Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Eternal Questions #3: How Much Wood, Precisely...?

How would one go about designing a wood-chucking contest for woodchucks? How would one entice the woodchucks to compete? Should it be for distance, or just volume of chucked wood? The question after all is not "How hard and far could a woodchuck chuck wood if a woodchuck were to be so inclined as to chuck wood hard and far?" In the classic quandary, it's purely a question of quantity - and more dauntingly, motivation.

But surely in the interest of designing a more gripping contest for spectators, one needs more than merely a count or weigh-in of chucked wood per woodchuck. You need urgency: some kind of a time limit. And I think you need some way to make the achievement more measurable: distance and accuracy perhaps? What about arranging it as woodchuck combat? Each woodchuck stands at the appropriate distance where it's going to take some skill to score a hit, and they just CHUCK THE FUCK OUT OF THE AVAILABLE LUMBER! All kinds of strategies might be involved, dodges, blocks - no blocking with a piece of wood held "in-the-grasp"! One must chuck the wood to knock the incoming block of wood off-course.

There would be a line in front of each woodchuck which could not be crossed. Behind each woodchuck would be an equal supply of wood, in chuckworthy chunks of varying size and weight.

The playing field would be a wide, long elevated mound between two trenches - the trenches being considered "out of bounds." If a woodchuck falls into the trench, that's game. If a woodchuck is incapacitated by a piece of chucked wood - game. If either woodchuck runs out of wood - has successfully chucked their load - game. First woodchuck to chuck all their wood gets +10 points for that.

The winner would be determined by how many pieces of wood chucked "in-bounds," with 1 point for wood in the no-woodchucks zone (between the two front-lines) and 5 points for all wood behind the line. No points for beaning the other woodchuck! You try to so that, of course, but the goal there is purely to put him off (and perhaps out of) his game.

Also note: defensive wrinkle, one woodchuck's wood is painted yellow, the other blue (or suitable contrasting colors) so scoring is easy. But if you choose, you can pick up any of your opponent's wood and throw it back at him! Or throw it out of bounds, etc. - but no kicking of wood allowed. Once again, the wood must be chucked. If you kick a piece of wood out of your scoring area that's a penalty. You'll get 5 pieces of wood added to your stack.

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