Mark Hayward Is My Hero

This year Takeshi scored an amazing hook-up for the Indy State contest: it will be held at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.  Sept 22nd, 10-5pm.  More info here.

Also, with a little luck, we will have a trial run for the set-up and scoring of the Ultimate Battle Top Championships of the Universe too.  The actual contest will be at the National Yo-yo Contest in Chico CA in October, but we have to make sure that it’s going to be a good event first.

The Ultimate Battle Top Championship of the Universe will take place for the first time at the National Yo-yo Contest in Chico California this year, and I spent the weekend figuring out some of the details with my friends in Chicago. I was lucky enough to have a gig in Mount Prospect IL the same weekend that Alan Gray and family made their annual pilgrimage to visit the Wolff family in Chicago. Eric Wolff and Alan Gray are superstars in the top-spinning community and they individually made the two best tops in my arsenal.

Alan came up with the idea that if everyone in the contest had the same tops then it would be a contest of skill rather than a contest of who bought the best top. So he and Eric set about making several prototypes of the new battle top.

Alan with the afternoon’s work.

Eric, Alan and I all have slightly different ideas of what this contest should be about. Here are my two goals for the contest:

1. It should be fun. i.e.: Not boring. Sometimes battletop contests get a little slow when you end up just standing around waiting to see who’s top is going to slow down and fall over first.
2. There should be mayhem and destruction. When old-timers come up after my show to talk tops they often tell me about how they used to split tops in two when they would battle as kids. That sounds awesome to me… AND I recently learned the deadly overhand throw.

Eric’s son Woody came up with a good scoring system, and we all fleshed-out the tentative rules:

• Everyone throws at once, and there are multiple rounds.
• You can only score points if your top ends up spinning in the arena.
• If you knock another top out of the arena (or hit it and keep it from entering in mid-air) you get a point.
• If you land the tip of your top on the crown of another top you get two points.
• If you break another top (or break a chunk off) with your top you get 5 points.
• The tops that are spinning in the arena get points according to which ones spin the longest. If three tops are spinning in the arena, the first one to die gets one point. The second one gets two points, and the third one gets three points. If there are 10 tops spinning in the arena, it is the same point progression all the way up to the last one to stop spinning, which gets 10 points. If no one lands in the arena, no points are won.
• Before the first round you decide on the winning total number of points. The number of players times 3 seems like a good recommendation.

This scoring system makes the game exciting, but it basically eliminates my favorite goal. There is very little mayhem and destruction. One possibility is that there could be a separate division that is just about the destruction, but I’m hoping that some of the other top spinners have more ideas. Please leave a comment if you do.

It was a little cooler yesterday so my audiences were a little happier than they have been, and that was good.  No other crazy stuff to report.

The count so far:

• 3 ears of corn at the fair
• 1 giant State Fair brownie (plus some mangled extra brownie bits that one of the other performers scored)
• no deep-fried cheese curds or cream-puffs yet… I’m not sure what my problem is.

I saw the first night of the Shoebox Tour (sponsored by threadless) last night and it was really, really good.  Of course there were the expected first-night minor problems, but all in all it was an amazing show.  I really like the casual feeling that the guys created, and the Japanese guys are incredible.  Do everything you can to get to one of their shows.  I can’t wait to see it again in Pittsburgh.

Behold the Mega-Wagon!!!

I saw these guys last year too.  Maybe next year I’ll have the patience to actually talk to them and find out what the story is here.  That HAS to be heavy and hard to pull.

Today is the start of the Shoebox Tour!  I hung out with the guys last night as they were rehearsing, and I’m REALLY looking forward to the show.   It starts at 7:00 tonight at the Nicolet High School theater here in Milwaukee.  It goes to Madison WI next for a show on Sunday night, and then off to Chicago on August 14th.

Yesterday we finally had a great weather day at the WI State Fair, and happy fair-goers mean happy audiences and better shows.  Last night I hung out with Marcus and we ended up at Kopps for a late-night snack. (see photo below)

We do love our cows in Wisconsin.  Look closely and you can kind of see the one black cow.

That’s right… it’s a giant, living pickle.

It’s been going well so far, with only a little rain. Today is overcast again, but at least it’s cool, and there’s not supposed to be any rain.

The tally so far:

• 2 ears of corn
• 1 giant State Fair brownie

No cream puffs or deep-fried cheese curds yet, but that will come with time. The Shoebox Tour is coming to town in a few days and I plan on making the Japanese guys eat State Fair food until they are sick.

I’ve been playing an online game for a while now called WeeWar. It is so awesome. It’s kind of like the board game Risk. Aside from the fun strategy, and scheming, and destroying, one of the things that makes the game great is that it is turn-based. I’m currently embroiled in furious battle with my brother and my two cousins. What happens is I take my turn, and then the game sends an email to the next person in line that it is their turn. That means that every player can play when it is convenient to them, and the game doesn’t have to steal your soul and ruin your life! If you want to play more, you just start more games. If you don’t have much time for games, you can just be involved in one game with a bunch of players so that it takes a while to get back around to your turn again. This has been great for us since the four of us have very different lives: one who is frequently on the road (me), one with kids, one a newly-wed, and one who lives in the gutter and sleeps in filth.

The game with my brother and cousins has turned into our major form of communication too since there is a little box on the screen where you can have an ongoing chat with the other players. It’s great.

Ok, now here’s the real deal though: after I have recruited 10 players to the game, I achieve Pro status which means that in any game I start, all the players have access to a bunch of additional units (planes, boats) and cooler game maps. So if you want to play WeeWar, you can help me achieve Pro status by using this link to sign up. That way you will be counted as a player I have recruited! Then once I get Pro staus I would be glad to invite you to a game with all the additional units. Just remind me ;)

I should point out though, that you will need some patience. It turns out that WeeWar is so popular that they have had trouble keeping up with the huge demand, so there are times that the site goes down, and they are still fine-tuning the recent upgrades. I think they will get it all worked out soon.

You’d think that since I have six games going right now it would be my turn in one of them… but no.  I guess I just have to get invited to more games.

Yes, it’s true.  Just three days until Lenore and I move to Pittsburgh.  There is a lot of work yet to be done and I am tired.  Part of the tiredness might have to do with the fact that I drove almost 300 miles today, and it is currently 1:27 am.

Today was the last day of the International Jugglers Association Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was awesome. If you juggle you HAVE to go to an IJA festival. It’s just amazing. The Saturday night public show may have been the best show I’ve ever seen. Check out Get The Shoe, they totally stole the show. After saying my goodbyes to my friends I headed up to Elkin to visit my Uncle Bill. He lives way out of town in a nice log home that he built when he retired, and in the basement he has a giant train set that he is building. It’s awesome.

It has two gauges of track so he can run the two different size trains that met up in a town in Colorado back at the end of the steam locomotive era. Uncle Bill showed me a bunch of the things he’s working on, and I even got to drive a train. The last time I was here none of the trains were running yet, so it was great to see them in action. He even has digital trains that you can run with a wireless remote control, and they have sound! I was worried that the sound might be dumb, but was actually really high quality and added a lot. I can’t wait until the next time I get to come here.