Onesome: College-- playoffs? Yes or no? ...or 'who cares?' Is the current BCS system something you think works or would prefer things a bit more 'tidy'?
I'm in the "who cares?" camp. I also have no idea what a BCS system is.
Twosome: Bowl-- of cherries? Chips? Tofu? What's on your snack list during a game. ...or a favorite show?
I have eaten cherries, chips and tofu while watching television before. Just not at the same time.
Threesome: Games-- within games: if you're a sports fan is there any sort of 'inner game' you like to watch during the contest? I'm thinking in terms of line work in football or post play in basket ball. ...and if you're not into sports, how about something similar in your favorite pastime?
I suppose there's also games in books. But it's getting sort of old with only chess or poker included in the plots. Where's checkers and Go Fish?
* * *
I don't think it should take almost 24 hours to fly from one part of the United States to another, but it does. Even without weather being a problem, layovers, detouring connecting flights (dang it, I never asked to go to Portland, Oregon!) and inconvenient bus schedules pretty much eat up the time.
Yes, I'm a cranky traveler. I will never be like that young woman I saw who seemed overawed at everything because it was the first time she's been in an airport or an airplane. I'm not metropolitan chic, but I haven't been sequestered in the countryside for the past decade either. And speaking of sequestered--what's up with all the people who never read travel advisories? At the checkpoint, the young woman in front of me got her huge can of hairspray confiscated. A middle-aged man who should know better was complaining about security taking away his toothpaste. And somebody trying to hold his place in line (yes, I was going on Southwest--no assigned seating!) with his carry-on lost it to the roaming patrols on the look-out for lone pieces of luggage.
Some other observations: On one of my flights, I sat in front of a man who complained about the de-icing procedures. He viewed himself as an expert because his father had been a commercial pilot (before he was forcibly retired after a flight to London). A young boy sitting in front of me was yelling, "We're going to die! We're going to die!" while the plane was landing. His grandmother never told him to shut up. The middle-age couple I sat next to were making fun of people who did not speak English as a first language. I should have told them to shut up.
And you're sure to find a laptop junkie at every available electrical outlet in the airport terminal.
An inner game with literature might be something like appreciating the mechanics of it as you go along. Looking at what the author does to make characters natural and nonidentical, to make dialogue sound natural, balancing showing and telling and allowing some to be filled in mentally, keeping things chugging along so that everybody ends up where they are supposed to be when they're supposed to be there.
Or, perhaps more likely, noticing why things seem awkward. Or noticing an element that was tacked on solely because they'd run out of places to mail the thing in their original market.
(and a special game now that I've gotten into the habit of looking through strangehorizons, a guessing game that goes "will it be yet another damned werewolf this week?" (vampire, winged fairy thing, flying horse, mermaid,...))
