China is where gunpowder was invented.
Wait, someone cared about the outcome in Cornhole?
I defeated a Frenchman at Bocce a few weeks ago (my first time playing) and got a similarly petulant reaction. I think us being shirtless may have been partly to blame for the unpleasantness.
Just don't go too far with colonial games.
The closest I ever got to taking cornhole seriously was when people got the idea to dart back and forth across the field to distract, if not block. Provoked imitation and more rivalry than usual.
If you used brooms to block/distract, you could invent a new game: Corncurl.
Playing cornhole with bottle rockets or roman candles would also be fun.
3: Surely there's a shaggy dog story that cautions one against playing Bocce torse nu with a Gaul but I can't come up with it.
My Fourth of July party behind the Orange Curtain featured bro-parents doing beer bongs, skate-drinking, and toy Hummer hybrid races manned by three year olds.
Thanks to your remote control fetish, quad copter ads are following me around the internet. I'm probably going to have to buy one soon.
That's not a complaint or anything.
Stanley, I applaud your sporting efforts, even if they were in celebration of treason. Next time some bro gets in your grill, I recommend a Top Gun high five to let him know it really is over.
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What are the goofbags linked in 5 thinking? Ok, they aren't thinking, but they also clearly don't get the irony of celebrating Independence Day with "colonial games".
celebration of treason
I remarked at one point that remaining part of Britain wouldn't have been so bad. Better health care. Less religiosity. Driving on the other side of the street.
I defeated a Frenchman at Bocce
Perhaps he was used to playing Pétanque.
16: Or driving on the same side of the street as everybody else on the street, depending.
Ok so that is the other meaning of that.
Yeah I was not familiar with the holiday game by that name.
You'd have thought acquaintances were very over-familiar if you ever moved to Indiana or thereabouts.
I had to look it up, because I had previously only heard the word in association with Beavis and Butthead.
I associate it with tailgating for college football more than holidays. It's kind of hard to keep from laughing when someone says something like, "Mom, wanna go out and get our cornhole on?"
I've always seen it called something like a bean bag toss whenever it is done by people who are children or sober.
At football tailgates, I think the kids are the only ones who are sober. The nomenclature was unchanged for little ears. I don't think 4 year olds get the joke.
I, too, had not heard this association with the word.
Is the name "cornhole" really a joke? Around here we fill the bags with corn, and you throw the cornbags in the hole. Innocent as can be.
Sometimes the professionals aren't safe to watch either.
For those afraid to search, here's a SFW site with an explanation near the bottom of the page. I'm confused by the accessory section, though.
I think basically the only time I ever read the term was in Edmund White's sentimental, occasionally porny memoir A Boy's Own Story, which I nervously checked out of the public library when I was 17.
Would you have been able to check out Teach Yourself Cornholing without nerves?
Based on the rest of the terminology per Wikipedia, I don't think we can assume the game was named in total innocence.
You can have sanctioned tournaments etc!?
And for your hyper-competitive opponent I note: Section A. Point Limits - The Cornhole / Corn Toss match shall be played until the first team of contestants reaches (or exceeds) 21 points at the completion of an inning.
Vaguely topical: I miss lawn darts. Too bad they were fatal.
Somebody should think of a game where you tie roman candles to lawn darts and light them before throwing.
37: You mean they don't play Fiery Death From Above in Pittsburgh?
At the barbeque I attended yesterday, the games on offer were Hammerschlagen and "Shoot beer cans with a BB gun and if you hit one you have to shotgun it"
We just rocked the hell out of some wilderness Bocce.
I'm with those who do not think of a bean bag game.
Heebie, I was introduced to the game in TX and a certain Big Ten school that takes its football very seriously. How did you miss out?
The good Big Ten school or the evil one?
I don't know how to answer that. The one that's super stuck up about how classy they are? (Didn't go there, just been to a few games with alums.)
The one that's super stuck up about how classy they are?
Iowa?
Also, I'm annoyed that I assumed the evil one is not the one with the child molesting coach.
You'd describe Iowans as stuck up? Salt of the earth, simple pig farmers?
Everybody I know who went to Iowa is very fancy.
Everybody I know who farms pigs is from Nebraska and has a rich inner life.
Maybe the Iowans you knew were city folk.
Maybe the Iowans you knew were city folk.
Really, I've never spent much time in Iowa. My sister went to Iowa and she's fancier than the rest of us.
I have an aunt and uncle who live there. The uncle used to brag about how great it was. He really appreciated the "rolling hills," as compared with the flatness of nearby states. Their town had a stoplight.
My town had a stoplight and then the highway people changed their standards. Now there are three stoplights and nobody can give directions.
Turn left at Walmart, continue to the Farm 'n' Fleet?
"Shoot beer cans with a BB gun and if you hit one you have to shotgun it"
Because BBs don't have enough power to actually open the can?
58: I should clarify: If the BB hits the can, and punctures it, then you run down the range and grab it and try to shotgun as much as you can before it all leaks out.
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Just read some of the Crooked Timber commentary on the Petraeus thing. I feel like everything I've read about this is seriously missing the point. Plenty of universities pay similar salaries to senior faculty who don't do much. The real scandal is that people can be teaching full-time in a university and get paid only $3000 per course. I feel like most of what I've read is along the lines of "why are they paying Petraeus so much?" when it should be "why are they paying adjuncts so little?" Petraeus seems basically irrelevant to me aside from highlighting the awfulness of the pay scale a lot of the other people at CUNY are working under.
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Winner-take-all society, essear, that's why.
Also, much of the commentary (even, bizarrely, from academics) plays into the whole conservative framing of "professors only work 3 hours a week!" Nonsense. I mean, Petraeus could (again, like other senior faculty) half-ass it and come in and babble for 3 hours and leave, but "teaching in-class for 3 hours" generally requires working a lot more than 3 hours per week.
Petraeus will have an awful lot of grading.
(No no I take the point the image of Petreaus staring grimly at a stack of essays just entertained me.)
I've heard the term "cornhole" used in this sense before, but I don't think I've ever been to a party where it was being played. The party I went to yesterday didn't have it, although there was ping-pong and bocce.
I mean, Petraeus could (again, like other senior faculty) half-ass it and come in and babble for 3 hours and leave, but "teaching in-class for 3 hours" generally requires working a lot more than 3 hours per week.
I am endeavoring not to follow this issue, but I think it's been clearly admitted that Petraeus had a crop of grad students who were going to to do all of the prep, grading, etc.
People should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
And FTR, it's definitely bean-bag toss. I have no idea what you infidels are on about. I have never in my life heard the other term used to refer to a game.
I don't know how grad students could prep for giving a lecture. That part doesn't really make any sense to me. Having grad students do all or almost all of the grading is completely standard, in all the departments I've been in. I mean, yes, his salary is a bit high and he presumably wouldn't be doing research, but I don't see why alarm bells are going off in particular about this. The outrage is really that adjuncts are paid so little.
The outrage is that he isn't just taking over the whole country like an Egyptian general.
Er, write the lecture and materials? I'm not meaning to be snarky here, but I can certainly imagine how it could be done.
This is not to detract from your larger point, which is of course that it is appalling that we are routinely paying people $3,000 with no benefits to teach a college-level course.
At least I dropped out of graduate school and saved myself from that fate.
the image of Petreaus staring grimly at a stack of essays just entertained me
Hee hee. I also got a kick of fantasizing about him doing all this boring adjunct shit--going to grade norming workshops, getting observed, sharing a tiny office with thirty other people...
The outrage shouldn't be more than what comes from the average instance of some celebrity being paid 5 figures to give a speech to some non-profit organization. After all, he's going to be giving a couple dozen speeches during the semester. We can assume he is doing no other work for the course and will not interact with any of the actual faculty members or set foot on the campus at any other time, but this astronomical and ludicrous salary is probably well below his normal appearance fee, per appearance.
It's only the second inning against the Cubs. This means either you can now play baseball in the dark or some fuck put electric lights at Wrigley Field without telling me.
I knew two things about baseball. Pirates suck and Wrigley Field has no lights. Apparently both are wrong, but I'm not sure about the first.
The outrage shouldn't be more than what comes from the average instance of some celebrity being paid 5 figures to give a speech to some non-profit organization.
I disagree. First off, it's relatively rarely that the kind of nonprofits paying those fees are also facing drastic budget cuts. Part of the outrage over the Petreaus thing is that it's occurring in the context of massive cuts to higher education funding. That makes the contrast more egregious -- you can't afford money for X, Y, and Z worthy thing, but you can afford it for this guy?
Secondly, when a celebrity gives a speech nobody is under the delusion that they are replaceable with some lesser-known speechgiver. The whole POINT of an event like that is to have a big name (that will hopefully attract people who will spend lots of money for a ticket to hear them).
In theory, nobody should be enrolling in graduate school for the chance to hear a big-name guest lecturer.*
*I'm sure somebody somewhere is.
Huh. Night games at Wrigley Field. I feel old.
I know. The fuckers. At least the Pirates can still collapse.
I suppose that for reasons of local pride, I could be bothered to learn that the pirates usually suck but not always.
78.link: If you'd asked me to describe the decisionmaking process before reading the article, I would've guessed the Cubs had something closer to carte blanche. After reading, I can think of reasons to be unsurprised that these negotiations exist and are reported upon, but I started out cynically assuming they wouldn't.
remaining part of Britain wouldn't have been so bad.
Having a royal family would be pretty weird, though.
And being enthusiastic about cricket.
82: you mean other than the Clintons and Bushes? Yeah, that would be weird.
Part of the outrage over the Petreaus thing is that it's occurring in the context of massive cuts to higher education funding. That makes the contrast more egregious -- you can't afford money for X, Y, and Z worthy thing, but you can afford it for this guy?
The trouble is that getting upset about this amount of money being paid to someone who spends three hours a week in a classroom is pretty much exactly what a bunch of right-wing commentators do about higher education in general and use to argue for those very budget cuts. I don't actually know how many faculty members I know personally make at least $200k/yr, but since salaries at University of California schools are public information I know that I know at least a handful of people making that muc;h I strongly suspect a lot of my local senior colleagues are making that much; and probably more broadly just among personal acquaintances I know twenty or more people who are paid $200k/yr to spend three hours a week in a classroom. And I'm pretty sure I know literally hundreds of people who are paid more than $100k/yr to spent three hours a week in a classroom. The attack on Petraeus seems dangerously close to the broader attack on academia that elides the fact that the job of a faculty member involves much more than time spent in classrooms. It's not entirely clear what's expected of Petraeus, but if he's writing any books or articles and listing his affiliation as being with CUNY, or giving talks at places and advertising them with his affiliation at CUNY, that's actually part of the job of a faculty member.
I mean, sure, you can make an attack on Petraeus in particular based on whether or not you think his expertise is worth paying for. Is it reasonable for CUNY to hire him, rather than someone else? Likely not. But it's not as if questionable hiring decisions by universities are anything new. And the general hand-wringing about the salary number and the classroom hours is missing the point in a really bad way.
The real problem remains that we have supposedly top-notch universities that are paying people below a living wage to teach students.
My usual bar is closed for a whole week. Probably a sign of strong workers rights, but still all the other bars either aren't good or cost more.
Time to start making rusty nails at home?
and probably more broadly just among personal acquaintances I know twenty or more people who are paid $200k/yr to spend three hours a week in a classroom. And I'm pretty sure I know literally hundreds of people who are paid more than $100k/yr to spent three hours a week in a classroom
Well, tbh, that annoys the fuck out of me. Why don't these people have regular teaching loads? Presumably they're quite knowledgeable.
Three hours a week is a regular teaching load in plenty of departments. If they asked us to teach any more than that we'd be talking to empty rooms.
Good lord, essear! Where do you work, the Harvard Department Of Extremely Practical Engineering Where Faculty Could Leave Right Now And Get Twice As Much Working For Raytheon?
But 90 is correct. In my department the professors barely have any teaching to do on average. There aren't any TA's either.
People who bring in large grants don't really need to teach in classes much justify their salaries. Schools take roughly 50% overhead on grants, so a 500K/year grant pays for a 200K/year salaried professor in overhead alone.
Sorry that was me.
Most of the people I know, being theorists, don't have grants nearly large enough to cover their salaries in that way.
I'm just mad that essear is talking about teaching rather than cornhole and so I (or the other commenter who has the same rights) could get all huffy about sell-outs who leave our state and have no clue, but it's what I get for being all Indianaish up here anyway and probably isn't statewide. Also, while I'm being parenthetical, it's hard to sympathize with newly employed teachers of marketing who want to be paid like the big ol' business school pays people and not how regular teachers in reality get paid. I'd like bigger checks as much as the next, but come on!
Anyway, a university pays me to commit science, so I try not to get very upset with them. My next favorite job was building pig barns.
We got a cornhole set to get into the local spirit, but I hadn't realized it was Indiana specific rather than more generally Midwestern.
There was sometime a few years ago when I went home to visit my parents and at some family gathering all my cousins and aunts and whatnot were talking constantly about "cornhole" and I was really confused. I haven't heard much about it since, so I thought it was a trend that kind of spiked and then died out.
When we reach the year 2021, we will finally reach the point where every person who hosts parties has independently found out about this "cornhole" thing and thought it would be hilarious to have a "cornhole" game and make a big deal out of playing "cornhole" and insisting earnestly that that is the real name of the game, and then lost interest after a year.
I only become of the designation as "cornhole" sometime in my adulthood, in the NE Ohio of my youth it was definitely "bean-bag." And it was bean-bag that Miss Sis Boombah was coaching it on the pages of The Incompleat Pogo so I will argue for that being the more broadly known term (in the '50s , anyway).
No one may have told you this, essear, but when you have that light of a teaching load they're expecting you to do this thing called "research". I'm guessing Petraeus won't be spending his extra time uploading papers to arXiv.
103: I have not found any mention of "cornhole" as a game (and termed such) that can be reliably dated prior to this century (and the sexual meaning to ~mid 20th). "Bean bag" has book references to the early 20th.
There seems to be some consensus that Cornhole arose in its present form and name near Cincinnati (or at least got spread from there). Almost certainly "knowingly" named is my confident guess.
89: Why don't these people have regular teaching loads? Presumably they're quite knowledgeable.
???
Photo added to the Flickr pool: a large number of people playing cornhole in DC during Unfoggedycon weekend.
Schools take roughly 50% overhead on grants
Hahaha- only 50%? Unless you're converting it to a percentage of grants rather than the typical tack-on. We call 50% overhead an admin charge of 50 cents when you spend a $1, which if you did it as a fraction of the total spend would be 33% to admin. Anyway, I think much more common rates are in the 70% range, and I've heard of some in the 90s.
Anyway I'm on vacation right now but working on two separate grants ($4M total) due at the end of the month, that was a stupid plan.
89: Silly wolfson, if they are good at teaching, they are necessarily not that knowledgeable.
Right. One four million dollar grant is more efficient.
The outrage is really that adjuncts are paid so little.
This needs to be emphasized. Often.
It's hot and muggy outside, there's no more beer or wine (only vodka), and I have conference papers to review!
that sounds like a job for folded paper fans, a tumbler and ice cubes.
After so many plugs, I decided to have a crack at this game. So I set it up and had a go at bunging in a few. After awhile I was behind, so when no one was looking I fudged the score a bit. But that was soon rectified, and my score was wiped from the board.
I need to work on a grant application this weekend. I'm torn between following the advice everyone is giving me and trying to do what would satisfy the reviewers who rejected my last grant application, which would be roughly the opposite of the advice everyone is giving me.
(Although two of those grant reviews amounted to "essear shouldn't be funded because he proposed to work on Topic X, which means he's ignorant of the field because I exhausted everything worth doing on that topic 30 years ago", so I don't think it would be possible to satisfy those people.)
89: Silly wolfson, if they are good at teaching, they are necessarily not that knowledgeable.
Who said anything about them being good at teaching? The proper objection is "if they're that prominent that they have such low loads [which is what I would have assumed was the deal] they aren't necessarily that good at teaching."
But I think that things like intro courses really ought to be taught by senior people.
"essear shouldn't be funded because he proposed to work on Topic X, which means he's ignorant of the field because I exhausted everything worth doing on that topic 30 years ago"
You're working on cellular automata and need to get it past Stephen Wolfram?
The girls and I are at the hyperlocal (rather than big-city) Gay Pride and there's a cornhole tournament going on. We are neither participating nor watching, just waiting for the doggy drag race. Nia is very taken with drag queen makeup, unsurprisingly. It's like a YouTube makeup tutorial come to life!
Is it an ironic cornhole tournament?
Is a non-ironic cornhole tournament possible? Anyway, glad you're having a nice afternoon.
Per the stuff I looked at for 106, Thorn's hyperlocal is pretty close to cornhole central.
The girls and I are at the hyperlocal (rather than big-city) Gay Pride and there's a cornhole tournament going on. We are neither participating nor watching, just waiting for the doggy drag race. Nia is very taken with drag queen makeup, unsurprisingly. It's like a YouTube makeup tutorial come to life!
I don't know if it's ironic or not. It wasn't being played ironically. Next weekend our town has its annual sausage fest, which is what it sounds like rather than what it sounds like.
which is what it sounds like rather than what it sounds like.
An important distinction.
I don't know about the doggy drag race, but RuPaul's Drag Race has taught me that drag race competitions may not have the LEAST arbitrary rules in the world.
Under Halfordismo, not all doggies will get treats, I suspect. This seemed to be an Everybody Wins sort of "race." I don't think there was even any trash talk about who was a bitch, etc.
Hmm, will it remember my personal info now? I can't do anything right today!
And Stormcrow, by the time I moved back here in '02 cornhole was definitely established as A Thing, which it wasn't at least in my circles in the mid-late '90s.
That's OK, someone posting without a pseud is doing a bang-up job of being you.
Oh, and I have to be sappy for a moment that I thought I'd explained we were going to Pride and that they'd remember from last year, but we were partway through and Mara saw all the rainbow flags (or maybe the HRC tent?) and suddenly said, "Oh, for two moms and two dads!" And she was all excited until she remembered to be sad because she only has one dad, and I had to reassure her that most of the other queerspawn have one or the other. And yes, I'm sure it's super problematic that she's thinking of it in terms of closed couples parenting, but she's five and that's the part she knows, and she lit up when she realized all the other kids had two moms or two dads too and was extra affctionate with me. (It's not necessarily true about all the other kids, but whatever, she can assume and be happy.)
I'm also a little conflicted about how both of them do the "Is that a boy or a girl?" for people presenting in a masculine way but have never thought of a drag queen or any of the transwoman they know as not being a woman, because performing femininity = woman but having the power associated with masculinity means only certain people deserve it or something? Probably really just because Lee is a girl who does boy things and they're trying to differentiate on that front, I guess. We talk about some of this, but I don't pick people out as object lessons and so they clearly don't generalize yet.
I feel uneasy around firecrackers, especially when the people deploying those firecrackers are drinking. I don't really get the attraction to shooting off lame-ass bottle rockets.
This was me once, but now having attended a bachelor party on a salt flat that included running around shooting Roman candles at one another, I now get the attraction.
I wouldn't think that it's as much about power as about a differing level of taboos: a longhaired person in a dress is either a woman (cis or trans) or a man intentionally dressed as a woman, and even a little kid knows that men don't wear dresses (and might or might not know that they sometimes do as costume.)
A shorthaired person in pants, on the other hand, doesn't give you much information without subtler tells that are going to be complicated for a little kid, because short hair and pants aren't taboo for anyone.
135 is definitely accurate. They also have far more models of "girls who wear boy clothes," including themselves at times. (That reminds me that I should make sure Nia has a tie-appropriate outfit clean for church tomorrow so she can wear her new tie, which almost certainly means doing more laundry. Ugh.) There's Lee who wears boy clothes because they're comfortable for her (and she's gay), one of Mara's favorite teachers and our friends who wears boy clothes because she's an athlete (and gay), the people at church who feel most comfortable worshiping as Brother So-and-So but identify as women in the professional and other lives (and are in relationships with women) and then there's also me wearing an old shirt of my grandfather's today but totally under the radar because they only notice ongoing patterns and not individual details. They didn't clock the drag king either, though I was preparing for questions about race (I was guessing South Asian but performing black masculinity, which wasn't going to be too hard to explain) and didn't have to follow through on that.
They definitely know that dressing up in girl clothes is something men on tv shows do to be funny, but I think it strikes them funny for the same reason cowboy or clown costumes would and that they haven't really internalized expectations about what gender-bending implies for men.