When I was a kid, fidget spinners were called “ninja throwing stars,” and they could only be obtained by the ads in the back of “Ninja Magazine.”

AND WE WERE THANKFUL FOR WHAT WE HAD.

Unless, of course, you were the kind of kid whose mother forbade him to ever touch one.  Dammit.  (She also took away the crossbow I’d made from scratch.)

Let me qualify the first sentence above — only the uninitiated actually called them “ninja throwing stars.”  Genuine ninjas, like me and my friends, knew that they were properly called “shuriken.”  My friends and I were serious students of ninjutsu in the early 80’s, and we had the magazines to prove it.  Our Ninja Clan was called “The Night Stalkers.”  (We actually started out as “The Night Crawlers,” until one of us realized that was what fishermen called earthworms.)

[DISCLAIMER: If any real ninjas are reading this, please do not assassinate me.  Also, various sites on the Internet contain misinformation suggesting that historical ninjas did not actually wear those black outfits — they’d wear ordinary period clothing, so that they could only figuratively “blend in with their surroundings” and avoid detection by samurai.  I didn’t write that nonsense, I’m just passing it along to you.]