Monopoly: Cat Got Your Iron?

Okay, so now there's a cat instead of an iron. This isn't the first time they've changed the game pieces, though doing so flies in the face of the benefits of a monopoly.

On Monopoly. One of the foundation board games of human experience.

Seems desperate to me, though, this public, "We're changing something and you can help." Must be a function of declining western birth rates. Clearly, we're not increasing the population enough to sell the many games required to keep continued printing viable. But -- as remastered CD packages do -- an altered Monopoly will move bushels of new units to those who already have the hopelessly archaic, now-outmoded versions. How I weep for the familial traditions that prevailed when I was a kid.

Our kaboodle had -- before finally upgrading of necessity -- a passed-down '30s or '40s version of Monopoly, in a small box with a larger board on the outside and wooden houses and etcetera and all that. Which we thought was cool. If we wanted something new, we could get a more modern game, like the futuristic Trouble, where board movement was determined entirely within a domed control city, essentially a brain in a globe, portending what will one day become of us all.

The best of the old and the best of the new, each redolent of its geological epoch. The science-doubting, business first radicals of today simply won't allow it.

But who will be hungry if not hippos?