The monthly newspaper of a certain advocacy organization for which I only recently became eligible for membership is generally forgettable (at best), especially when it comes to “Do you remember this?” roundups. But the staff box callouts for a web site feature brought back to mind a game that I’d forgotten that I remembered: Cootie. I had a set when I was a wee one, and the reason that I don’t remember the rules is that they’re so simple they hardly exist: roll a die until you collect all the plastic body parts for your cootie bug. Sort of like playing Hangman with less skill required. I recall putting the critter together, Mr. Potato Head without any possibility of phenotypic variation, but I don’t think my parents or anybody else ever played with me. There were limits, even in 1961, to an adult’s capacity for boredom just to entertain a child.
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theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks