Best way to pick anything...

[elfwitch]

Poll question: Best way to pick anything...

When you were a kid did you do "one potato two potato" or "My mother and your mother"?

[ScreamingMeemie]

1. Eeeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe...Catch a Tiger by the toe...If he hollers

let him go...eeeny meeny miney moe...:hi:

[elfwitch]

3. I forgot about that one...

Boy it has been a long time since I was a kid... Sigh

[GOPisEvil]

2. Eeny meeny miney mo

Yes, I know it's racist...but when I was a kid, we never used the racist language.

[ScreamingMeemie]

4. We didn't either as noted above. GMTA.

:hi:

[rogerashton]

5. acka backa soda cracka ...

Well, I just checked Digital Tradition, and apparently that is the same as "my mother, your mother" but my redneck gradeschool companions seem only to have used the last part.

Link:

http://www.mudcat.org/kids/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=122

[elfwitch]

6. new for me...

Where did you grow up?

[rogerashton]

7. NW Louisiana.

But there was this one kid we all learned it from.

[felonious thunk]

8. Pray to Jesus

Dear Jesus, I'm torn as to whether I should order the chicken fingers or the nachos. Please Jesus, give me the wisdom to know which choice is correct and that my honey mustard will be good if I choose the chicken fingers.

Amen.

[khashka]

14. LOL

I'll have to try that!

Dear Jesus, vodka or pot? I really wanna get high. Jesus, what would you do?

Khash.

[rogerashton]

9. What about ...

Paper, stone, scissors?

Evens-odds?

Funny thing is, these kids' games are deeper than you might think. They provide (approximately) "correlated strategy" solutions to "games in normal form" with more than one Nash equilibrium -- something mathematical game theorists think is really difficult. That's what the bar scene in A Beautiful Mind would have been about if the director had gotten a game theorist in.

Or maybe not -- that approach wasn't "discovered" until later than the movie -- although kids have known about it for thousands of years. Wotta world!

[Career Prole]

10. We used "one potato, two potato", but my daughter

in elementary school taught me a different one:

"Inky, pinky, ponky
Daddy bought a donkey
Donkey died, Daddy cried,
Inky, pinky, ponky."

Anyone else ever hear this?

[elfwitch]

11. new to me

These kids today...
:eyes:

[starroute]

12. The odd finger is it (or out)

I can't remember if there was some way to make this work for larger groups, but if you had only three or four people, you'd gather in a circle and on signal would put out one or two fingers. The person with a different number of fingers from everyone else would be the one chosen. (Or else they'd be eliminated, and when you got down to only two people, you'd use odds or evens to finish it off.)

[starroute]

13. And here's an old one my mother taught me

Ibbidy bibbidy bibbidy san
Ibbidy bibbidy canal boat
Dictionary
Down the ferry
Fun, fun
American gun
Eighteen hundred ninety-one
Out goes Y-O-U

[geniph]

15. Eenie Meenie is the only one I've ever even heard!

the others are completely foreign to me. Then again, I didn't deal much with other kids when I was one.