#beliedbabe

[copperbadge]

Sports Night In The Ask

franticbindings

It'd be interesting if the traditional bow fishing thing pointed to sport archery also being a thing. Like your high school might have an archery team.

beledibabe

It would be fun if A-S had some arcane local game, now mainly played by old men and women in cafe gardens using home-made equipment. Maybe similar to petanque or bocce? And of course, it can get cut-throat. ::g::

I love that these two comments came in right next to each other because I think you guys are on to something. Definitely archery is considered a cultural tradition, both bowfishing in specific and bow sport in general. They probably do regularly send Shivadh archers to the Olympics and they probably do extremely well.

It would be super fun to invent a local sport -- as you say, like bocce, that was my thought too -- that incorporates archery somehow. I know there are some mounted archery traditions in Mongolia that I think have formalized games attached (I know they have formal competition, I just am not sure there's like, team games).

But it would also be fun for there to be a running joke about a local Shivadh sport that doesn't exist -- kind of like Calvinball meets Mornington Crescent. Something to tell the tourists about, like "Oh yeah you just missed the annual Lofingi games, they were epic this year." And explaining the rules of Lofingi is just an exercise in improv.

("Fingi" in Italian is "fake it" in the second person imperative; "lo fingi" isn't grammatical, I believe it's actually fingilo, but it's basically "I order you to fake it.")

oft-goes-awry

"There is no golf. Michaelis detests it personally." Sam, after having gone to the Masters the last couple of years (my dad has tickets and you couldn't PAY my mom to go), I would LOVE to see his face when confronted with the utter surreality that Augusta National during Master's Week.

I don't know that we've ever seen Michaelis properly seethe, but that might be the time for it!

Realistically, it's not even that he hates golf on principle. There are a lot of reasons to dislike golf from a social standpoint, at least the modern game -- and he's obviously not in favor of massive water-sucking gatekept tax shelters, not to mention there's a strong historical affiliation between golf and racism, golf and antisemitism.

But he also just...doesn't like playing it. (I feel this way about bowling.)

He understands that for people at his level it's mostly a way to have private conversations and do networking. I think he'd find Master's Week fascinating from that standpoint; he'd know how to work it to get what he wants. And he's an outdoorsy guy, he likes hiking and being out in nature, you'd think walking around outside for several hours would appeal to him. But you're tethered to the stupid little ball and the obnoxious people you're playing with and there IS the creepy gatekeeping and it's not like it's nature nature.

One time Noah showed him one of those memes about "turn all golf courses into public sex forests" and he plaintively asked "Can't we just rewild them?" and Jes laughed so hard they fell off their chair.