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| all my sandcastles spend their time collapsing
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| who would've thought that being 30 minutes late to class, a game of nim, la marseillaise, fortune cookies, a pair of roses, and a pillow fight would teach you so much about grace --
grateful for you guys. grateful to the Lord.
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| science is:
slaving four hours in repro lab making a mouse chimera by maneuvering a 30 gauge needle into an oviduct less than a millimeter wide, flushing out the embryos, stripping off the zonae pellucida, and manipulating two ridiculously small embryos to adhere to each other, only to have a faulty pipet containing your final product blow up on you as you complete the very last of 20+ steps.
science is:
going back to lab a second time because you're too persistent to let a shoddy pipet get the best of you, getting the hang of the procedure, and pwning that pipet, producing an intact mouse chimera.
how cool is that? this little embryo contains cells from two different embryos (one black, one albino), but if you fuse the cells together really early on in development simply by getting them to stick to each other, they'll develop into one mouse. put the chimera back into a foster mother, and the pup will have white and black patches of fur according to which parts the different original embryonic cells developed into.
admittedly, though ...
science could be:
going back to lab a ridiculous number of times and never getting the procedure to work. alas.
but it did. taking joy in the little things.
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| if you know me, you'd know that i am a huge fan of wait games. you know, games to amuse you on long waits in line, or on the airplane, or on long road trips. no boards, pieces, cards necessary. those kinds of games. (hm, there must be a snazzier name we can come up with than "wait games." any suggestions?) thought i would reminisce about some of the classics:
games involving pain or contortions:
> slaps. timeless.
> korean slapping game. (woah, that's a ridiculously ambiguous name.) it's the one where there's a, b, c, d that correspond to four different hand positions (hands together, hands together at right angles, hands apart palms down, hands apart palms up) and you slap each other. adds some more fun to slaps.
> thumb fighting. does anyone do this anymore? one two three four i declare a thumb war huttah!
> turkish wrestling. this was a beautiful game introduced to me by christopher yamaguchi '09 and alexander yang '09. you face off with your opponent by clenching a pair of hands like in a handshake and extending a pointer finger. the victor wins by touching any part of the other person's body (except for the arm/hand that is being used).
> guess the middle finger. not as potentially offensive as it might sound. my dad used to play this with me all the time when i was waiting for piano lessons. haha, good times, dad. here's a shout out to you. basically, you scrunch the fingers of one hand up and wrap your other hand around it. the other person has to guess which finger is your middle finger by looking at the scrunched up finger tips. being the sneaky kid i was, i always tried to fool my dad by contorting my fingers such that my middle finger was hidden and replaced by the pinky of my other hand. (hey, i thought it was precocious for a 5-year-old!) it actually worked most of the time.
> chicken. joseph oh '09. 'nuff said.
games involving the mind:
> 20 questions. no need for further explanation.
> botticelli. the big daddy of 20 questions. joy of ucdub retreat rides and hikes up sleeping giant. it's 20 questions with the added twist of you have to stump the person in the hot seat before you can ask them one of the 20 questions. gots the pop culture aspect built in.
> map games. for teh awesome geographically inclined people. e.g. adam johnson '04 and i played this enormously fun game while traveling down to maryland that involved one person picking a state and the other person having to name at least five cities in that state. i think amy wang '04 was snoring away in the backseat. or calling us dorks. or both. but try it. (easy: ohio. medium: missouri. hard: delaware.) then you get other crazy questions like, name the 5 countries in the world whose names are only one word that contain the letter p as one of the letters in the middle of the word. this was a doozy for wen fan '08, but she got it in the end. what a beast.
> trivia games. once again, adam johnson '04, kudos. and bigdavekim '04, so i hear. you can rely on them for the most mundane facts. demographics in particular ... gdp's, oil exporters, population. to give one small illustration of this duo's dorkiness. they found this fedex site that said it could send a truck to anywhere in the u.s. the site had slots for two cities you could type in that measured the distance between any two cities in the u.s. they spent hours (HOURS) gleefully typing in cities in the u.s. to find which two would give the longest distance. can you name them? (fine, fine. i think aj said it was something like unalaska, alaska to key largo, florida.)
> riddles. brian k. lee '06, i defer to you. ryan lee '09 is my mccc homeboy on this one. evangeline tu '09 is pretty sharp too. current classics on my mind: greg lee '06's two ropes riddle, blee's caps riddle, google's weights riddle.
> concentration. i'm finding that this is a dying breed. i'm finding not many people like concentration anymore. what a shame.
> ghost. i think amy lin '08 intro-ed this to me back in ol' njsyo. (ah, those were the days. dick and gabe and back of the first violins.) you go around in a circle, and each person says a letter. the string of letters generated must be able to spell a word longer than 3 letters. you must continue the chain without spelling a word. the person who cannot continue the chain without having to complete the word loses. i suppose you could play this game like spud and once a person gets s-p-u-d, he or she has to run the gauntlet. that'd be fun.
mindless games:
> fruit game. concentration-esque. instead, everyone picks a fruit (e.g. pomegranate, kumquat, pineapple, whatever.) the game works like concentration on beats of four: 1, slap your thighs with both hands; 2, clap; 3, snap with left hand; 4, slap with right hand. repeat. one person starts out with saying another person's fruit and a number from 1 to 4, on beats 3 and 4. the person whose fruit was named then has to say his or her fruit the number of times that was indicated, starting from beat 4 and working backward. let me demonstrate. i am "passionfruit." someone calls "passionfruit 2!" i go slap, clap, "passionfruit, passionfruit!" slap, clap, "guava 1!" and so on and so on. while amusing, this game quickly loses its appeal. but then you spice it up by replacing "fruit" with "names of other people who are playing." chaos ensues!
> 1 to 100. jesse dong '09 reminded me of this one recently. everyone in the car (where this is usually played) takes random turns shouting out consecutive numbers. the goal is to try to reach 100. but! silly, it's not that easy. if more than one person says a number, you have to start all over again. game over!
> 3-letter word game. this is hands down the most ridiculous game on this list. and it's only on here because of its importance in foreshadowing the whole point of this xanga entry (which is down there below). okay, and it's on here because the '09 and '10 boys are pretty awesome. wilbur hu '09, eric klein '09, and david lee '10 were the silly boys at ysc fall retreat who were blindfolded and handcuffed (essentially for being silly boys, you can ask them why) to handicap them while we were playing that team-building game where you have to get everyone on the team over the 6' foot rope without touching it. because they were pretty much useless, and because it was about 29 degrees outside, they huddled around each other for warmth (and to, um, commiserate). in addition to singing and humming and giggling and generally acting to distract the rest of the guys who were trying to freakin get everyone over the six-foot "electric fence," they came up with this beautiful game. the 3-letter word game. one person thinks of a three-letter word in his head. the other two people have to guess it. that's it. that's the entire game. these boys. man, i love you guys.
mindless games that involve a little space:
* i admit, these games are stretching the category of wait games, because you need to make a circle to play them, and usually wait games don't require space -- i.e. you can play them in a car or while waiting in a single file line.
> dippy dippy dip. or however you spell it. i first learned this from iris amazon princess shim '07. fun for the whole family! suffice it to say, you go around making hand gestures and pointing at people while saying "dippy dippy dip!" awesome.
> big booty. mm, not such a big fan.
> ride that pony. mike yu
'08, this one's for you. he says if you go on youtube and type "ride
that pony," you get some pretty hilarious videos. cf. youtube for
further amusement.
sooo ... you're probably wondering why i break my one year+ xanga hiatus with such an esoteric topic as wait games. well! josh au '08 and i gave birth to a beautiful new wait game this afternoon and decided that unlike suri cruise, our brainchild needed proper and full exposure to the public eye to thrive. (or bomb.) we'd like to present to you ... four-letter mastermind! props to scott stroebel '65-whatever-he-is for the name inspiration. (we played mastermind in class on our first day of biochem.)
mastermind's the game with the colored pegs where you pick a specific patter of colors and press enter, and it gives you black, gray, and white circles: black means you have the right color in the right position, gray means you have the right color in the wrong position, and white means you have the wrong color. but aha, it doesn't tell you which one is which. so you have a finite (usually 10) number of chances to guess. but obviously, you can work from previous clues to solve the puzzle.
four-letter mastermind employs similar techniques. one person (the "computer") comes up with a four-letter word (like the 3-letter word game!). the other person (or people) have 10 guesses (inputs) to guess the four-letter word. but the computer produces an output for each input that consists of the number of blacks, grays, and whites. for example, say i pick the word "barn." say your first input is "nape." my output to you would be "black, gray, white, white," because the a is in the right position (second letter) --> black, and the n is a letter in the word but in the wrong position --> gray. p and e are not in the target four-letter word --> white.
the one additional rule is that all your guesses have to be actually words. so while you can put "red red red red" in mastermind, you canNOT put "xxxx" for four-letter mastermind. uh uh uh. try again.
we played this game for like an hour. haha, good times, josh. i finally stumped him. he got s e _ _ after 5 guesses and spent a dozen more guesses exhausting all the letters except for k, q, v, w, x, and y. then he gave up.
can you beat josh?
comments, suggestions, donations about / for four-letter mastermind are welcomed. we hope this game brings you many hours of line-waiting / car-driving amusement.
heh, and please post additional games! i missed about 1,052,674 of the other good ones out there. and riddles. good riddles are always like "chyeah!"
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friendship hurts so bad sometimes.
i’ve never wanted to give up on someone more. and yet i’ve never felt more resolve not to give
up.
we are a broken, broken people.
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"keep on loving each other as brothers."
(hebrews 13:1)
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