Friday - September 16, 2011

Rolling Right Along

My team on the Tuesday night Greed League took all 7 points. That’s a small miracle. We didn’t win it so much as the other team lost it; we bowled pretty much on average but the other team bowled well under average. Not sure if this was a tactical move on their part to keep their averages down, or if it was just an off night for them. I’ll take the wins, thanks.

We were cracking jokes, and new team member Bob tells the one about NASA and the pen. It’s an old urban legend at this point, but the truth is that the Space Pen is real, it’s still made by the Fisher Pen Company, and a plain old pencil can actually be dangerous in a space capsule. I’m not sure if they quite believed me when I mentioned all of that, but you can still buy either the original Fisher AG-7 which is still in use today by all the space agencies, or the slightly cooler, better looking, and less expensive bullet version which comes in a neato box where the foam lining looks like a lunar landscape.  The story behind proprietor Paul Fisher is interesting reading too. Radical, Libertarian, engineer, and successful mass marketeer. Learning a bit about thixotropic non-Newtonian pseudoplastic fluids is also interesting; the ink in Fisher’s pens have this property, as does a large amount of the fluids in the human body.

So anyway, back to bowling. We took 5 out of 7 in my Thursday night Cheap League, and had a blast. We lost the first game by less than 10, and then rallied for an absolute slaughter in the second game, winning by more than 180. The 10th frame was a dream come true for me; I’ve spent years being on teams that just sputter to a dull finish in the 10th, but in this game my team was on fire. Out of 12 possible balls we got 9 strikes and a spare. It was stunning. Awesome. We got the third game too, proving to ourselves that we could overcome the psychological challenge of the massive automatic scores generated by the other teams 2 absentee bowlers, both of whom are great rollers. Plus the 29 pin handicap we gave them. Their lead bowler would throw one ball, and suddenly about 58 points would show up on the scoreboard. Yikes. But we did it.

I call the one group Greed League because they charge $22 a week, pay the league officers quite well, and give out a 1st Prize award to the winning bowlers that is $130 more than the year’s dues, and that’s for a men’s league of only 8 teams. It’s a money league and the competition is ferocious. I call the other one Cheap League because they keep costs to a minimum. This one is only $14 a week even though they pay the same alley fees as the first league. Their officers get paid less than half as much, and the prizes for the winners are really small. With 12 teams, it’s a mixed league that emphasizes the social over the competitive. So it’s my team’s plan to win this one while also being Miss Congeniality and making friends with everyone. And really, the bottom line isn’t all that different: my whiz-bang spreadsheet shows me that a $100 prize in this league gives you the same net expenditure as a $394 prize in Greed League, so why spend the money in the first place?

Posted by Drew458     on 09/16/2011 at 09:59 AM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
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