Friday, September 30, 2005
"Quote of the Day"
Dr. Bryan Alexander.
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Friday, September 30, 2005 "Quote of the Day"
"I used to think that the goal of bowling was missing both gutters simultaneously."
Dr. Bryan Alexander.
Funcast: The Origins of Volleyball According to the Oaqui
Today's FunCast, brought to you courtesy of the Oaqui, wends the winding ways of history for evidence of the origins of Volleyball.
See also this. Labels: funcast, Junkyard Sports, sports
Thursday, September 29, 2005 "Why Should I Play with My Kids?"
I found an article titled "Why Should I Play with My Kids? by Mark Brandenburg MA, CPCC (check your pop-up window prevention settings before opening links). It begins:
"My son came running around the corner of the house. It was just as I had hoped. I gave a wild, primitive yell as I sprang out at him. He hit the ground quickly, trying to avoid my grasp. I reached down and tagged him easily, and the burden of being "it" was transferred once again....and concludes: "Research has shown that kids laugh about one hundred times a day, and adults laugh about six times. Our kids are showing us something. Isn't it time we started learning how to be playful again?" And the neat thing is, we know exactly where we can find the best teachers.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005 Castle Keep - a Keeper Castle Keep is a tile placement game of luck, strategy and significant fun, for 2 to 4 players, ages 8 and up. There are 90 cardboard tiles (thick, colorful). There are three different kinds of tiles (corner pieces called "towers"), side pieces ("walls"), and central pieces ("keeps"). There are three different shapes of corner and side pieces (straight, zigzag and curvy), and three different colors. You start with any four of them. Your goal: build a complete castle of 9 tiles, with all the outside, adjacent tiles of the same color or shape, and a "keep" whose color matches any tile in the castle. Your other goal: destroy your opponent's castle. Accomplish either, and you win the game. OK, so destroying an opponent's castle is a little harder than building your own. Well, it should be. You have to have a wall or corner tile that exactly matches (color and shape), and two Keep tiles of the same color as your opponent's Keep. You might want to be careful about building a castle whose walls are both the same color and shape as their towers. Granted, it's a lot prettier. But there's a price for beauty: if one piece gets attacked, and adjacent pieces are the same color and shape, they are also, well, shall we say "obliterated?" The two-player version is just different enough (you only build one castle, and try to be the player to complete it) to make it, well, different - different enough to make you have to find a different strategy in order to win. Which makes it like having two different games. And then there's a solitaire version. And then there are variations.Designed by Richard D. Reece, Castle Keep has just enough strategic elements to entice the serious game player, just enough luck to keep everyone, adults and kids, from getting too serious to know when they're having fun, and is just long enough (around 20 minutes) to keep people deeply and happily engaged. A definite keeper of Major FUN proportions. A claimer (I was going to day "disclaimer," but it seemed too negative): rumors have it that Gamewright, the manufacturer of this certifiably Major FUN Award-Winning game, has contracted with Major FUN, him- (and my-) self, to produce a new card game actually designed by the aforementioned. Though these rumors are rumored to be true, this exceptionally good news for all fun kind has in no way impacted the impartiality and integrity of this reviewer. Castle Keep is a game worth keeping, no matter who manufactures it. And that's the troof. Labels: Major Fun
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 Ping Pong Punk'd I found this on the ever-useless repository of silliness known as "Milk and Cookies." It might take a while to download, but it's worth every megabit. It's a video of two, evidently champion ping pong players going beyond, well beyond, the pale of tournament competition. I have no idea what led these two to this ping pongly apotheosis. I think it might have been the guy in red who started it all. But the blue dude was there for him all the way, getting the ball back to him no matter where he went. The announcers clearly thought it was funny. The audience seemed to be more than adequately delighted. Me, I found it downright inspirational. I can tell you why, but I'd have to quote myself, which is always a questionable practice. The following comes from my article on CoLiberation: The central experience that led me to write my book The Well-Played Game was, in fact, a game of ping pong between my friend Bill and myself. Let me describe it to you, thereby exemplifying the selfsame example of the kind of experience I hope you will also learn:Know what I mean?
Monday, September 26, 2005 I Like Drawing™ - cont'd Art Stevenson, the same charming fellow who has his playfully pictorial way with trash has developed an entire website of whimsy for our collective inspiration and amusement.Of the many inspiring art-for-fun and fun-for-art exhibits described on his site, one of my favorites is the "pictoplasmic colouring and activity room. The artist explains: "Pictoplasma invited I Like Drawing™, Jon Burgerman and Dennis Tyfus to create a colouring and activity room experience! The drawings covered 70 square meters and for the duration of the exhibition the public were invited to colour it in." Everything about it invites fun - the wacky drawings, all those people coming to an exhibition and finding themselves taking part in its creation, coloring between or beyond the lines, finding, in a museum, the genuine and unpretentious permission to play.
Friday, September 23, 2005 FunCast: Introducing the Oaqui
Today's FunCast introduces the mystical incantations of the mysterious Oaqui. The mysterious Oaqui communicate only by email. Is the Oaqui a male or female, a child or old person? Is there only one Oaqui? These are things we shall perhaps never know.
In this transmission, the Oaqui shares a short, exemplary myth, called "Two Players." The rest, no matter how hard you try to eff, must remain ineffable, at least until the next FunCast. Labels: funcast
Thursday, September 22, 2005 Telephone Pictionary
Telephone Pictionary is a combination of the paper-and-pencil, graphic version of the Surrealist game known as "Exquisite Corpse," along with a bit of the story-telling version of the aforesaid - only much simpler.
The rules: "...It's best played with at least 7 (no fewer than 5) people, and an odd number of people is somewhat better than an even number.See, for example, "Six Penguins." From Melissa D. Binde
Wednesday, September 21, 2005 "Play is our free connection to pure possibility"
In case you need yet another validation for the fun you're having, Hara Estroff Marano's article "The Power of Play" is a treasure worth cherishing. Here are some highlights:
"Most of us think of adult play as respite or indulgence, but having fun is no trivial pursuit. In fact, it's crucial to put mental creativity, health and happiness...
Tuesday, September 20, 2005 Archery Golf Archery Golf is, apparently, currently played in Italy and Cuba. Go figure. It is in deed and in fact a combination of archery and golf, and hence the descriptive name. It is also, at least in essence, a paradigm of the Junkyard Sportly mind. As explained so vividly in the following:"Scottish many years ago enriched the pleasure to go for a pleasant walk in woods by carrying under their arm bow and arrows, which had been already used with not actually playing aims, stopping sometimes to dart an arrow: to a grass lump, a tree log, a root or only aiming high trajectory in the next of a grassland.Clearly, Archery Golf is not one of your casual, play anywhere, nobody could possibly get hurt, kind of sports. On the other hand, for any group that has ever wandered with long bow and loaded quiver amidst the rills and meadows of a sufficiently vast and clearly unpopulated land, Archery Golf is an invitation to significant play and many pure flights of delight.
Monday, September 19, 2005 Pronoia
"Pronoia," explains Michael Quinion, "is the suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf, the opposite of the popular sense of paranoia. It seems to have been invented by the sociologist Fred Goldner in an article in Social Problems in 1982, in which he defined it as 'the delusion that others think well of one,' the unreasoning belief that your superiors think you are indispensable, that your colleagues adore you, and that you are doing brilliantly in your work."
The term was taken up by Rob Brezny in his book Pronoia is the Antitode for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Rob takes the idea of Pronoia seriously. And beautifully. See his descriptions of Unabashed Pronoia Thereapy. Here's one of his 19 suggestions: "18. Those who explore pronoia often find they have a growing capacity to help people laugh at themselves. While few arbiters of morality recognize this skill as a mark of high character, I put it near the top of my list. In my view, inducing people to take themselves less seriously is a supreme virtue." Yes, even though pronoia might be as unfounded and irrational as paranoia, if you have a choice of irrationalities, I say, go pro. Now. |