September 16, 2003
Calvinistball
Bill Simmons has a great ESPN article on the joys of college dorm hall sports. "Our monument to crastination was Wallball, in which players bounced a racketball into a wall, one at a time. The ball had to bounce twice -- before it hit the wall, then after -- before the next guy hit it. If you screwed up, you got a "letter." Sounds dumb, right? We played for days on end. There was one legendary 30-player game that lasted two hours. There wasn't a girl to be seen. Not a one."
Which of course reminds me of the many fine sports we played on my Covenant dorm hall, Catacombs. The most famous was hallball, that inspired combination of dodgeball, soccer and nudist colony which you can see ably defended on Matt's blog. But there were other games as well, including Buckets of Fun, a sort of street hockey with all the players seated on the wheeled bottoms of college trash cans, and one more of the trash can bottoms used as a puck. The resulting game was something like polo crossed with a rugby scrum in the middle of a parking lot.
There was also Ultimate PanGeos, a game of ultimate frisbee played with the perfectly areodynamic salad bowls from the PanGeos world cuisine section of the dining hall. And there was an unnamed game in which old CD-ROMs would be flung Oddjob style into plaster walls or the back of Nathan Brinkerhoff, who could be counted on to conveniently wander onto the hall just when such a game was commencing. And there was my personal favorite, Kick the Soccer Ball at the Sleeping RA's Door, which could provide hours of evening entertainment. Needless to say, many of these games were invented by Josiah.
Posted by mesh at September 16, 2003 12:27 PM | TrackBackDude, lets not forget war, it's two goals being to hurl sucessively larger and larger objects at your hallmates until somebody get's a serious injury (like Zach Cheney's concussion) or we break an functioning appliance.
I loved this game because all the Tacoma boys really got into it. Oh, and I got hit in the head with a trashcan once.
Posted by: JosiahQ at September 16, 2003 12:34 PMOr, a more specific variant: Kick the Ball at Wes Hollowell's Door.(The variant and the original coincided the year I moved off the hall.) The ultimate goal of that one was to have "Dad" come raging out in his tighty-whities yelling at you to "cut it out!"
Posted by: gosey at September 16, 2003 12:38 PM"Do you idiots know what time it is?!!" Kick, thunk. "It's ten-fifteen!!" Kick, thunk. "People are trying to sleep!!!" Kick, thunk. Kick, thunk.
Heh, heh. Good times.
Posted by: mesh at September 16, 2003 12:41 PMOn Sutherland, we played Hall Rugby each night of finals week. With the whole hall crammed into the hallway, it was basically just a huge, throbbing pile of masculinity that inched its way in either direction. BEST used to work overtime cleaning the blood stains off the walls.
We also threw tennis balls at each other in the halls, but when we didn't have any, we used the readily available toilet paper rolls instead (which was probably more fun b/c they made much more of a mess). When we got really bored, we just took various objects and tried to knock down the hall exit signs from varying distances.
Of course w/ SD's ridiculous new rules, these treasured events are a thing of the past, leaving us to wax nostalgic about the way things used to be.
Posted by: Ben at September 17, 2003 09:18 AMIdea! Mebbe we could get the current hall residents to HOT WAX nostalgic about the past?!?
Posted by: JosiahQ at September 17, 2003 03:37 PMI just found a great site that focuses on subleases, sublease agreements, and finding a sublease. They are the only site I have seen that has a sublease auction feature. Someone told me that they got their sublease for almost 200 bucks less than their neighbor by using a sublease auction instead of a realtor. Here is the site http://www.subleaseauction.com .
Posted by: sublease at February 21, 2005 08:26 PM