Ten Pin Bowling

(Written as part of the Force the Door blog: http://forcethedoor.blogspot.com.au/)

Cas

Ten Pin Bowling
Attempted 26th April 2010

Bowling is awesome, but there is one thing I can’t quite hack about it… the fungus.
The fungus in the shoes, the fungus in the little finger holes of the balls, the fungus fills everything. Get hung up on the fungus and your game disintegrates into a laughable gutter smashing, no pin hitting affair.

We booked the lane, got the shoes (which looked smashing I may say, 50s retro meets Ronald MacDonald) and chose a ball each. Having not played in any serious capacity I chose a number 8, my favourite number. What do the numbers mean? They certainly weren’t finger sizes. I was playing with the same ball as the 9 year old in the next lane and I don’t think I have freakishly small carnie hands.

I was doing “OK”. I was hitting the occasional pin. Then 2 goes into the first round we had a technical malfunction and I was only awarded 3 pins for my 9 that I knocked down. Also the balls got stuck at the end and the pin-mover-thingy didn’t work. So the attendant came and sorted it all out via the computer. Mandy tried to flirt with him and get some extra points added to her total (cheat). Mandy wasn’t doing to well and I am sure she will tell you the reasons why in her part of this blog…cough.

So we were back into the swing of things, literally. I mean swinging the ball across our bodies, from front to back, etc. I don’t think any of us had a consistent technique. Mandy was yelling some choice words on her turns. I am sure the children attending the Batman themed party a few lanes down all went home with bleeding ears. Oh well, its an “early education” as Mandy put it. We were fast becoming the queens of the gutter ball and I was seriously considering asking the attendance to raise the gutter blockers. That wouldn’t be too humiliating, surely?

However, a miracle then occurred. We’ll a miracle of the bowling kind. I didn’t see The Big Guy or anything. We started the second round and the computer wigged out again and started awarding every player a minimum of 9 points. Regardless of whether or not you hit anything your first turn was a 9 pointer. This meant that you only had to achieve a spare, so you only had to hit 1 pin. This made it more interesting. We had the opportunity to get 10 on every turn, AWESOME!

Can you believe that I couldn’t even achieve that?

Mandy got her groove back and started developing a mean technique. Her expletives went down and her score went up. We did consider calling the attendant to fix the issue, for about half a second. The final results for Round 2 were Mandy 144, Ness 102 and Cas 96. (Round 1 scores were just too devastating to keep)

Do I see myself buying a pair of the funky shoes and joining a bowling club? Ummm no.


Mandy

Bowling, well what can I say another outing I totally sucked at. Thanks Cas for not posting round one as it was more than devastating for myself, let’s just say I was almost ready to go home and hurt myself, very embarrassing to say the least

Anyway I have worked something out about that game, skill really doesn’t come into it well not for me anyway, I tried numerous tactics over those two games to improve my score from untucking my t shirt, untying my hair, changing my shoe size and after all this and the yelling and swearing I did at the ball and pins the oddest thing is I totally blitzed it by the end of the second game – go figure!!