in the streets. "Ashes ashes," goes the simple refrain before it concludes in straightforward frankness: "We all fall down." How do children today deal with societal crisis of impending sexual intimacy? The answer is to be found at Toys R Us: they play with slime. The hottest new toys for kids aren't really toys at all, but highly advanced forms of goo. Most adults can remember the craft-oriented goop products of their own childhoods, like Play-Do and Silly Putty. But these all had apparent purposes. Play-Do was a reusable modelling clay, and Silly Putty was used to copy and then stretch the impressions of comic book pictures. Today's goop equivalents, most notably Gak and Floam, celebrate slime for its own sake, and serve as a great example of the way kids cope first with cultural crisis.

The goop revival began in about 1982, when a Nickelodeon show called "You Can't Do That