Today is National...

Checkers day and dogs in politics day. I don't know if the Checkers to which they are referring is the actual game or Richard Milhouse Nixon's dog. Since he gave his famous "Checkers Speech", as it came to be known, on this date a scant 56 years ago I presume they mean his dog. It would kind of go along with the theme wouldn't it?

Although dogs in politics is an intriguing topic, Clinton is the obvious choice, I don't want to write about that. I want to write about kids games.

So I will.

What's your favorite? Toss-a-cross? Ants in Your Pants? Don't Break the Ice? Concentration? Kerplunk? I'm talking classic kids games. Older than Pong even....I just typed in classic kids games on Google and in the description I saw things like "Must have Flash Player to watch" and "Classic kids games with a twist." When I was a boy I did not know what a Flash player was. Heck, I don't even think Al Gore knew. The games I played weren't old enough for a "twist"...Hide and Go Seek? Smear the Queer? Ditch em? That was pretty much like Hide and Go Seek but with a much cooler name.

I guess the best game we ever played was Ditch em on bikes. We would ride over to the housing tract across Los Alamitos boulevard and literally ride all day...

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I was never a big fan of Monopoly. All of that raw capitalism in one place. Yeewww! Risk I liked. Australia was the key.

I guess now that I think about it Pong shaped my childhood as much as anything else. How many hours did we spend on the Atari joystick bouncing that little white pixel square back and forth and back and forth and back and forth...I'm just glad that didn't affect me at all.

One great game we played was our not-so-imaginary bar called Ludwigs. We would bring Mom and Dad into the family room which was transformed into a mid-town Manhattan night club complete with music and a bar. We actually made them drinks. Real drinks. Booze and all. I was about 9 or 10 at the time.

I still make one heck of a Shirley Temple.

We grew up in an interesting time. The beginnings of our childhhod games were as they had been for decades. There's not much you can do to improve on Hide and Go Seek or Barrel Full of Monkeys. The same stuff we played were the games our parents played before us. As we grew a little older the Ataris came into play. Definitely not our parents games. We evolved into Asteroids, Missile Commmand, Donkey Kong, Pacman and the like. Which eventually led to Playstations and Xboxs and Wiis. The level of technology advanced so quickly. It's amazing what is out there now. The graphics. The themes.

With all of that technology available I'm glad that Ian's favorite game is still Break the Ice.

I can't wait until the kids are old enough to make drinks. Sing it Frank.