AskNott, thanks for clearing that up about Mumblety-peg, or Mumble-the-peg. That all sounds familiar. Does that magazine refer to variants? If not, does this thing I was describing go by some other name? I seem to recall “Splits” being used somewhere along the way.
The “real” Mumble-peg was always with a small knife (as in pocket) and had several key places on the body where the knife had to be placed (point first against whatever body part) and then spun at least half a turn so as to stick up in whatever surface (table, floor, ground) without falling over. All I can remember for sure were elbow, chin, forehead, knee, and maybe chest. I don’t remember any penalties, such as the peg in the ground, but I do remember older people (uncles, grandparents) talking as if the game was much more serious when they were kids.
Knife throwing was a big deal for me ever since I saw the Alan Ladd movie The Iron Mistress. I finally got a Randall made Bowie that was a lot like the one in the movie, but eventually found this one at this site which looks more like the movie knife.
Pencil-break reminds me of the pecan cracking contests we used to have. The yard where we lived had at least seven huge pecan trees and they were a major source of eats and fun from like September until Christmas. We’d sit out in the yard and crack and eat pecans until suppertime without ever filling up on them. I guess the one-at-a-time nature of it, plus the time between bites, what with cracking them, picking out the bitters and then eating the nuts, was enough to delay the filling up process.
We would find that one pecan more than others would win the fight. (To crack pecans, you’d use two of them and squeeze them together in your hand until the shell on one of them cracked. Every now and then both would crack, but usually you had a winner and a loser.) So as time went on, if you had a particularly tough nut, it would outlast all of them.
When we got full enough or it got dark enough we would have a crack-off between our winner nuts to see which one was grand champion. The best one I ever had, cracked all comers for at least an hour as well as my brother’s champ, was rotten!
“Hot Wheels” was always frustrating. I would set up tracks which ran from my room, through a hallway and down a flight of stairs. They had loops and bends, very difficult to keep the cars on the track for an entire run. Just when was I getting the thing to work, one parent would come home and make me take it down. :mad:
Heh, tell that to my brother. Apparently his interpretation was that cat-like reflexes were a part of the game. No peg chewing though, but I’d always wondered where that name came from.
I just now stopped laughing at the OP about the electric football. I had one. Got it for my birthday. Later that day, my older brothers were fighting and one of them stepped on it, bending the field around the 20 yard line. All further attempts at play resulted in both teams slowing moving towards the divot and ending up in one big cluster-fuck! I never got to play a single game on it! It was the Ram and Lions.
Anyway, a stupid game we used to play when I was a kid was called “Death-Mo Wars” (short for Death Machine). Each team of 3-4 kids would build a “fort” in the trees. This would take about a day or two. When both forts were complete, we would attack each other WITH STICKS AND ROCKS AND PINE CONES AND WHATEVER ELSE WE COULD PICK UP AND THROW!! The only forbidden item was metal or dirt-filled cans! To this day, I am amazed no-one was seriously hurt or killed! Unbelievable how stupid this was!
One time, I picked up a bent stick and whipped it sidearm from the flank of the enemy fort. I hit the first kid in the chest, it spun/bounced off him into his brother and continued on to smack the third brother in the head. Killed three soldiers with one shot!
Actual headline: “Church ends probe of Gay Bishop”
Some relative had the fool nation to give me one of those early role-playing games. Not familiar with such entertainment, I recruited a friend schooled in such things to teach me. This game didn’t have dice, but those small little cardboard squares called “chits” that had different numbers on them. By the time we worked our way to detatching all the chits and finding different bowls to hold the chits without mixing the differently-colored chits, I was so bored out of my mind that I just gave it to him.
“Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather” is a game I only played once, in my gym class of all places. One person has to lie down on the ground, taking care to remain stiff. The others (six to eight of them, 3-4 on each side) kneel down and lift the person up. The weight is spread evenly, so it feels like the lifted person is as light as a feather. I’m not sure, but I’ve also heard that you can lift the person up with each person only using two fingers on each hand…at least that’s what someone said in my Psychology class last semester. We were going to actually do it in class, but for some reason we never did.
Finally, I get to answer something. Oh, and thanks for all the Mumbleypeg explanations.
Ahhh, yes…I remember all these games. Smeer the Queer was big when I was a kid, as was Dodgeball. I can’t believe you can’t play Dodgeball in most schools anymore, although it is not surprising that Smeer the Queer has not survived with that present name…at least to my knowledge. Probably for the best.
I had one of those electric football games and LOVED it, although I never did figure out how to kick or pass. And of course it got old quick once I got my Atari football game. However, it was not the stupidest football game ever invented. That honor goes to VCR Football. You chose cards or something to determine play and once in awhile you'd turn on the VCR for a play that counted. Once you'd been through the tape once, which took all of, oh, two game or so, it got old because you knew the outcome of the plays right when they started and knew what plays were coming up. However, the tape just watched by itself was kind of fun because they used some of the wackiest plays in NFL history on the tape. I am surprised know one has revived this idea in the DVD era as it would be more ideally suited for the game. You could have 10 times as many plays to choose from and it is digital instead of analog, so you could pick plays at random and would not have to go in order. Oh, and I think on the VCR game if you happen to get a "Touchdown" play it counted no matter where you were on the field, which was very odd. If I remember correct, you could be on your 20 yard line in your game, but you turn on the VCR and there the team is from like the 2 yard line running it in for a score. Maybe I am wrong on that.
I remember my sister having parties and they'd play all sorts of weird games. In one game, one person, preferably a member of the opposite sex, would be placed under a sheet and be told, "You have to take off something you DIDN't wear to bed last night." One clothing article at a time would come off. The idea was you are suppsed to "take off" the sheet, since that was an item you didn't wear to bed. Of course the goal was for the person to not catch on to this until they were close to naked. What creative minds my sister and her friends had.
me and my sister would play the worst game when we were 5 and 6. if we ate watermellon we would end up with a plate of juice that would be the ‘ocean’ and seeds. since watermellon seeds can be white or black we decided they were white and black people, in our game only the ‘black people’ could go in the ocean and the white people had to stay on the beach and watch them have fun.
it wasn’t racist… well, it was, but it really was just solely because there was two colors of seeds… and the black people DID get the better end of the deal, but yeah, very very bad game, more so when I learned the connotations of black people and watermellons.
My two best friends and I had a game we played called “Silent Castle”.
One of the local playgrounds had one of those climbing frame thingies – two short “towers” connected by those parallel bars you swing across hand by hand – made out of railroad tie-sized pieces of timber. One of the towers was a series of small platforms going stepwise up in a circle, with a climbing net and sliding board attached to the sides at different levels. The other was two platforms, one above the other, with a climbing/sliding pole connecting the two. The whole contraption was situated in a gravel-filled area (the playground kind of rounded gravel, not the industrial pointy kind).
The game (usually played late at night, when everyone else had gone) was essentially a variant of tag. The people who weren’t “it” could go anywhere on the structure during the game, but couldn’t touch the ground/gravel. The person who was “it” could likewise go anywhere on the structure including the ground – but was blindfolded. Since the “it” person had more freedom of movement, there was a great incentive for the other two to move as quietly as possible to avoid detection. There was also the challenge of not getting trapped on one tower or the other, so getting past the parallel bar “pinchpoint” without getting tagged was a particular achievement.
Actually, that was a helluva fun game, although it’s amazing none of us sustained any worse injuries that the odd kneescrape, leaping around in the dark like that.
I never got to play a single game on it! It was the Ram and Lions.