Just yesterday, almost simultaneously, the Athens 2004 Paralympics were indeed ended, and I, also, reached a conclusion.
You have all those Olympic athletes and you have all those Paralympic athletes. But you don't have any games where both kinds of athletes can compete together. The wheelchair athletes do their wheelchair athlete things. The running and jumping athletes do theirs. Couldn't they be doing their things together? Couldn't there be some kind of Olympically-proportioned sport where teams of differently-abled athletes compete with each other?
Well, I respond rhetorically, of course they should. And could. If they played in the Junkyard Sports Multilympics.
In a way, you could legitimately say that there's no such thing as the Junkyard Sports Multilympics, or any other kind of Multilympics at all. But you'd have to admit that there could be. So, ah, so easily.
Like, for example, a junkyardly kind of basketball where each team has two wheelchair athletes, or three, or one even. And only the wheel-chaired athlete can score. You could probably play football that way. Soccer even. That'd be fun. That'd be challenging for each according to her ability. Meaningfully challenging. For the whole team. For the entire family. Of man.
Here's another good source for grandparents who take their grandparenting seriously - or is it playfully? Divided into five different age groups, the source offers advice that is practical and sensible, and, for the most part, a reliable path to real fun for everyone involved. Compiled by Joy Stevens and Jan Wilson, with contributions from readers, each section is filled with simple, time-tested, age-appropriate ideas for finding fun.
This is only one of the resources offered through the Grandparents Web. As soon as you discover that there's link to a section on discipline, you know that you're looking at a resource based on a very solid appraisal of the art of grandparenting.
Though the resources I have to add to this very deep collection of grandparental wisdom are comparatively very slight, they just might prove inspirational enough to lead you to yet another conceptual slew of cross-generational joy. See, therefore, this.
"Bob and Carole Phillips, who sew and stuff dice by the cartload in their rural Burlington home, find them not only lovable but lucrative. To their surprise, the Phillips' have become the nation's largest...and possibly only...manufacturer of giant fuzzy dice. But few people are aware Walworth County is the Giant Fuzzy Dice Capital of the World because Bob and Carole like to keep a low profile. And it isn't hard to keep things quiet when your house is stuffed with foam rubber."
Giant Fuzzy Dice. I am not sure how sturdy they are, so I don't know if you could exactly play soccer with them. Yet the simple act of kicking a giant pair of fuzzy dice around a playing field can lead a sufficiently playful group of soccer players to new heights of junkyardly accomplishment. Like, for example, when you make a goal, your score is what's on the face of the die. Or do you play with two dice at the same time?
Even if you can't kick them, you could certainly bat them around, volleyball-like. Even if you only had the living room to play in. There's something transforming about giant fuzzy dice, something that begs the creation of games, that invites the imagination, ignites the senses of humor and play, becomes the very stuff of a junkyard sport.
This is a picture of someone's desk. Someone who calls her- or himself "Comatose." Click on the picture and you will not only see a large image. But you will see it annotated (run your cursor over the rectangles). If you click on this, you will be treated to a slide show of images that have been "tagged" as "junk." Ever since I used the term "junk" (well, actually "junkyard" - but it's really not about the yard), I've been looking for a more accurate way to capture the true spirit of junk. So you can understand why I'm so excited, and grateful to the brilliantly playful Ianus Keller for showing this site to me.
There's even another reason. It's called "Flickr. It's where I found my new pictorial definition of junk, and a gateway to what you might call an online photo storage/management/sharing community. With Flickr (currently in Beta, and free), you can keep your photos completely to yourself. You can share them with a select few. Or you can share them with everyone. You can add comments. You can add tags. You can upload photos from your camera phone. Up to 10 Megs-per-month's-worth of throughput. You can join and publish to groups. You can publish your photos via newsfeed.
It takes a while to understand what all this is and does and means. And even if you play with Flickr for months, you won't get the whole picture, as it were, until you take a look at Flickr's developers, a group called, oddly enough, "Ludicorp" whose stated mission is the creation of "Groupware for Play." Ah ha!
There's more. There's too much more. I must myself go, therefore and join the virtual frolic.
At LEGO Company we feel we have a special responsibility to respect and nurture the way children play, learn and thrive. As a part of the LEGO Company we have unparalleled access to a wealth of experience and expertise in play and learning. Our opportunity is to bring this collective knowledge and insight to new audiences, while at the same time generate helpful feedback to the people who design and build the company's play experiences.
Parents, educators, politicians - and not least companies producing tools for children - need to acknowledge that we live in a world characterized by increasing diversity, fragmentation and complexity. In such a world knowing the drills of reading, writing, and arithmetic is of course necessary, but by far not enough. We have to empower children to become active players in such a world; to become creative and innovative thinkers rather than reproducers. To become skilled at using different media to communicate and create new messages rather than just becoming passive receivers of entertainment. As Dean Kamen, Founder, F.I.R.S.T. has said: "We need to show kids that it's more fun to design and create a video game than to play one." Thereby we enable children to become powerful players in tomorrow’s society.
According to AARP, I've been a Senior Citizen long enough to believe it. Which might explain my increasing fascination with the connection between being as old as I am, and my going around teaching the world how to play Junkyard Sports.
I wrote the following message explaining that connection for those of my age group who might be still curious:
As seniors, one of the most valued gifts that we have to offer the world is our laughter and playfulness. It is the gift upon which most human growth and happiness is founded and grandparenthood is built.
Sadly, too few know how deep our playfulness can be, and how lingering our laughter.
Junkyard Sports brings playfulness back into play – no matter with what or whom we’re playing. It is based on a way we played when we were children, in cities, on streets and sandlots, unsupervised, left to our own devices. We invented stickball and stoopball and hundreds of games we never even named. We played with what and whomever we could find, wherever we were. We didn't need official equipment. We didn't need $150 shoes or $300 T-shirts. We didn't have bats, so we played with broomsticks. We didn't have gloves so we played with a rubber ball. And the sewer lid was home plate.
This is a way of playing that most children of this generation have not experienced. For most of them, play has been co-opted by supervised sport, and sport co-opted by media and commercialization. For most of them, games and sports are less about fun than about proving their self-worth. And in sports, only one-in-a-million succeeds.
Of our many gifts to them, this gift, this increasingly rare spirit of playfulness, of play and invention and making do, of sports for the fun of it, can prove as empowering as it is healing.
So let's see what we can do to help make sports fun again - for all ages and abilities, wherever there are people who want to play; let's foster innovative sports-based programs and events that emphasize fun, creativity, adaptability and inclusiveness.
Playing Junkyard Sports with people of different ages and different skills invariably leads to a sport that can also be played by cross-age and cross-ability groups. What this means for us seniors is that we get to play, too.
According to this source, an ancient Roman ball game one could apparently call "Rome Ball" was very similar to the street game Boxball. OK, Roman Ball is played in circles and not boxes. But the similarity is self-evident. I quote:
1. Draw 2 concentric circles on the ground, 5 feet and 20 feet in diameter.
2. Players ( 3 or more) may stand or run anywhere outside the large circle.
3. The ball must bounce in the inner circle, the 'strike zone', and pass beyond the outer circle.
4. If the ball is not caught and hits the ground, the thrower gets a point.
5. The player who catches or retrieves the ball throws it next.
6. The first player to reach 21 points wins the game.
On the other hand, this is at best a modern intepretation of how the game was actually played, so similarities to modern games are inevitable. On yet another hand, it does illustrate how ancient and profound is our fascination with ball games. So, on either hand, it makes you wonder how old our games really are.
The amazing Dr. Wladyslaw Jan Kowalski has provided us with genuinely illustrated resources on both Roman Ball Games (with a smattering of Egypto-Greekly fun) and even Roman Board Games. He freely admits that he's guessing on a lot of the rules. And that's what makes his work such a valuable resource to those of us who like to play, and those of us who like to make up new ways to play, and those of us who just like to wonder.
Though I wrote about the soccer variant called "Panna" a few months ago, it wasn't until I came across this site that I understood not only Nike's interest in the game, but also their influence over it.
Allow me to quote:
"Panna is Surinamese/Amsterdam slang for playing the ball through the legs of your opponent. If you make one, you're a hero. If you get one, you're a zero. Pannas reign supreme in the streets of Holland where the only thing better than winning is making your opponent look foolish. In Amsterdam respect comes from reputation. Haven't got one? Better not show up. Reps are made by humbling the big names and showing off the big moves. Reps take time to build, but just one Panna can make it all disappear."
The site itself is pure virtual cool. Cool music. Cool Flash animations. Cool navigation. There are biographies of ruling street players and film clips and games and even a downloadable Panna screensaver. But nowhere is there a reference to the fun of the game, to the creativity and joy, to the player's appreciation for each other's skills. I was there. In Holland. I watched. What I saw, in addition to sometimes astonishing displays of skill, was laughter and recognition and genuine respect for excellence, no matter where it came from. I guess that aspect of the Panna experience isn't macho enough to justify buying $200 sneakers.
"On July 10, 2004 Andre Tolme became the first person to golf across Mongolia." And it's documented! Online. With Progress Reports, and photos, and, most excrutiating of all, scorecard. (Hole #1 had a par of 711. It required 833 shots, 8 days and 40 lost balls.)
Here's a particularly revealing report of Andre's progress:
After nearly 1000 km of golfing across Mongolia's steppe, I've encountered an unconquerable challenge - a sea of knee-high vegetation determined to halt my golfing progress. The unusually high amount of precipitation that brought about these conditions was unforeseeable but the current reality is that with every swing, I have had to embark on a search for the golf ball akin to searching for the Holy Grail. My recent reconnaissance mission to the west revealed a unified resistance of shoulder to shoulder weeds stretching as far as I could see. Small guerrilla forces have stymied superpower militaries many times in history and though the Golf Mongolia expedition possesses an unending supply of determination and will, lessons of the past need to be heeded. Thus, this mission to become the first person ever to golf across Mongolia will be restructured."
The Worldwide Day of Play is October 2nd. It's a project of Nickelodeon - yes, the kids' network itself. According to the Parents Guide to Let's Just Play, Nick is so much putting some of its money where part of its mouth is that there are even grants available for non-profit fun.
"Why play?" you ask. "The state of play for kids in America has reached a stumbling block. Today, they live in a world with reduced resources for recreation in schools and communities, trash talking in sports and a general stress in their lives, which are all threatening to take the fun out of play. Over the past several years America has seen a double-digit decrease in the amount of time kids spend being physically active. It’s no wonder that the national obesity rate is reaching epidemic proportions. It goes without saying that if kids are to have the best quality of life in the present and the future, they need to PLAY now! Nickelodeon is committed to putting PLAY back into the forefront of kids’ minds by elevating the VALUE of play for everyone."
This is all very wonderful. But it makes me wonder. Do we really need to be putting play BACK into the forefront of kids' minds? I mean, isn't it there already? Isn't that the one clear privelege of childhood for play to be pretty much always forefrontal? What else makes me wonder are, of course, the games that Nick suggests: relay races, red rover, freeze tag. Kid-appropriate, for sure. More playful than sports.
I know I'm being overly critical here. It's a wonderful thing that Nick is doing, and I applaud it with significant enthusiasm. But, well, if I were part of this initiative, I'd want it to be so much more delightfully junkly, if you know what I mean. Kids could be making up their own games, even. Games that the whole family, junior, mom, dad (whose in a wheelchair now), and even grandpa can play. I mean, it could have been so much more worldly, as it were, involving so much more of the world, of the people and their planet if Nick had exchanged the wacky (their forté) instead of the o so traditionally competitive.
The Rekord-Klub SAXONIA "was founded in 1988. There is a strict rule that every member must be a world record breaker. At the moment, our club members have established more than 100 world records like largest bicycle, longest noodle or computer game marathon."
Just yesterday, almost simultaneously, the Athens 2004 Paralympics were indeed ended, and I, also, reached a conclusion.
Here's
This
According to AARP, I've been a Senior Citizen long enough to believe it. Which might explain my increasing fascination with the connection between being as old as I am, and my going around teaching the world how to play 
The Worldwide Day of Play