Its the girl who always loved you
its the one that got away
Its the moment that escapes you
when the predator is prey
its the way to finally take charge
its a question of your hate
its the easiest part of your new life
when you finally seize the day
When the one you want rejects you
When the pain is its own drug
when you can't take another moment
it is time for them to pay.
What you just read was a spam poem by Kristin Thomas. It is one of a collection of Kristin poetry.
Well, you know of my current passion for junk. And you can guess how pure my delight was when I discovered an artist who makes poetry solely out of the subject lines of the junk mail littering her daily inbox.
It is a small, clear victory for the human spirit at its best.
From today's Dept. of It Doesn't Take Much, we learn how little it can take to "Turn Your Trade Show into a FUNvention." The article, from Ronald P. Culberson - "director of everything" at "FUNsulting," shows how a little imagination, and an even smaller investment, can transform a large conference or meeting into a memorable event. "Activities that evoke laughter and fun at conventions," Culberson writes, "are powerful ways to keep participants engaged and excited about being there."
My favorite example:
"According to Janet Delph of EXPERT Magazine, CNN Headline News anchor Bob Losure used a talk show format, instead of the typical speech, to interview top executives in a general session at the 2003 OfficeMax national convention. The 1,100 attendees rated it the best session ever."
Favorite, because the whole idea is so easy, on everybody. For Losure, this was a lot easier than preparing a speech, and a lot less threatening. The same is true of the executives he interviewed. In fact, they got to feel "extra special" because it was just like being on TV, almost. For the attendees, it was a welcome break from a long speech, informative, yet in a format that bordered on entertainment.
Here's a slightly more elaborate example:
"During the breaks between general sessions, one government agency showed photos taken at the conference and added funny captions. Two minutes before the start of each session, the music from Jeopardy would begin playing, and a timer would count down the time to the session. Before long the attendees were laughing at the photos and humming to the Jeopardy tune."
And then there's this:
"Lou Heckler, a speaker and coach from Gainesville, Florida, attended a convention at which the 'talk of the conference' was a buffet breakfast table backed up to a "stage" of risers. On the stage was a full bedroom scene - complete with a nightstand, lamps, chair, dresser, and bed with a real person in it. Participants assumed the person was a mannequin until they approached the buffet, and the person said, 'Good morning!'"
The Skillman Center for Children has a clear and singular mission: to enhance the economic and social well being of urban children and their families. After reading their Spring Newsletter, devoted to "Childhood Obesity and Play," I began to think that maybe it should be my mission too, this enhancement of the economic and social well being of urban children and their families. In fact, I went so far as to thinking that maybe it should be everyone's clear and single mission. Everyone's.
Though the 24-page Newsletter is loaded with frighteningly informed statistics and practical solutions, the section (beginning on page 10) really did it for me. It took the form of an article called "Moving from Monkey Bars to Mudpies: Rethinking the Playground." Which is an introduction to the concept of "Adventure Playgrounds." The author explains: "I learned about this kind of playground by accident through our neighborhood?s children?s community garden. The adults and older teens were intent on having a beautiful and perfect final product of a learning garden. But the kids had a different idea. They enjoyed constantly changing it. One day there would be a pond where the day before there was a planned flower bed. The garden was never neat and tidy. It looked like a giant mess of flowers, vegetables, fruit and piles of dirt. When we would get a load of dirt, the pile became things. At one point a pile had become a burial ground for a bee. The kids came up with the idea to have a funeral for 'brother bee,' and imitated their parents at funerals. They went around and all said things they would miss about the bee and 'fake cried.'"
We all have a lot of "fake crying" to do about some of the too real events of our days. I hope such playgrounds will have a place for all of us.
Wordigo really took us by surprise. We see a word-board game and we think: "maybe fun for the guy playing, but agony for the people who are waiting their turns." So we conclude "Word-board game = not really MajorFUN material." Then we notice the different boards and four complete sets of tiles. This leads us to conclude that maybe all four of us can play simultaneously. No turn-waiting. Immediate gratification, verbally-playfully speaking. Except that there are six of us. So we play in three teams.
And the game just takes off. Sure, we are confused a little by the different boards in the set, and the funny arrows on the tiles, but we start anyway, racing against each other and the timer, using and drawing tiles and discarding, trying to fill our boards up with words. And then, when the time is reluctantly up, we figure out the scoring, which really gets interesting, strategic-implication-wise. The next round (we hardly ever play more than one round during a "game tasting," but this game was just too darn delicious), we are much more score-conscious so we get strategic and discover we really don't have enough time anyway. We also decide to start with the second board, only to discover that it is actually more challenging than the first.
The game comes with four sets of letter tiles with pouches, four sets of four different game boards (two boards with a different design on each side), the first and probably only seven-minute sand timer in the world, and a score pad. The tiles look remarkably similar to those letter-with-number tiles you see in scoring letter games, but they have arrows on the vowels. The boards are similar to kids' crossword puzzles, but without the clues.
The game can be played simultaneously with up to four players or with teams, which we think is even more fun. And you can even invite the kids to play or compensate for those with different verbal skills. The boards are of varying levels of difficulty. Those who want to can use the easier boards or start with more tiles or maybe recycle their discarded tiles.
Wordigo is the only word game I know of that allows you to use a dictionary while you're playing. Of course, looking something up in a dictionary while the sand is inexorably streaming your time away is perhaps not such a useful option. Unless you're playing in pairs. Which we just happened to be. And even then, we were all too wrapped in the rapture of it all to use anything other than our rapidly muddling minds.
For those of us who enjoyextended moments of time-free deliberation, the game is still entertaining without timers. Players just continue until all the boards have been filled.
Balancing Aliens never disappointed us. And we were already excited, just opening the box. And from there, it just got more and more exciting. Such an elegantly made instrument of fun, so finely tuned, so subtle, so strategic, so silly.
The kind of silly you have to watch very, very carefully, and think about alot. That you can expect to get when you have a round game board, with bowling pin shaped pieces, that sits on a big screw, that can be raised or lowered, for different skill-levels. A board that has two sides, each of which a totally different game, each just as obviously the only game possible.
I mean, you could play it with 7-year olds who could probably beat you. And the very steady-of-hand 80 year old. And those of the less-steady persuasion could direct others where to move and get just involved in the strategic implications of it all. And you could be each as strategic as you can possibly get, and still, anyone might win, might be drawn inexorably towards adding just one more alien, teetering on the very precipice of improbability. Until lured by both scoring and collective-admiration potential, you upset the delicate balance, and all fall down.
Though dexterity is a definite advantage, winning the game is all about intuiting its strategic and physical dynamics. Even if your hand is not steady enough, you can still direct some younger hand and feel fully engaged in play.
Balancing Aliens is a fun toy and a fun game. MajorFUN. As in award-winning. It's a near perfect model for what a good family game should be like. Because it's based on physical as well as strategic properties, and because the strategic properties are so well expressed by the physical properties, the rules of each of the two balancing games are as apparent to kids as they are to grown-ups. Kids will play with kids. Grownups with grownups. Kids with grownups. Equals in skill and delight.
Roger Greenaway is a treasured friend and long-time Bernie-and-fun advocate whose Active Reviewing site is a treasured resource for people interested in "Active Learning" (may their numbers increase and prosper). He's also a member of the Playful Path (formerly known as "Deep Fun") discussion group.
Today, he sent us a link to psychologist William Glasser's Five Needs. Glasser is the founder of Choice Theory, Reality Therapy and Lead-Management. His Five Needs are an extension of Abraham Maslow's famous Hierarchy of Needs illustrated here.
I know, I know. It's a very long, and oddly fun-lacking introduction, but these are each important resources for me, and explain why this comparatively little story is getting such big play here.
Glasser goes beyond Maslow's position that self-actualization is the ultimate need to conjecture that perhaps, after we've taken care of such things as the need for Survival, Love and belonging, Power or recognition, and Freedom, we can attend to the ultimate need. And you know what need that is. FUN.
Art you can eat. What could be more Zen-like in its delicious ephemerality? Brought to us by the Institute of Official Cheer, the Dayalets collection of food art images was created as an advertising campaign for these vitamins, still available from Abbott Labs. Whatever the motivation (The Institute of Official Cheer attributes darker purposes), the result is a collection of images that are perhaps not appetite-inducing, unless your appetite is for fun.
There's something cleary inspiring about corn-cob lips, spaghetti hair and a bread-slice shirt. The artist has gone to such great lengths to make the images look "real" that we find ourselves needing to deconstruct the image, to puzzle out how each aspect was created. So we get invited into the fun of it, and as we delve more deeply, we become ever more appreciative of the art of it.
The same can be said of many of my favorite fun things - puzzles, toys, games, arts. Fanciful works of play, created with such skill and conviction that you almost believe them to be not really what they are.
Lest we forget the true spirit and purpose of collaborative physical activity, here, from the Netherlands, is the People Powered Pub. The site is in Dutch, so we of the non-Dutch-speaking persuasion might find it difficult to appreciate the full significance of the People Powered Pub. I've determined so far that it can handle up to 17 people, and an unlimited number of taggers-along. Given the unlikelihood of any collective inclination towards People Powered Pub racing, those who wish to accompany the Pub on its rounds, or perhaps to order a round of their own, should have little difficulty keeping up with this movable drinkfest.
It is yet another testimony to playfulness and creativity and the everpresent desire to combine what is good for you with what isn't.
And where, you most naturally find yourself inquiring, does one find yet more news of such innovations in human powered vehicle design? Why, at Unusual Human Powered Vehicles, a wonderfully comprehensive and oft-updated site created and maintained by the developer of the Ice Rower.
The world of compter games, and, consequently, of computer game players, can get very harsh. Despite the endless possibilities of faster processor and more graphic glories and completely surrounding sound, most of our games are given over, as we are, to violence. Not that violence can't be fun. Not that there's anything wrong with violent games. Just that there are far too few respites. Ferry Halim is one of the few. A true respite.
Ferry Hallim demonstrates that all it takes to make something as interesting to play with as violence is a little applied whimsy.
Whimsy. Hallim is a master of it. His games are true diversions, invitations to worlds that simply don't take themselves very seriously. He is the creator of light-hearted games that are bouyant enough to lighten-up even the dark of desire and the heavy of heart - at least for a few minutes. Like the game Summer Walk, where you make three bird-like things hop into the good floating things, to the tune of the pleasant guitar. Or A Cupid's Day where you, as Cupid, shoot arrows into clouds.
Whimsy. What a powerful concept.
Ferry Hallim is the newest inductee to the MajorFUN Hall of Fame.
Basari is a racing/bidding/bartering/strategy game for three, or better, four players. It is definitely one of your more complex games, involving, as it does: racing, bidding, bartering and strategizing. But it is not one of your more difficult games - and that's what makes it so noteworthy. That it's acutally possible for anyone over, say, ten to do all those things at more or less the same time. Not only possible, but fun.
The race is for score. In fact, the score board is a race track. The bidding and bartering is for jewels or points. You start with a showdown, all players choosing between one of three possible things they're interested in bidding and bartering for: position, points or jewels. If you're the only one choosing a particular action, well, then, you go right ahead and do it. If someone else has made the same choice, prepare to barter. You need jewels in order to barter. Which is precisely why you might not be the only one choosing jewels. Which makes it more of a gamble. Especially if three or more people also chose jewels.
On the other hand, it doesn't matter how many jewels you have if you don't win. Which is determined by how many points you have. Which is determined by your position on the inner race track. Which determines what everyone is bidding and bartering for.
OK. So it's going to take some time to learn the game. And no, it isn't like one of those elegant, perfect information, Japanese Go experiences. But it is fun. And often surprising. And not too challenging. And though you're competing, and though only one of you can win, there's just enough luck involved to keep you from taking it too seriously.
From today's Dept. of It Doesn't Take Much, we learn how little it can take to "Turn Your Trade Show into a FUNvention." The article, from Ronald P. Culberson - "director of everything" at "
The Skillman Center for Children
Wordigo
Balancing Aliens
Basari