Because You Can Find Stupid Questions to Answer for Any Day of the Week: This-or-That Tuesday

1. CandyLand or Chutes and Ladders? CandyLand. I always thought Chutes & Ladders was really boring. At least with CandyLand you had those nifty little gingerbread guys and all those place names that make you feel hungry.

2. Barbie or GI Joe? OK, I admit it. I had Barbies as a kid. No GI Joes at all, just Barbies. I remember my cousin was really into Barbie. She'd invent all these complex soap operas which always seemed to involve Barbie having a glamorous, rich-bitch celebrity lifestyle... and which tended to bore me silly. Me, I was more interested in Barbie's house. I'd arrange all the furniture just so, and arrange Barbie and her friends in these artistic poses... and then I'd completely lose interest, because, frankly, I couldn't ever really imagine Barbie actually doing anything interesting. I mean, like the house, she was just there to look pretty, right? It's what she was good at, after all. Now, my sister used to really have fun with Barbies. She'd remove their limbs and swap their heads around and stuff. I remember, we had this Ken doll that walked -- well, OK, he moved his legs when you pressed a button on his back -- until she dissected him. I don't think it was even that she was curious about how he worked; she just felt like taking him apart.

3. Play-Doh or Silly Putty? I think I probably owned some Silly Putty at some point in my life, but if so, it didn't make much of an impression on me. Play-Doh, however, was a fixture of my childhood. Ah, the happy, nostalgic smell... Mmmm...

4. Lincoln Logs or Tinkertoys? Lincoln Logs. I mean, they look like little logs! How cool is that? Well, OK, when I was a kid, it was cool...

5. The Game of Life or Monopoly? Life. Monopoly tends to get boring after the first twenty minutes or so, but with Life at least you can make stupid jokes about your job and how many kids you have and stuff. Plus it's got that cool spinner thing. I always liked playing with that spinner.

6. Etch-a-Sketch or Lite-Brite? I had and enjoyed both as a kid, but for sheer staying power, the Etch-a-Sketch wins hands down. It was much more of a challenge than the Lite-Brite, what with having to find creative ways to draw stuff with only one line, and when you got tired of that you could always twiddle the knobs around and pretend it was the computer readout on your cardboard-box space ship.

7. The Slinky: metal or plastic? Metal! I mean, duh! There are few things lamer than a cheap plastic slinky.

8. Easy-Bake Oven or Sno-Cone Machine? I think I was given some kind of little oven-y thing for Christmas once as a kid, but I don't remember it very well, probably because I used it once and then stuck it in a closet. The Sno-Cone machine would have been cool, though. How come nobody ever gave me a Sno-Cone machine?

9. Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars? Dunno. My sister was the one who collected the cars, and I don't remember which kind she had. Maybe both, for all I know. (Interestingly, it occurs to me that this is probably making it sound like my sis was the tomboyish one when we were kids. And I think she was, at least as far as the choice of toys went. But, the Barbies vs. Hot Wheels thing aside, she's a lot more "feminine" than I am in most ways and always has been. Whether there are any profound psychological conclusions to be drawn from that or not, I couldn't say.)

10. Spirograph or Paint-by-Numbers? Spirograph. I could amuse myself with that thing for ridiculously long periods of time. Paint-by-Numbers is actually just a bit beyond my artistic abilities, sadly enough.