It’s Tom Waits’ 58th birthday today. Happy birthday, Tom, and on that note, let’s go lickety-splitly to the friday5.org Friday Five.

1. What playground game do you remember most fondly?
None of them, really. The playground where I went to public school, and more specifically the kids in that playground, are the reason why I have a chip out of one of my front teeth (and a good part of the reason why I started going to private school).

2. What playground game did you just hate?
Pretty much anything that involved climbing. In addition to bring highly unathletic, I also had a fear of heights when I was younger. (I’m still a bit nervous around heights, but I’ve gotten better at controlling the fear.)

3. Which playground apparatus did you most enjoy?
Swings, although I never got good at being able to swing that high when I was younger. I finally figured out the physics of swinging when I was older, but by that point when I tried to swing high I just gave myself a really bad case of motion sickness.

4. Which playground apparatus did you generally avoid or not care much for?
At my public school there used to be this big metal sheet tilted at an angle, much higher on one end than the other, with an iron pipe above it. The kids there always scaled the bar from one end to the other, but as they did so their bodies were flat against the metal sheet, and particularly close to the summer months that thing reached about a million degrees. Shortly after I started going to private school, the apparatus was taken down.

5. What playground game might be really fun if grownups played it with adult rules?
Cops and robbers. What?