The Return of Hal Gurnee's Network Time Killers!

[captainsblog]

From a one-line reference in this week's New Yorker to the old JGE Appliance ads that I can still recite from memory ("Hey Jerry! What's the story?"), to an even more obscure one I only barely remember for something called the Automobile Club of America ("Did you have to be that good?"), I stumbled <<this word will be key later

on this website where, using only your mouse, you try to help the drunken German walk a straight line.

I'm working my way slowly up to about 10 metres. The record is apparently something over 15,000.

Note the thumbsucking when he finally crashes to the ground.

----

Meanwhile, returning once again to the ever-fertile Aussie soil that is the land of active_apathy, an effort is about to get up a game of Nomic.

Nomic, as you could learn here, or there, or best of all on the post itself, is a game devoted primarily to the modification of the rules of the game. Much as George Carlin theorized ages ago in reciting the rules to a nonexistent game show (which I can also still recite from memory,  



Well, you know how we play our game, don't you? The champion, Mrs. Muckenfuss, will get the first question.
If she answers correctly, the challenger, Mrs. Fussmucker, will spinnnnnn the Big Prize Wheel™ to determine the champion's prize.
If the wheel stops on a prize already won by our champion, she'll have to forfeit that prize and draw a number for a new category.
If it stops on a prize not yet won by our champion, she'll have a choice, of either accepting the prize orrrr, picking a prize from the challenger's list,
in which case the champion forfeits her turn and chooses the challenger's home partner from the Revolving Drum.™
We'll call the challenger's home partner on the phone, we'll ask her fifteen questions. If she can answer all of them correctly, she'll get to pick a number from one to nine hundred.
The champion will then spinnnnn the Big Prize Wheel™ to determine the amount of money won by the challenger's home partner.

::desperate exhale of breath::

Well, that's what happens if the champion answers correctly. If she answers incorrectly, she'll have to give us her first born male child.
)

Coming up, a phone post of the actual recording of that bit, just to see if I got it right. (And if you want my first born female child if I got it wrong, that's not an immutable rule.)  Also, in checking Teh Interwebs to see if anyone had ever posted that, I found three things, one of them scary:

(a) Nobody had,
but...
(b) A few people made reference to it, mostly referring to the contestants' names as Carlin's clever way of getting obscenities on the air even before he made history for getting all of them on the air, in his use of fake names that would lend themselves to spooneristic trouble (believe me, I had plenty of trouble, especially with Mrs. Fussmucker's name),
but...
(c) There are numerous actual people in this country, some of them married women, with the actual name of Mrs. Muckenfuss, who must wonder why, every few years, weird men in their late 40s ask them for their ID and wind up giggling uncontrollably or making mention of Big Prize Wheels™

Comments

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

that drunk thing is awesome, although i go all of 6 meters. the thumb sucking really takes the cake. :)

and just to get back at you for linking me to something i am now going to have to spend a lot of time trying to beat, i give you:

5 Letter Words dot com, a delicious, fast, utterly addictive word game.

*snickers behind hand*

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I made 48 meters.

I've been trying to get people interested in Nomic for years. Nobody around here wants to play.

[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

Simply LOVE George Carlin. As for Nomic, don't we already have that game on a national scale? It's call the U.S. Congress. I think The Constitution was supposed to be the list of immutable rules, but somehow that got forgotten.