what to do, and sat with the boy until the blood stopped, almost 30 minutes later. Dad wanted to take turns with Step-mom going skiing, so that one would be with the kid and one on the slopes at all times. Step-mom volunteered to stay with the boy the whole time. After 45 minutes on the mountain, nosebleed recommences, Step-mom calls Dad, and Dad returns to Son. Son wants to go home.

Did the dad take the kid home? No. Sallan explains: "I gave him a relatively stern talk on being a man, learning to deal with some pain, as there will be some pain in life... I explained that running away would only teach him how not to deal with life's crises… We give in to our children's whims and complaints too easily. Sometimes, we as parents need to take care of our needs... [Step-mom] chose to be over-the-board careful and I chose to be, what some might say, selfish..." Beyond the fact that teaching your kid to "toughen up" is soooo 1950s and reinforces some nasty stereotypes about what it means to be a man, don't both of these stories make you wonder why these dads feel no shame about being so selfish? And don't you wonder what the mothers think of such behavior?

I'm A Better Dad Part-Time [Globe And Mail]
A Dad's Point of View: Am I Selfish? Or Just a Jerk? [Strollerderby]
Related: A DAD'S POINT OF VIEW: Am I A Selfish Parent? [HuntingtonNews.net]

According to Live Science, researchers asked 650 adults for pictures taken during their final year of school and rated the brightness of their smiles. The men and women were between 21 and 87, meaning some of the photos were 70 years old. The volunteers were then asked if they had ever been divorced. Those with the "weakest" smiled were more than three times as likely to have been through a divorce. A second experiment used pictures taken when people were as young as five and confirmed the findings.

"Maybe smiling represents a positive disposition towards life," said study leader Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana. "Or maybe smiling people attract other happier people, and the combination may lead to a greater likelihood of a long-lasting marriage. We don't really know for sure what's causing it."

What do you think the cause could be? Once a pessimist, always a pessimist? Is happiness contagious? Do some people just smile through the pain? And if you did this experiment on yourself (or your parents), what would the results be?

Smiles Predict Marriage Success [Live Science]
Related: Childhood Photos Could Hold The Secret To Your Marriage [Daily Mail]

Today 24 boys and girls attend the school, dancing to donated CDs. Their teacher says "when they dance for two or three hours they forget all about the war." Clip at left.

While some on the Jezebel staff disdained such paper prescience, I was a wholehearted believer in the powers of the cootie-catcher - seen in the South Park clip above left from the 9th season episode "Marjorine"- the name game, and especially MASH. I've compiled a little gallery of games like this below — it's also a pretty good summation of my grade-school hopes and dreams. Observe:

1. MASH: MASH, my favorite, is kind of complicated. First you write MASH on top of a sheet of paper. Below that, draw a box. Around the box, write categories of things you are curious about in your future. At my school, these were almost always boys we would marry, jobs we would have, cars we would drive, and, of course, the colors of our inevitable wedding dresses. For each category, you pick three good outcomes. My top three boys, you'll notice, are Scotty (the boy I liked in grade school, who once promised to fight another boy for "the friendship of me" after I wore my super-trendy red-and-black-striped minidress-and-bike-shorts combo to school), Johnny Depp (duh), and Michael Stipe (shut up). Then your friends get to pick one bad outcome for each category. For boys, that would be Steve, who had this habit of licking the desks when he thought no one was looking, and whose butt-crack I accidentally grabbed once during math (long story), forcing me to wash my hands one million times. Then you shut your eyes and make tick marks in the box until someone tells you to stop. Take the number of tick marks, start with the M, progress clockwise through the options, and cross one out when you reach the number. Keep going until you have just one item in each category — this is your fortune. In the example below, it was revealed that I would marry Michael Stipe (shut up), that my wedding dress would be off-white (zzz), and that I would ride a dog to my job as a cat wrangler (seems like a bad idea). Oh, the MASH part stands for Mansion Apartment Shack House. I forgot to do that part this time because it always struck me as the most boring.


2. The Name Comparison Game: [If anyone had a better name for this game, we'd love to hear it. None of us can remember what we called it.]You thought MASH was complicated? Check this out. Write your name and your crush's name. Starting with the first letter of your first name, count the frequency of each letter and write the numbers in a line. Example: there are 2 A's in "ANNA NORTH SCOTTY JONES" so I wrote a 2 first. There are 4 N's, so I wrote a 4, etc. Now add the first two numbers and write the result below the second number. Add the second and third number and write the result below the third. Keep going until you have another line that is one number shorter than the previous. If you get a 2-digit number, write only the second digit. Keep doing this until you have a line with just two numbers — that is the percent chance that you and your crush will be together forever. If you don't get it, don't feel bad, it took Anna H. two phone calls to explain this to me, and number 3 offers a way simpler variant.


3. The "True Love" Game: [Thanks to Hortense for this one!]
Write your name and your crush's name. Count how many times each of the letters in the word "TRUE" appears in both names. Add those numbers up. Now count how many times each of the letters in the word "LOVE" appears. Add those numbers up. Write the first number next to the second number, and use THAT as your foolproof percent-likelihood-of-everlasting-love. This method gives me and Scotty only a 44% chance at being together forever, which seems more accurate since I haven't spoken to him in about sixteen years (and 3 months, 13 days, 6 hours . . .)


4. The Cootie-Catcher: As seen on South Park, this is a fortune-telling game of medium complexity. It involves a lot of paper-folding, which fit right in with the huge origami craze that took my school by storm in about second grade. Here's a great set of instructions for how to make and use a cootie-catcher. The South Park kids give a good demonstration of how to play. The most important thing is to include a balance of good fortunes like "You will marry Scotty!" and bad fortunes like "Steve likes you" or "You will be homeless" (equally bad in my mind at the time).


5. Lemon: Write down five girls' names, five things you can do to a lemon (i.e. lick, bite, slice), five boys' names (or other girls' names), five body parts, and five locations (i.e. my childhood favorite, "closet"). Don't let your friends see what order you write them in. Then ask your friends to put the numbers 1 through 5 in random order. Select the item in each column that corresponds to each number, then combine them to form a Mad-Lib type sentence. In this example, I picked the sequence 13452 (I cheated a little). This yielded the sentence "Anna sliced David's dick in bed," which handily reveals the basically sadistic nature of this game. Another interesting thing about Lemon is it doesn't exactly tell the future — except insofar as the time for playing it is well before any of the players have licked, let alone "peeled," anyone's balls. It's sort of a bridge between innocence and experience, between the does-he-love-me chastity of the name games and the sexual experimentation of a later favorite, Seven Minutes in Heaven. We didn't have the word "tween" when I was one, but now that we do, I can say this is definitely a game for tweens.

I was sort of embarrassed at how unquestioningly I believed in these games, even in the face of obvious problems like the fact that each MASH yields a different fortune every time, or that the name comparison game gives a different percentage depending on whose name you write first. Anna H., however, isn't embarrassed at all — she looks upon her cootie-catching days with nostalgia, because she fears girls aren't playing these games anymore. Are kids today entrusting their futures to the fickle flickering screen of a computer instead of a steadfast sheet of paper? Did you play games like this? Can you think of any others? Did boys ever join in the fun? And would you be glad or sorry to see them go the way of that weird hoop-and-stick toy the old-time youngsters liked to play with?

It's long been known that Papa had threatened to cut his mom off if she ever revealed anything about his childhood, and his sister's revelations about their early years explain why: according to Marcelline, their mother Grace was desperate for twin daughters, and despite the 18-month age difference between the kids, carried out the fantasy, holding her daughter back a year so the siblings would be in the same grade, and dressing the children in matching girl's clothes. Oh yeah — she also addressed her son as "Ernestine." To Have and Have Not, indeed. [MentalFloss]

Okay, seriously, I have no idea whether commodity prices have anything to do with crayon prices. Binney & Smith, which is now called Crayola LLC, makes crayons mostly from wax, which I guess is made from oil, but really, the point is, most people are probably not mature enough to spend money wisely (ahem, Dick Cheney) and the Obamas know this, and kids probably don't even need allowances now that Babysitters Club books are no longer being released. And from the looks of Malia and Sasha's outfits, they are probably best letting their mom make their purchasing decisions for the next few years. So suck it, Cato Institution.

Obama Daughters Keep Hectic Schedules Of Their Own [AP]

Related: Inflation Calculator [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

What I find bizarre about all this is the implicit assumption that kids can't relate to a character who's not exactly like themselves. Strawberry Shortcake wasn't popular twenty years ago because we all wore bloomers and lolled around in a berry patch; it was cute and fun and the dolls smelled good. This kind of formulaic thinking presupposes a narcissism that, ironically, agendas like these seem to create. More importantly, if they "downplay" Apple Dumplin' I will be seriously displeased.

Beloved Characters as Reimagined for the 21st Century [New York Times]

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Smaller babies more prone to depression, anxiety later on [EurekAlert!]