So I mentioned yesterday that Ian was in town. Turned out he was finished by lunchtime, so I cooked up some spag bol and he brought around some fancy garlic bread and we were ready to roll.
Not even any hacking today, but that wasn't part of the plan. We played some Finska, which is closely related (made by the same company) to Kubb, which really "took the Australian footbag community by storm" when Copey described it as "hitting sticks with other sticks".
Here are a couple of Kubb experts, Jamie took this photo. Would be good to get him out and kicking again. He could bring back the bike shorts. That's got to be up there with the most memorable moments in Australian footbag history....
Anyway, this other game is based around numbers, you need to get up to 50 points. If you knock down more than one, you just get that number (ie 3 pins down, 3 points). If you just knock down an individual, you get that amount of points. If you get more than 50, you reset to 25.
Anyway, I won the first game with a fluke shot. I needed 11 for victory, and decided that the 11 was to close to the other pegs. So I was just going to go in that area and try to knock down three or four. My shot veered to the left, bumped the 11 and knocked it down for the victory.
Ian got the second game then I was looking pretty good for the decided. I had been trying to knock down three pins together, which would have given me victory. But if you miss three times in a row, you lose. So I had the 1 close by, I aimed for that, but knocked over another. That meant on my next turn, I could only hit the one. That didn't work out, so I went back down to 25, and eventually Ian won the decided but only just.
Also, I knocked over the gnome in the background. Not worth any points, but worth noting. At least I didn't knock his head off, as they're not ours.
I read two very interesting blogs today. Nothing to do with footbag, more about the world. I have a friend, an English bloke I met in Chile, who is currently in the Ukraine.
http://thefrontierukraine.blogspot.com.au/ He was already filming a documentary over there and I guess now there's a lot more interest in it after the plane being shot out of the sky. Still pretty unbelievable that.
For a little less grotesque imagery, this is a writeup of World Cup travels from a friend from Chile. He's a guy from the US, who has been very involved in the startup scene for a few years. He's the "darling" of Start-Up Chile and has recently created his own fund with a few other blokes.
http://www.nathanlustig.com/2014/07/09/ ... azil-2014/
Anyway, this is closer to my mental picture, because the thought of going to a warzone does not appeal to me. Not for journalism, not to "go check it out", and definitely not to get shot by some deflected piece of shrapnel. It's terrible to think about being shot out of the sky, because so many of us fly, and you don't expect to be a target of a missile launcher when you're on a commercial jet just chugging along.
http://www.nathanlustig.com/2014/07/09/ ... azil-2014/
Anyway, back to the other blog, it's about going to the world cup. So this bloke Nathan, he went to maybe ten games. Some of them he was going day after day, flying, taxis, rental cars, as well as changing shirts for the new teams. It sounded exhausting, and it sounded like everywhere things could have gone oh-so-wrong.
But he seemed to have worked it out and not really had any disasters, despite a few calls that could have gone either way.
Anyway, each of those blogs got me thinking quite a bit about writing, about why people read blogs and what to put in blogs. Both of these are "hot news topics" that in general would attract traffic.
In footbag, we're already a very small target audience, so it's got to be something quite reasonable to really capture the attention.
I guess I should talk about my session briefly. I played again in my "shred shed" and came very close to hitting ripped warrior>matador. I believe I hit full symposium tap for the first time, though I would like to get it on video and check that out.
There have been some interesting comments on blogs, Facebook and in conversations that I've had in recent times. A lot about what should and must be done for footbag. The funny thing is that there is no answer to that, and that's the beauty of a "freestyle" sport, is that you can do whatever you want.
On a completely different topic. Can't believe that Berlin Worlds were five years ago. That week, and whole trip, which lasted around a month, remains one of the best times I've had in my life.
On to a different topic, I saw this today from Ted Fritsch, making some more noise. 
80 tiltless
So wicked how you can just walk around and see kangaroos. Jealous. All we have close to that is deer. Lame. I did a research paper in college where I researched all about the urban kangaroo problem in Canberra. Crazy stuff. Very eye-opening stuff.