Potential Games for the Olympics What I Invented

#1 Bungalow Ball

Overview

Bungalow Ball is a game between two teams of even players. Players line up either side of a single storey building, normally a bungalow. Sides take it in turns to throw the ball over the bungalow.

The Playing Area

Professional Bungalow Ball is played over the roof of a mid-seventies built bungalow, tiled in standard 1-foot black tiles. The ball is a Fisher Price Sea Life ball.

The Game

The starting side throw the ball over the bungalow roof. The receiving team must catch the ball without it bouncing. Failure to do so means that the thrower earns 5 points and can mock the masculinity of said receiver. If the thrower fails to throw the ball over the roof he loses 2 points and the opposing side must not only mock the thrower’s masculinity, but also call into question the thrower’s sexuality.

A point is scored for the number of times it bounces on the far side roof slope. Three points are scored for each time the ball bounces on the thrower’s own slope (assuming that it still goes over the ridge).

The game is played in sets of 21 points, best of 3. Alternatively the game may be halted by the wife because the baby has just been put in bed and if she is woken then you can sort her out.

Reasons Why I Don’t Do Jokes

I tend not to tell the jokes I make up.

Apparently Dr Brian Cox is recording a new series of his excellent "Wonders of the Universe" thing. I like his stuff. He is obviously enthusiastic about stars and planets. And the moon.

The problem for Brian is that he has to explain all this stuff to us, simple lay people. It must infuriate him with his big brain, trying to get through our thick skulls about the composition of the gas giants, the atmosphere of Titan and why we can't shoot our rubbish into the sun (still not satisfactorily answered in my opinion). Meanwhile we sit with a slightly vacant stare, giggling everytime he mentions the rings of Uranus.

What Brian really wants to do is show us the really clever stuff, like the special relativistic redshift formula or the Polyakov action of super strings. But he can't because we're too stupid, (Christ, we can't even understand simplified M-theory).

So Brian has to resort to making comparisons. "If you imagine this tennis ball was the planet Mars", he will say, "Then the furrows of Andy Murray's brow represent the Martian Canals". This helps us to visualise the complex things he knows, and the physicist will use them a lot.

Unfortunately for Brian, this way of describing phenomena has resulted in him having to delay the recording of the second series.

During a particularly complex explanation of the Horsehead nebulae, Brian is painting a picture through the medium of speech. He begins to compare the interstellar cloud to a 250g packet of pistachios.

Suddenly he starts choking, and grabs his throat. He falls to his knees and is quickly rushed off to Arizona State Hospital.

Turns out he has a particularly bad nut analogy.

Ahem.

Like I said, I don't tend to tell jokes.