Page 21 - Demo

Slippery Rock Gazette
September 2022 | 21
Never Give a Sucker
(Or a Grandfather) an Even Break
Iwill be having alpha-and- omega feelings on September 11 this year.
Sam Venable
Department of Irony
itself is ancient, dating to the Seventh Century. It’s the generic name for a complicated board game. Mancala has something like 800 specific names, depend- ing on where in the world you happen to be playing. In any loca- tion, I would call it “that %$#!&# smarty-pants nightmare.”
I never turn down an opportu- nity to play any game with my grandkids. Thus, I agreed imme- diately when Lucy said, “C’mon, Pippy. It’s easy to learn.”
Sure it’s easy—if you have a mathematical mind, which Lucy does. She inherited this trait via her electrical engineer father and computer guru grandmother.
Me? You gotta be kidding. I still have trouble with basic jock math.
This game involves a series of parallel, cupped depressions. It can be played on the bare ground or with a board that looks like an elongated muffin tin. At the start, each cup is filled with an equal number of tokens: beans, seeds, rocks, whatever’s handy. Lucy and I used colorful river pebbles.
The action moves in a circu- lar rotation. The object is to cap- ture as many of your opponent’s tokens as possible, while los- ing as few of yours. Each player starts with an equal number and doles them out, one per cup.
If the last token lands in a cup filled with others, that player gets possession of the entire cache and then keeps rotating and doling until he or she inevitably winds up on an empty cup. Then it’s the other player’s turn. The person
with the most tokens at the end wins.
Doesn’t sound all that compli- cated, right? Be not fooled.
I thought this was a completely random affair, pure chance. Little did I realize it’s an analytical game. Like chess, it requires that you anticipate moves in advance.
After five or six games, all of which Lucy won handily, she took pity.
It was my move.
“Start with those pebbles,” she said, pointing to a certain cup.
I did. It seemed like a prudent choice. But then a few cups later, I landed on empty and was out.
“I thought you were giving me good advice,” I complained.
Lucy smiled devilishly and raised her eyebrows.
Several games later I faced a similar quandary.
“Start there,” she said, pointing to another cup.
“Yeah, right,” I replied sarcasti- cally. “Just like you led me astray before.”
“Noooo,” she cooed sweetly. “It’ll work this time.”
Yes, of course, I was out in the blink of an eye.
“You tricked me again!” I spat.
Lucy just shrugged as she counted her winning pebbles. “It’s your own fault, Pippy. You’re the one who listened to me.”
Kid’s got a great future in politics.
Sam Venable is an author, comedic entertainer, and humor columnist for the Knoxville (TN) News Sentinel. His latest book is “The Joke’s on YOU! (All I Did Was Clean Out My Files).” He may be reached at sam.venable@ outlook.com.
River Formation is a fossil-rich area in Montana about 45 miles from the Canadian border. The auction house, which did not disclose the name of the seller or the buyer, had estimated it would sell for between $5 million and $8 million. The high bidder also won the right to name the dinosaur’s skeleton.
All of the other known Gorgosaurus skeletons are in museum collections, making this one the only specimen available for private ownership, the auction house said.
“In my career, I have had the priv- ilege of handling and selling many
“I believe every human has a finite number of heart- beats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.”
— Neil Armstrong
Getaway Mower
Florida deputies used a taser to stop a man who tried to avoid arrest by fleeing on a riding lawn mower one Saturday.
The Okaloosa County sher- iff’s office said it was trying to serve arrest warrants on an unnamed 40-year-old man and found him on the mower in a backyard. They shouted at him to stop and get on the ground when he tried to escape on the mower.
Deputies chased him on foot before using the taser. When he was finally caught deputies found him with a revolver, a handcuff key and a pipe with methamphetamine residue.
He is facing charges of grand theft, grand theft of a vehicle, felony criminal mischief, two counts of resisting an offi- cer, possession of a concealed weapon by a convicted felon, carrying a concealed handcuff key, possession of drug para- phernalia, felony failure and other counts. It is not known if he has legal representation.
“Nine-Eleven (or 9/11),” as it has come to be called, marks one of the most tragic days in American history. Even now, 21 years after the fact, images of ash, smoke, fire and terror flash anew in my mind.
Fortunately, there’s an opposite, happier, side of September 11 in 2022. It’s National Grandparents Day. Officially declared by pres- idential proclamation in 1979 by Jimmy Carter, Grandparents Day falls on the first Sunday after Labor Day.
This gives me yet another opportunity to repeat a universal truth: As much as you love your children, just wait until you have grandkids. Mary Ann and I have three, all of whom live within 20 miles of our house. What a blessing!
This summer, I’ve been letting
One Owner Dino
The fossilized skeleton of a T. Rex relative that roamed the earth about 76 million years ago was auc- tioned in at Sotheby’s in New York, for $6.1 million.
The Gorgosaurus skeleton was a highlight of Sotheby’s natural history auction on July 28, the auction house said.
The Gorgosaurus was an apex carni- vore that lived in what is now the west- ern United States and Canada during the late Cretaceous Period. It predated
them run the outboard on my bass boat—with kill switch firmly snapped to their wrists and just-to-make-sure Pippy seated alongside.
They know only one speed, of course: full bore, straight down the channel. Looking at those grins, caps backward, hair in the wind, I invariably start humming Alan Jackson’s country classic, “When Daddy Let Me Drive.” If you’re not familiar with that song, Google it and smile. This tune oughta be declared the National Anthem of Growing Up.
Ah, but there’s also a devious side of grandchildren. I discov- ered it from granddaughter Lucy when she was a sweet, innocent 11-year-old. It was the day she introduced me to a new form of insanity called “mancala.”
New to me, that is. Mancala
The sale was the latest in a series of dinosaur-fossil auctions that have infuriated paleontologists who worry about the commer- cialization of Earth’s precious evolutionary history.
its relative the Tyrannosaurus Rex by 10 million years.
The nine-foot-tall, 22-foot-long skeleton was discovered in 2018 in the Judith River Formation near Havre, Montana, Sotheby’s said. The Judith
exceptional and unique objects, but few have the capacity to inspire won- der and capture imaginations quite like this unbelievable Gorgosaurus skel- eton,” Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s global head of science and popular culture, said.
Paleontologists were not so awe- struck. But they acknowledge that everything about the sale appears legal. In the United States, fossils found on private land can be sold for profit. If the Gorgosaurus had been found just north of the border, in Alberta, it would have belonged to the public, paleontologists said.