Organic beans on my lawn get drafted by theory

Bean Trivia is organic. Every time we play the rules change a bit. They’ll be even better next time, no doubt, which will be at the Lex RR. Of course, there’s a difference between playing teams vs. singletons. Teams need to eliminate the other teams, which is hard, because someone on the team tends to know the answer, so what we dabbled at last night that will become a normal feature, is a Jeopardy-like bet-off where teams can gamble a number of their beans, and the team with the most beans after a specific question goes on to the elims (mano-a-mano). In singleton play, on the other hand, it’s easier to lose all your beans because, first, you don’t know everything, and second, other players jump on a wounded player like hyenas at a carrion charity show. (Competitive little buggers, eh? But you knew that.)

Things I learned last night: All Sailors know the name of SpongeBob’s snail. Few Sailors have seen a movie made before 2004, except maybe anything with the word wizard in the title or with wizards in the content. (I think I need to remind the nautical universe about the medium of film a la McLuhan, for what it’s worth.) Also, kids nowadays seem to have no idea that there is any sort of music other than whatever it is they’re listening to when I try to get them off my lawn. As the Duke said, there are two kinds of music, good music and the other kind, which is, intentionally, a pretty wide-open field. Note to the VCA: open your ears over the holidays. Listen to something that isn’t rock. Listen to something that isn’t in English. Listen to something that was a hit before your mother was born. Seriously.

Meanwhile, last night the torch was passed from now Captain Emeritus SuperSquirrel to new Co-Captains, the Panivore and the People’s Champion. Their guiding principle needs to be, Build the Team. We are pretty thin on the ground these days in the younger area, so this is pretty necessary. I think we’re going to need to go beyond the all-volunteer navy and just draft people. You know, go into the middle school and find kids who look marginally intelligent and tell them they’re on the team, period, whether they like it or not. That might work. At the moment we just have too many people of the I’ll-Debate-Someday-Maybe persuasion. Rather odd, you know. I can understand liking to debate, and not liking to debate, but liking not to debate is something that’s beyond me. I guess I need to hear the theory argument on it.