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BlogInvented in the 1950s to simulate surfing on land, the skateboard enjoyed a second wave of popularity 20 years later as a West Coast drought obliged residents to drain their backyard swimming pools. The drought resulted in a wealth of vacant, dry, sloping, and gently-curved concrete surfaces that tempted skateboarders to sneak in and show their stuff.
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ZA is a perfectly good word. You know, like PIZZA. While you probably wouldn’t use (or eat) ZA in a formal social setting, it’s a two-letter word that might help boost your next Scrabble game. Surprised that ZA is a legal word? Don’t be. The entire world of Scrabble terms can be pretty surprising. From the first word (AA) to the last (ZYZZYVAS), the Scrabble dictionary overflows with the uncommon and plain old bizarre words that high-level Scrabble champions apply […]
The National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong inducted Scrabble in 2004. Since then we’ve made efforts to collect many different versions of the famous “scrambled word game.”
Oldest
Visit The Strong’s National Toy Hall of Fame web page for Scrabble, and you’ll learn that unemployed architect Alfred M. Butts invented the game during the Great Depression. Butts first called his game Lexico, and later Criss Cross.The Strong holds one of very few known copies of the Criss Cross game board. […]
Continue Reading about Scrabble: Oldest, Newest, Biggest, and Smallest at The Strong!
I first heard of Brian Sutton-Smith when I was an undergraduate at Bowling Green University in Ohio. Though he had by then moved on to Columbia Teacher’s College, the campus still reverberated with stories of the inspired teaching and impish good humor of this prolific young scholar, a dashing New Zealand import fully in tune with the sense of liberation and rebellion growing in America in the late 1960s.
Continue Reading about Brian Sutton-Smith—He Helped us Find Our Way on the Playground
The limits of computing hardware of the 1980s required game designers to use pixel art, a 2D graphical style that is enjoying a revival today. Games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, and The Legend of Zelda consisted of 2D images with low resolutions and limited color palettes that many designers and gamers considered pioneering. The introduction of consoles like the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 in the 1990s enabled game designers to render 3D images that made earlier […]
Continue Reading about Pixel Art: Nostalgia or Visual Style?
A friend sent me this striking image a collector had reproduced as a postcard in 1993, and titled “Angel of the Asphalt: A Miracle on Maplewood Drive.” The attribution on the back guessed its original date at 1954. Irony had accumulated over those four decades between the original and the reproduction. The collector, in a skeptical, post-modern spirit, meant the copy to evoke and poke fun at a hokey, bygone ideal.
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“Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.”
~ Admiral James T. Kirk
Continue Reading about Beam Him Up, Scotty: Remembering Leonard Nimoy
When I leave The Strong this week after almost seven years, a shiny, new collections manager will take the helm. I feel like the well-worn toy Margery Williams describes in The Velveteen Rabbit who becomes Real when the Boy loves him and when the nursery magic Fairy sets him free. Except for the trials of becoming Real, the Rabbit’s greatest anxiety is being forgotten or replaced. And here I am, undergoing the process willingly when so many toys are not […]
Continue Reading about Screen-Play: Succession Planning in the Playroom
During our training, conservators usually specialize in a specific type of material, such as paper or paintings. As we become professionals, we find ourselves in institutions with diverse collections which requires broad conservation knowledge for all of the artifacts under our care, not just those comprised of our favorite material. Nowhere is this truer than at The Strong, where the museum’s collections range from paper dollhouse furniture to Barbie dolls to coin-operated arcade machines. The conservation challenges presented by this […]
