Day 13 of 24/7

And more than just the 24/7 entry today.

I’m listening to music on grooveshark. Specifically, at this exact moment I’m listening to Sir Harry Secombe, whose voice I have always loved, since the first time I saw the movie "Oliver!", in which he played the obnoxious Mr. Bumble. So I listened to this song from that movie, and now I’m listening to his version of The Impossible Dream. He was a dumpy little man with a great big voice and I liked him tremendously.

Now, related to the challenge today is this science news story. Pretty interesting conjecture, and it led to this:

Cosmic Crokinole

Played with uncounted planets for pieces

Caroming into each other–crashing and spinning

Mercury stripped of its outer layers and Venus slowed in her tracks

Two more smash, meld, melt and break apart–Earth and the moon endlessly circling

Mars reshaped, an unknown smashed to rubble, now just an asteroid belt

A solid giant impacts Jupiter and is swallowed whole,

Saturn eats smaller pieces, Neptune gains a moon

Uranus is tipped on its axis, blue ring at a jaunty angle

Little Pluto runs its elliptical orbit, perhaps seeking one last shot

Of the countless pieces only nine remain

Circling the centre waiting for the next round.

***

It’ll do for now. I thought of billiards at first, but a crokinole board came to mind, and how you try to knock your opponent’s pieces away. I imagined the gods of creation playing crokinole with the planets–who can get closest to the sun?

 EDIT: Go here to see how the game works. Crokinole (pronounced "croak-n-oal") is easy to play, difficult to master. It’s one of my favourite games of all time, and may be Canadian in origin, now that I think about it. There are so many things that are common in Canada that aren’t available in the US, I tend to forget they’re not universal. Chocolate bars like Coffee Crisp, and Smarties, and so on. Crokinole is pretty much a board version of curling. The goal is to reach a goal score set ahead of time (50, 100, whatever). Each ring has a specific point value, with the middle hole being worth 20 points. Players take turns trying to get into the centre while knocking their opponent’s pieces off the board.