Simple fun in the sun

The fountain cools and wets your skin. The sun warms the stone. The stone warms and dries your skin. Repeat.


Some friends and I doing just that near the reflecting pond in downtown Boston a couple of weekends ago. Definite fun times, almost no effort/money necessary.

Ahhhh, huge tornado! No wait....

It's Giant Twister.

I'll let the photos do the talking. But Giant Twister is pretty awesome, especially when people finally get over their own lame self-consciousness--when we first arrived there were literally 50 people standing around the mat watching the three people playing--and join the fun.


Even after more people joined and the mat got close to full, people still often insisted on staying in their own little space. At one point I attempted to get everyone to try to move to the opposite side simultaneously (i.e. people on the left go right, people on the right go left), but the group as a whole wouldn't take. Then, my three friends and I decided we'd each start in a different corner and then work our way to the center, at which point it was an all out battle to be the last man standing. Of course, I went half way to the center and then fell over on some other random person instead. Nonetheless, very awesome.

Kids never hold back their excitement. Someday adults won't either. (Note: one of those is not true).

UPDATE: It dawned on me that I never actually explained where this took place. This was last Friday night at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) on the waterfront in South Boston. Dan Deacon also performed, and the event was given a scathing review by Bostonist here. I agree with the review, although I also did have a ton of fun, too.

Three week break

Time for a three-week break as I attend a science policy colloquium down in DC :)

Perhaps they're thirsty, too

Serving as a rather direct contrast to the German board games in my previous post, this week's topic deals with one of America's greatest board games (term used loosely) for kids--and, naturally as an invention of American ingenuity, one that requires effectively zero skill: Hungry Hungry Hippos. As described in a 1990's article of similar nostalgia by Edward Allen in the New Yorker: "The object of the game [is essentially] to press your handle down again and again as fast as you can, with no rhythm, no timing, just slam-slam-slam as your hippo surges out to grab marble after marble from the game surface...." No game theory required this time around; in its place, though, lies a wonderful theme song that no child should ever have to grow up without. The fact is, the game is mind-numbingly loud, involves fat, relatively stupid animals consuming large quantities of food, and is made of plastic, probably in a factory in China: in other words, it's the quintessential American board game. But hey, it's also really brightly colored.

And thus, I recently felt the urge to find an original version of this game that brought so much joy to my own childhood, and luckily amazon fulfilled just such a need. The photo here shows the hands of three of my starving friends at the kitchen table pounding away on the hippo levers (clearly, the Brooklyn Lager is in control of the yellow hippo). Unfortunately, playing the game demonstrated the slight tilt that apparently exists in our apartment's foundation, as the northernmost hippo won 95% of the time. So not much in the way of true competition, but wildly entertaining nonetheless, particularly (necessarily?) when accompanied with a few beers.

Ushering in summer with a spontaneous water balloon fight

I unfortunately do not have any photos of the first great Spontaneous Water Balloon Fight of Summer 2009 that took place two weeks ago, on Sunday April 26th. But nonetheless my descriptions here will act as a harbinger (I'm going to assume that word can be used in a positive sense, too) of many more glorious balloon battles to come in the next few months.
If anyone out there is looking to have a ton of totally unplanned, unbridled fun on a hot day, all it takes is $5, a Target store (or equivalent), and a functioning faucet. The key, though, is not to think about it; just GO. Go to the store and find a bag of water balloons (at least 200; you'd be surprised how quickly you go through them and how many break as you make them), bring them home, fill them up with water and stick 'em in a bucket, and go outside.
If you have friends in the area: entice them to come outside and leave a bag of water balloons near where they'll come out. This way, they have a chance to protect themselves as you pummel them with water balloons.
If this tactic is not available, simply call up a couple of friends and start throwing right in the middle of the street--the more innocent bystanders, the better. Trust me, as people walk by, you will feel the jealousy emanating from their old, bored souls as they break a little smile that screams of "god i wish i could just let go of all those god damn socially-constructed inhibitions and join in". And if you've made enough balloons, chances are a couple people will.

Looking for a great board game? Ask a German!

If you're looking to rediscover the awesomeness that is the (not-so-basic) board game, it's recently become clear to me (and is apparently clear to many other board game aficionadoes) that all you need to do is locate your friendly neighborhood German and ask them what they play back home. In the past couple of months I was introduced by two close friends of mine--who happen to be German--to two fantastic board games that exceed your wildest dreams of what constitutes "fun" in a board game setting: Bohnanza, and the Settlers of Catan, the latter of which was recently called the perfect board game.

Both games are remarkable for two reasons. First, they both engage all players during everyone's turn, rather than forcing players to roll, move their piece, have something happen, and then idle painfully for 20 minutes while others make their moves. Second, their entertainment is derived primarily from the tenets of politics and game theory: namely, that you not only do you care greatly about what your fellow players are doing, but winning or losing the game is strongly dependent on your capacity and/or willingnesss to cooperate with each other. Each game is built upon the need to acqure and use resources to earn the points needed for victory; however different resources have different values and gain additional value when used in combination, and the ways in which such resources are distributed among players, particularly early on, is strongly based on luck--in a manner not at all unlike how real life operates. However, how you use what you've been given is really what ultimately decides your fate.

In Bohnanza, each player has a bean "farm" on which he/she can plant a couple of several different types of beans, which are represented by cards; the more cards you lay down, the more you are planting, and if you reach a given threshold number of cards you can sell the harvest for gold coins (whoever has the most in the end wins). However, some beans are scarcer than others (i.e. fewer cards in the deck), and thus require fewer cards to achieve the same number of gold coins. For example, one type of bean may have 24 cards in circulation, and thus requres 4 cards planted to equal 1 gold coin, 7 cards for 2 gold coins etc., while another type of bean may only have 4 cards available, and so planting just 2 may get you 2 gold coins. Of course, the glory is in the ability for players to trade with one another, to screw each other over, or to build the ultimate socialist utopia, as my two friends and I have done in the first game I had ever played, where we all took a highly cooperative approach and magically and unknowningly finished the game in a 19-19-19 tie.

Meanwhile, Settlers of Catan tells the story of settlers (you) arriving on a far-away island where each player seeks to build the largest settlement using the resources of lumber, grain, ore, clay, and wool; however, the board is broken up into an array of hexagons, each of which contain only one of these resources. Moreover, each hexagon is also given a number value from 2-12, corresponding to a possible sum of the numbers obtained by rolling two dice--noting that the extreme values are less probable. The resource in a given location is only fruitful if you have a settlement built next to it and its number is rolled. Once you select a starting location (an important first task, as the hexgaons are randomly placed for each game and thus can result in awkward clumping of resources), everyone competes for resources, again with the capacity to trade with one another, in addition to trading via ports on the coast. Settlers has several other features that lend the game even greater depth, but I will refrain from exploring them here and leave it to others to discover on their own. As the elaborate nature of the game's inner workings emerge, you really become amazed to think that you ever played something as tedious and unfulfilling as monopoly.

Ah, and not to mention that Settlers has expansion packs, of which I have yet to try but will no doubt very soon. In some sense, Bohnanza represents the bare bones of what makes board games with other humans fun--namely, meaningful human interaction--while Settlers takes this framework as the basis for something surprisingly rich and yet still very simple and easy to learn. I'm not saying that I'd give up my Stratego in a heartbeat, but certainly it's sad to think that I didn't have access when I was little to the games the German kids have. Luckily, it's never too late to start.

Any kid's favorite: destroying things

So as I finally get back on track with the blog, I'll start off with a gloriously awesome event that took place on Friday March 20th, 2009: a semi-random (friend of a friend) invitation to a "house destruction party".

Believe me, I was thinking the same as you: what does that mean, and whatever it means, it can't be anything like what it actually sounds like. But indeed it was that and so much more. We arrived to a house that the owners--a group of graduate students or other early 20-somethings--were in the process of remodeling, and so it was completely stripped down. The only things available were a bunch of glass jars, a keg of PBR, and some tables. Yep, you guessed it: good old fashioned beer pong and flip cup, just like the undergrad days.
The beer pong and flip cup tables were in the same room but separated by an annoying half-wall, which is not something that you can typically do anything about in any regular house. However, in this instance, the ~20 folks there had had their fill of unending cups full of beer, and it was time to move on to the main course.

The sledgehammer.

Not too often in life do you get to go to a place where you can drink and they actually want you to destroy things in the process. So here we were, with this close-to-once-in-a-lifetime chance to enjoy smashing stuff that you don't own like a bunch of 8 year old boys.

Everything began slowly, as I think people weren't quite ready to believe that we were actually going to be allowed to do this. Everyone was reluctant to make the first move (i.e. hole in the wall), but after a few tests to check where the studs were and some additional encouragement from the home owners, things got underway...

The idea of a hole in the wall as a good thing made for some great laughs...

(that's one of the homeowners) ...and the sledgehammer was swung with gradually increasing anger, aggression, and restless exhilaration...

And after approximately 20-30 minutes, the room finally began to open up...

After we cleared up the rubble a bit, we figured a few games to celebrate wouldn't be so bad. We have a shovel and some pieces of wall, and an open window--oooh, how about baseball? So we threw some things to hit up in the air and began swinging away.










That's me playing baseball. I'm wearing an industrial-strength gas mask--others were wearing medical breathing masks--since it became a little difficult to breathe with all of the dust/cancer floating around in the air. It was pretty nasty, and without a doubt contained plenty of things that humans aren't meant to inhale; typically this isn't a problem since the stuff stays, well, in your walls.

As a finale, the next stop following the swing shown above on the right is that piece of drywall being struck a bit high and shattering the window. A couple of the homeowners seemed less than pleased with this last occurrence, but others found it hilarious ("We needed to get a new window anyways."). I, for one, was definitely nearly on the ground dying of laughter.

After all that, we shared another beer and then headed on home. It was... ridiculous. I've never been a part of anything like that, and I can't imagine it happening again. We all loved destroying things when we were little, whether it was a fort, a jenga tower, card house etc.--anything that was 1) meticulously built, and 2) not yours. Perhaps that was more among boys, but the girls at this party certainly enjoyed themselves too.

Either way, adults don't get to destroy things too much anymore in a socially-acceptable manner, and it's not something that's easy to set up unless you've got some extra printers to take out to the field Office Space-style. So here's a cheers to having the opportunity to break down a couple more walls that separate adults from their childhoods of creative destruction.