quarter up

I'm a day behind on this, and X didn't find the story very interesting, but I'll pass it along, regardless. If you hail from the the Plains, Great Midwest, or varying portions of I-95 and Pennsylvania then you know from Skee Ball. We aren't talking about Chuckie Cheese or little kids-disco-light 'Skee Ball'; this is bowling alley, old-time arcade, and midway Skee Ball. I remember long ago when my brother and his friend (Dave or Dan?) played an entire day of Skee Ball at Peony Park in Omaha so they'd have enough tickets to buy eight, stemmed Budweiser glasses - that was big time, but that's not the point.

On my way home from the Caps game on Thursday night there was a couple sitting in the seat in front of me on the Metro and she pulls out her iPhone and starts to play electronic Skee Ball. (If you've ridden the Metro you know that anything going on in the seat in front of you is perfectly visible, especially when they are drunk and gabbing about their iPhone.) She'd only been playing Skee Ball for a few seconds before I knew she wasn't from any of the areas listed above. She's rolling her balls up the middle of the run...as if that's the professional method. I was tempted to remove my headphones and set her straight: in Skee Ball, if you want to properly impress the crowd, you'll need to bank your shots mid-bumper and then sit back and tally tickets. If you want to hang anything near 350-400 points you'll never get there going straight. It was almost unbearable.

Then again, maybe she didn't care.

t