Hello, believers in the high ideals of amateur sport, and anyone else who’s looking for someone to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn:
The torch has been lit, the pageantry of the
opening ceremonies is over, and the air is a-tingle with the excitement of hard-fought
competition. That’s the situation here in Funsville, anyway. Darned if I know
what they’re doing in London. Nobody asked us whether it was a good idea for
them to begin the Olympics while our biggest annual festival of sport was going
on. Their loss, really.
It’s not like we didn’t get there first, you
know. Many years back, someone noticed that July 26th was the birthday of four
of the seminal figures of twentieth-century culture. They are, in no particular
order:
Author and
visionary Aldous Huxley…
(Some doors of perception open a
little too late.)
Anyway, the
other three are as follows: playwright and social gadfly George Bernard Shaw…
Carl Jung, the
pioneer of psychology who proposed the idea that subconscious archetypes govern
our behaviour…
…and Hoyt
Wilhelm, the last great knuckleball-throwing relief pitcher to grace the major
leagues.
What better way to honour these four pillars
of modern civilization, thought Funsville’s Assembly of Notables, than to devise
a game which incorporates them all, and hold a tournament every time the 26th
day of July rolled around. Using the well-known game of “centrifugal
bumblepuppy” from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (well, it’s known to
those who’ve read the book, and can remember it), a special session of the
Funsville Fun and Games Committee came up with:
SHAVIAN
ARCHETYPAL KNUCKLEPUPPYBALL
The rules are simplicity itself:
-Play begins
once an object of play is selected. The object of play should represent a
deep-seated subconscious fear common to the entire human race—for example,
reptiles, unexplained revisions to your tax assessment, or being cornered by
Jehovah’s Witnesses. (In one legendary game, a winner was declared before play
had even started, when someone produced an object that reminded all those
present of an unexplained tax assessment performed by Jehovah’s Witnesses who
resembled skinks.)
-Sides are
chosen by asking the players to explain, in ten seconds or less, what Aldous
Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point is all about. The player who does the
best job of this is immediately sent home, because nobody wants to play with a
smarty-pants.
-The
remaining players take turns gripping the object of play tightly in their
fingertips and tossing it stiff-wristed into the air, in an attempt to impart
as little spin on it as possible. If the object of play persists in spinning
when tossed, players have the option of tossing one another instead.
-If anyone
can remember (and utter aloud) an actually memorable witticism attributed to
George Bernard Shaw or one of his characters (things like “By George, I think
she’s got it” and “Eliza—where the devil are my slippers” DO NOT count) before the object of play either hits the ground or
is caught, the game is declared a draw, and everybody can get on with whatever
else they had planned for the day. Otherwise, it continues until the last
player collapses from exhaustion.
They’ve been at it since Thursday, with no
end in sight. If the results of previous years are anything to go by, the last
athlete will have vacated the Olympic village long before our bunch gives up. As always, I’ll
get the results on a postcard, wherever I happen to have
decided to go to get away from all of this.
Uncle Fun
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