Archive for the 'Quiet Ball' Category

My lovely girlfriend says that this is one of her favorite Angriest Rice Cookers. She says it’s because of the “human” line in the last panel–she imagines that something very similar to this could happen with us and some of our old roommates and friends.

I think she’s right. Our group of friends had several people with an odd combination of being really competitive but without necessarily much interest in “rulesy” competitions. We played regular games too–and could become competitive about them. Also old video games–our Paperboy games could be intense. But they would also get competitive about simpler games, like the old standby “throw the ball around the dorm room.” It was kind of a self-defeating exercise for those competitive souls. “Throw the ball around the dorm room” isn’t a game you can win exactly, although you certainly can lose. And so can your dorm room.

One of the greatest creations of this competitive spirit was a game we liked to call “quiet ball.” There was a ball sitting in the dorm room of two of my best friends freshman year of college. It was like one of those balls you find in a giant bin filled with balls in a supermarket–an all-purpose play ball. But this ball made kind of a strange sound when you caught it. So when my two competitive friends threw it back and forth, they quickly started to compete as to who could make the least noise when catching it. “Quiet ball” was born.

We spent a lot of time playing quiet ball, both with that particular ball and with others. One time, we even grabbed a ball out of a bin in our local Top Foods and started playing right in the aisle. That is, until my aforementioned lovely girlfriend decided to throw the ball really hard at my nose. That was not very fun.

So, anyway, I guess my girlfriend sees something of herself in this comic. Take that as you will.

EDIT: I just was re-watching an episode of Arrested Development and realized that the phrasing of the question in the first panel is a near-verbatim lift from an ethics essay topic that George Michael has in one episode. I’m not entirely sure whether that was subconscious or intentional. Either way seems more or less plausible.

Read the rest of this entry »