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My son had a school award night thingy and the email that went out beforehand with instructions and expectations said something along the lines of wear your Sunday clothes.

My guess is the people who worded that email either haven’t been to church in a while, or maybe only go on special occasions, or maybe they’ve only seen it in movies. Because my son wore a polo shirt and nice shorts, like he usually does for church. Maybe that wasn’t his Sunday best, but it was his church clothes.

Anyway, he was the only one wearing shorts.

I felt out of place for him, but he didn’t seem to be socially uncomfortable with it, so the award ceremony went well.

I just found it interesting the various gaps between the older generation and the younger, and between the formal church crowd and informal church crowd and the non-church crowd.

This is a guide for how to play the game Abalone. I normally like to link to the official game website, but in this case I could not find a publisher who owns the game. So if you want it you’ll just have to search any place that sells used games.

1. How do I win?
Be the first player to push 6 of the other player’s marbles off the board.

2. How do I push their marbles?
By having a line of marbles with a greater number than their line (or singlular marble). Think of it like sumo wrestling or reverse tug-of-war – if you have the advantage of more marbles in a line than do they, you can push them. You take turns moving your marbles.

3. How do I move my marbles?
Each turn, you can select 1, 2, or 3 marbles at a time if they are in a row and consecutive. You may move that set of marbles one spot in any direction – down the row or to the side. You can’t move them down the row if they are against a row the opponent’s marbles with an equal or greater count (you can’t push a “heavier” opponent).

And that’s the five hows for Abalone. I was extra efficient and got the five hows done in three hows. But for those of you who want the full five, here are two more.

4. How do you start the game?
It’s kind of like chess, with all the black marbles on one side and all the white marbles on the other. Unlike chess, black goes first.

5. How do I best position myself to win?
The simplest strategy is to get your marbles in the middle of the board. You win by pushing the opponent off the sides/edges of board, so winning movement is toward the outside, which means you must start on the inside.

It is a simple game, like a combination of checkers and Othello. And sumo wresting. But it does take some thinking and planning your moves.

There, now go play Abalone.

There are many ads on TV these days for various drugs and treatments for various ailments. Back when I was growing up, pharmaceutical companies didn’t advertise to the general public. So I have no memories of those commercials from my childhood.

Nowadays, it seems like over half the ads are for some new drug that I’m supposed to ask my doctor if it’s right for me. Well, not for these next several weeks as political ads have taken over. But once the election cycle is done I’m sure they’ll go back to normal.

On one hand it’s annoying seeing the same few commercials. On the other hand it’s nice of them to pay for the TV content, and someone’s gotta have the ads.

All of this to say, whatever happened to Ring Around the Collar?

Back when I was a child, that was the major ailment was plaguing everyone. At least that is how it seemed, based on the number of ads that were out there claiming to get rid of ring around the collar.

I’ll have to play some of those old ads for my kids, so they know how rough we had it growing up, and they can be glad that they live in a day and age where they never have to worry about ring around the collar.

As a note for the detergent makers, if you want to drum up more business, you need to find a more modern equivalent of ring-around-the-collar. My proposal: Ring Around The Hoodie. If there’s a way that someone’s hoodie could be perceived as not good, that might scare up some extra sales of your product.

Being a University of Michigan fan whose kid enrolls at Michigan State is like the situation in the Sound of Music. In the picture below, MSU people are like Herr Zeller and I’m like Max Detweiler. They are zealous for their cause and I don’t really care for it, but I don’t want to upset them so I give a half-hearted reply.

I think in the movie it was actually Rolf that gave the Nazi greeting that Max Detweiler somewhat returned, but Herr Zeller looks more appropriate for this image.

Thanks to someone’s generosity in loaning us her car while ours was in the shop, I got to hear a few days’ worth of satellite radio. So we tried to get a wide variety of stations while we could, and I tried to explain the significance of various songs in regard to the culture at the time. One of the songs that came on was “The Beat Goes On” by Sonny and Cher.

It was written to highlight how things are changing, and things are staying the same. And it oddly still works today. It reminds me of a monologue by Roy Rogers, I think. The way it was written it spoke of politics and societal events in a general enough way that it was timeless. I wish I could find it on the internet, but no such luck today.

Anyway, here are some of the lyrics to The Beat Goes On

Charleston was once the rage, uh-huh
History has turned the page, uh-huh
The miniskirt’s the current thing, uh-huh
Teenybopper is our newborn king, uh-huh

I suppose miniskirts are still around, not sure about teenyboppers anymore though. This verse is a wash: +1 and -1.

The grocery store’s the super mart, uh-huh
Little girls still break their hearts, uh-huh
And men still keep on marching off to war
Electrically they keep a baseball score

This one’s still true on all counts. Although it’s not noteworthy now that baseball scores are kept electronically, it was a big deal back then. But it’s still true today.

Grandmas sit in chairs and reminisce
Boys keep chasing girls to get a kiss
The cars keep going faster all the time
Bums still cries, “Hey buddy, have you got a dime?”

This one’s mostly true. Cars do keep going faster all the time. As far as I can tell, we’ve reached diminishing returns on that one, both in top speed and in 0-60 acceleration – however you want to consider “faster”. The things that not quite true is that bums don’t ask for dimes. They still ask for money, but in denominations larger than dimes.

And the beat goes on

Okay, this one’s the chorus not a verse. But it needs to be acknowledged that the beat is still going on today, so +1 for that too.

A friend of ours got a case of Bai flavored water (I forget if she was given it or it was just a really good deal so she bought it) but once she tried it she realized she didn’t really like it. So we got to try some Bai flavors and take what we wanted.

That was my introduction to Bai. I don’t particularly like it because it tastes like fake sugar. My son thought it was okay.

Anyway, that’s all the background for why I was thinking about Bai. And while thinking about Bai, I thought they missed an opportunity for an ad campaign with NSYNC.

It’s a perfect fit, if you ask me. They don’t even have to change the song, just put images of Bai water on the screen each time NSYNC sings the word “bye”.

Some longtime readers of this blog may remember I wrote something about why Jesus lived for only 33 years and what was significant about the number 33.

I still like my answer, but I did find another meaning to the number 33, and I think it fits in quite nicely.

One of the many Old Testament laws had to do with impurity and cleanness after childbirth. If a woman gave birth to a male child she was unclean for 33 days and if she gave birth to a female child she was unclean for 66 days.

What does Mary giving birth to Jesus have to do with this?

Nothing.

But if we consider that Jesus was born of this world, then the earth would be unclean for 33 units of time. I haven’t worked out how to make the jump from days to years, I’m just concentrating on the number 33.

I also don’t want to take the comparison too far lest anyone think that the earth was Jesus’ mother.

Back to the numbers now. So the earth would be unclean for 33 years after Jesus’ birth. Hmm… It was also unclean for the 3756 years before Jesus was born. We’re just going to ignore that part for now too.

Anway, the earth would be unclean for 33 years after the birth of Jesus. Then how did the mother become clean after 33 days? She had to sacrifice a lamb, of course.

Jesus is both the child and the lamb in this analogy. He was sacrificed 33 years after his birth and that purified the earth. Hmm… Maybe that’s not the best way of phrasing it either, because that hints at universal salvation. Maybe “allowed inhabitants of earth to be purified” would be better.

Maybe I’m stretching it a bit, but I thought there was a decent connection between the 33 years that Jesus lived and the 33 days of uncleanness.

Now I realize that it could also imply the earth was only unclean while Jesus was on the earth. I’ll leave that topic alone also.

That’s all – just something to think about.