Its interesting how games and other things like songs, stories etc. persist and/or disappear over time.
- marbles (can you get them anymore?)
- kick the can (where would kids get cans today?)
- British bulldog/chain tig (far too dangerous)
I can't remember the rules of these, but they were very popular in the early 1960s, when I played them.
Almost literally never been cheaper. Under £3 for 50 on AliExpress, free shipping if you buy 150. I don't know if a child gets or loses street cred for having more cheap marbles then you can physically carry in 2024, but they could acquire that many quite easily.
> where would kids get cans today?
Pretty sure cans still exist! They might be a little more likely to contain, say, organic chopped tomatoes now than some gruesome 60s spam creation, but they're still a thing.
Oh, good to know.
Back when I played the most prized ones were steel ball bearings, which the NCO engineers filched them from the RAF Vulcan bombers. Us flight officers kids didn't get access to this stuff.
Somewhat interesting factoid (so I am told - be interested to see a real source), ball bearings were packed into the RAF nuclear weapons to prevent horrible accidents if the aircraft crashed (which quite a few did) - tales of crew skidding around on the tarmac after the balls were dumped after arming the weapon were not unheard of, but probably legend.
My imagination couldn't conceive of a logic behind this (nor could GPT-4, which told me you were talking nonsense), so in case anyone else comes across this and has the same curiosity:
Apparently "the ball bearings were introduced to increase the density of the core, preventing it from being compressed into a critical shape by an accident such as a plane crash", with the balls being removed as part of the arming the weapon ready to be dropped.
Wikipedia has a brief mention and a diagram here, though with "citation needed": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Warhea...
edit: And also there's "Aircraft engines must not be run with Violet Club loaded on the aircraft with the safety device [of steel balls] in place. The engines must not be started until the weapon is prepared for an actual operational sortie [to prevent the steel balls vibrating like a bag of jellybeans]." which does have a couple of apparent sources cited, though not clickable ones that are easy to look up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Club#Controversy