Adam Carolla - Daddy, Stop Talking! - And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

If it’s not on a tablet and in 3-D and costs at least three hundred fifty dollars, my kids don’t give a shit. As I write this, I’m looking out my window at an air hockey table that is being used as a regular table to set junk on because my kids used it once on December 26 and then never again because they’re so sucked into the virtual world. Think about the toys and games we old farts had and what our kids would think of them.

Ant Farms: Do you remember ant farms? Ask your parents or grandparents if you don’t. (Actually, just Google it. Why have a conversation with those old fucks?) The ant farm was two pieces of plastic half an inch apart with a bunch of dirt in the middle and you’d just stare at it and watch ants dig tunnels. This was the height of entertainment for us. (My generation, not the actual Carollas. That was too costly an item for us. I had to go to my kitchen to look at ants.)

First off, what did you expect the ants to do? They’re digging a tunnel. That’s what ants do. Big fucking deal. Whose idea was this? Finally, a reason to bring ants into the house. Don’t we spend most of our time trying to keep them out? If you want to see ants, just leave food out on the counter.

But the point is this. If I gave Sonny an ant farm, he’d drug me, put me on my back, take a Lincoln Log, put it in my ass and use the ant farm to hammer it in like he was driving the golden spike.

Venus Fly Trap: We never had one of these at our house, but there was one at the counter of the gardening store up the street. We’d go there just to put our finger in it and watch it slowly close. Could you imagine a kid nowadays being entertained, nay, amazed by this like I was as a youth? No fucking chance.

Shadow Puppets: Yes, back in the day we used to think shadow puppets were entertaining. Someone would hang a sheet, take the shade off the lamp and make something that looked approximately like an ostrich head. That’s what we had to fill our sad days. If I attempted to entertain my kids by folding my hands to make a shadow puppet of a bird, they’d flip me the bird.

Fake Rocket or Horse in Front of the Supermarket: When I was a kid, this is what made the trip to the grocery store worthwhile. Not that there were a lot of Carolla family trips to the supermarket. My mom would hit the Full o’ Life health food store for some sprouted wheat bread and jicama, while the rest of you readers over thirty-five were riding the fake horsie in front of the Ralph’s or Stop & Shop. That thing cost a quarter, and would sort-of vibrate or slowly rock for a minute, yet it was the height of entertainment. If it was the rocket version you held on to a metal disk of a steering wheel that either didn’t turn at all or spun in perpetuity.

Every now and again you see these around, but you never see kids on them. They’re like the appendix. They used to serve a purpose, but now they’re just taking up space. Kids today wouldn’t put up with that shit. And more importantly, they’d have no idea how to operate them. I don’t think my son or daughter have any idea what a quarter looks like. They’d be trying to swipe Mommy’s debit card in the horse’s ass.

Vibrating Electric Football Game: This is yet another game I wanted, but never had. This one broke two cardinal rules of the Carolla household — it plugged in and it brought joy. Anything that used electricity, either in the form of household current or batteries, was a no go. More importantly, this went on a tabletop. Anything that required space could never enter our abode. There was no place in my house to set up a game. My room was literally a converted service porch with a water meter still in it, so it wasn’t like I could even have friends over and set up a game of Clue on the floor.

This game was basically a vibrator that got flattened. You’d put little plastic football players on and they’d spin in a circle. But it was the opposite of football. Random vibrations would make the guys go in various directions bumping into each other. There was no strategy. If they were playing electric football, Kate Upton would win three out of five against Bill Belichick. The little foam football would invariably get lost and one guy would always fall over and just spin in a circle on the ground like Curly from The Three Stooges. Sonny would never have any interest in playing electric football, or as I now call it, Madden 1973 .

Rock Tumblers: I also wanted a rock tumbler when I was a kid, but we couldn’t afford it. So I was told, and this is completely true, to put rocks in a jar, add some water and shake it incessantly. For days, I just held a Mason jar full of rocks and shook it. At some point, the bottom of the glass jar broke free and fell out in a perfect circle without shattering. The rocks still looked exactly the same, but I was able to remove the bottom of that jar like the world’s worst jewel thief. That was the end of my rock-tumbling days. Except later, when I used Rock Tumbler as my gay porn name. That’s how pathetic I was and how spoiled my kids are. I had to make a DIY version of something they would never take out of the box.

The Viewmaster: Another pathetic toy memory from my childhood. This was the world’s worst pair of binoculars. You’d hold them up to your eyes and look at shit you didn’t care about. “Here’s what the Grand Canyon looks like from the south side.” Amazing. If they had photos of Lynda Carter with her top off I’d have been all eyes, but instead you got to see the construction of EPCOT Center. It was a portable version of school slide projector. And as entertaining.

Slinky: This toy is like an accordion that doesn’t produce sound and is made of scrap metal. Literally. It’s a by-product. It was originally a spring made by a naval engineer to stabilize equipment on ships, but somewhere along the way a genius marketing guy decided it would make for a fun, cheap toy. This is one we could actually afford in my family. And it didn’t require batteries or parental involvement. Yet it was still a rip-off. The commercials show it going down stairs, right? Never in the now-seventy-year history of this lame toy has this happened. Definitely not when a young Adam Carolla tried it. Like all things in my home, including my parents, it just sat there.

I think the thing only got popular because of their jingle, though it certainly wouldn’t fly today. There’d be a lawsuit by GLAAD. “It’s good for a girl or a boy” would become “It is fun for a girl or a boy, or a transgender, or a pansexual or an asexual, gender-neutral human.”

The Guinness Book of World Records:I loved this book when I was a kid. I could have never imagined ending up included in the book as the record holder for Most Downloaded Podcast. Portable music players didn’t exist until I was a teen and even then a Walkman was way outside of the Carolla budget. We were so pathetic and our self-esteem was so bad my parents had the little known 7-Track player. But anyway, looking back I can’t believe that this book was actually entertainment to me and my generation. You’d just stare at a picture the size of a postage stamp and think, “Wow, that crab has really long legs.” There weren’t even that many pictures. But we all remember the classic ones: the lady with long nails from India, the world’s tallest man, the world’s longest neck, and the greatest of all being the world’s fattest twins on the trail bikes. Sadly, my kids will never know the pleasure of gawking at the world’s fattest twins in the Guinness Book, for two reasons: They don’t read books that aren’t in tablet form, and those fat twins are now your average Wal-Mart shoppers.