Friday, April 10, 2015

Reverse Jenga

Forget about that game where you build a tower and remove wooden blocks one by one and try to stack them back on top. How tame. How snooze-worthy.

Here's a REAL game. No limit on the number of players. You start with an empty trash can. Then each player puts a piece of trash inside. The game ends when the last piece of trash makes the other pieces fall. Here's a game in progress:

Yep. The last item added was that Styrofoam cup that looks like an orb if you don't have your bifocals on. It was placed there by a teenage boy who made sure that it did not roll over the rail and thus end the game. One lady put a cellophane wrapper from a fortune cookie on top, but it was rejected. It did not topple the tower, so she picked it up off the floor and stuck it on again. Success!

This is one of the wastebaskets at the local junior college field house, where The Pony and I and many a student participated in a science fair today. Funny how there was another trash can just like this one a couple of staircases down, but a totally empty one just along the rail from that burrito-looking advertisement.

I suppose the competitors wanted a challenge, not a slam-dunk.

6 comments:

  1. That's a lot of trash! Surprising it could be piled that high.

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  2. I predict the next contestant will lose.

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  3. Is that a trashcan or is it a collaborative science fair project? Or is it part of one of those candid camera schemes? When the trash finally DOES topple, what will that person do?

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  4. Some people just enjoy a challenge. I hate it when the bathroom trash cans have five paper towels overflowing and nobody will shove them down. I remove my shoe and compress the mess.

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  5. I can't help but notice how much of that is recyclable.

    At any rate, I have two teenagers and they play the same game. I call it the lazy game.

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  6. Stephen,
    Well, this WAS a gathering of kids who whipped up science experiments and tested them and presented their findings. So I figure they're better at problem-solving than your average trash-pilers.

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    joeh,
    This was a science fair, not a casino. Keep your money in your pocket.

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    Sioux,
    It should have become an experiment for next year. Alas, the participants were down on the gym floor all day, except when released for lunch, when this sculpture appeared.

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    Linda,
    Good thing you weren't at the science fair. I might not have gotten my fuzzy-focus picture.

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    Birdie,
    You'd think that the college would have recycle bins. The people in town have them for weekly pickup. We're not all that backward here in Backroads.

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