Feb. 5: Tinker Toys

I am old enough to remember when Tinker Toys were made of wood. Today they are made of plastic. This is because there is a one in a bazillion chance that some little kid can get a sliver in his lip from an unsanded Tinker Toy. Or maybe it's because some group of hippies convinced Hasbro that the forests need to be saved. In any case, Hasbro still produces wooden Tinker Toys but they also make plastic sets. This saves the trees but rapes the oil fields.

How's that for a cynical reflection on your favourite childhood toy?

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I saw a psychologist when I was in Grade 5 and she had these giant Tinker Toys in her office. Once, during a session, she noticed me eying them and asked if I'd like to build something. Yes, I said. The psychologist and I built a giant fort and we called it Fort Zinderneuf. I asked if she would leave it standing until our next session and she said that she couldn't because another kid might like to play with them.

But she compromised by making a detailed a diagram of Fort Zinderneuf, in case I wanted to rebuild it exactly as before. I think I did that once.

I still love that psychologist for being so kind to me.



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Tinker Toys are fantastic because they encourage kids to play creatively. I feel the same way about Lego even though most of my Lego creations were built by following the instructions.

However, Lego is bad because you can't get Space Lego anymore. Now you can only get Star Wars Lego. This is bad because if you want to play space opera, you're pretty much relegated to using the characters from Star Wars.

I used to play Space Lego with my friend, Matt. Between us we had the Beta-1 command base and two bigass spaceships and a whole bunch of neat glider things. We had two yellow astronauts and we decided that these were the good guys. The white astronauts were computer techs and the red ones were bad guys. The head bad guy was a guy called Guy With Sword. We called him that because he had a sword. Our campaign started on Mercury, which Guy With Sword wanted to destroy (why?) So Matt and I set up our Beta-1 command base and then we hunted down the bad guys and killed them all except for Guy With Sword, who escaped in a spaceship while screaming "You might have survived Mercury but you won't survive Venus.

And so the next campaign was Venus. Then Mars. Then Jupiter. Somehow, we were able to fly the Beta-1 command base to Jupiter - which is just a big ball of gas (kind of like what forms in my dad's stomach after he eats a steak) - and plant it there. This was a high tech future where the laws of science were suspended.

I think we stopped playing after we stopped Guy With Sword from destroying Saturn. "You won't survive Uranus," he said, and that made us just laugh too damn hard.

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This note title was suggested by my friend, Heather, who has a baby son. She also has a young daughter who may or may not be into Tinker Toys. (She is into magic shows because I did some tricks for once and she liked them.)

Heather and I once shot pool and she kicked my ass.

I think Heather will buy her son Tinker Toys. If she doesn't, someone else should.

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Once, I built an isoceles triangle out of Tinker Toys.

Someone once used Tinker Toys to build a robot that can play Tic-Tac-Toe. This person is at least one billion times smarter than me.

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Tinker Toys is one of those gifts that you just have to buy a kid without him or her asking for it. Most kids aren't going to ask for Tinker Toys. They're going to want XBoxes or Star Wars stuff or Barbie dolls or iPods or pictures of my friend Heather drinking milk.

I will totally get my kid Tinker Toys. I will wait until he is old enough to not want to stick the little pieces in his mouth. Then I will curse when I step on one of those little pieces in the middle of the night.

And that's all I have to say about Tinker Toys.