Streetplay Discussions
I remember putting a small…
I too want the “how to’s”…
I too want the “how to’s” on Chinese Jump Rope, thus leading me here to this web site. I just tried playing with my 10 and 7 year old daughters – the cardboard the rope came on had very basic jumps but can remember it being more involved as a child, I believe Catriona from G.B. is the closest on the moves only too hard to understand what she wrote – only remember that the last move was landing on both elastics as Catriona stated. Hopefully one of us ole timers will remember – more Gingseng . . . . P.S. However, I did impress my girls with my jumps
Hi, I remember…
Hi, I remember skully (or wasn’t it skelly?) as the 9 box scenario described above. On Union St., in Crown Heights where I grew up in the 50’s, we used the grooves of the cement pavement boxes as edges of the total skully box. Then we chalked in the smaller numbered boxes. We also used to ‘load’ our bottle caps with melted crayon wax and smooth down the underside of the cap so it would slide true.
Lettuce! The missing word…
I remember making them with…
I remember making them with loose-leaf paper. So there were some extra steps to make the paper square. We would even go as far as to tear off the part of the loose-leaf with the holes first. But that complicated things and made it harder to get a nice square piece as an end product. And yes, we wasted lots of paper as well. 🙂 Lay the loose-leaf paper lengthwise. Take the right-bottom corner and bring it up to the top edge of the paper. Crease the paper well. Now you’re left with a small rectangular piece that you can now crease and tear off. Scissors, ha! Who needed scissors?! You’ll now be left with a peice of paper folded into a right triangle. The 90 degree angle should be to the left. Unfold. Now fold the bottom left corner up to the top right. Crease well. Unfold. You should now have a square piece of paper with creases in the form of an X. Fold all four corners to the center of the X. Turn the paper over so that the smooth, unfolded side is up. Fold all four corners of this “smooth” side toward the center. This is when I would pull out my pen and start writing. If you followed the above step precisely, you should have a square piece of paper with four triangular flaps. Each flap is “split” down the middle. Not literally split, thus the quotes, but the previous folding leaves the triangle “split” into two smaller triangles. You’ll see it when you do it. 🙂 Each smaller triangle gets it’s own number…1-8. Then lift up each flap, draw a line down the middle of it and write your fortunes within the two smaller triangles. Close up all the flaps and turn the paper over. Now the square flaps should be facing you. On each flap, write a color name. Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green. Crease the paper again, half and then half again, following the lay of the square flaps and so that the triangular flaps are on the inside, square flaps on the outside. (This part is hard to verbalize but when you do it I think you’ll see what I mean). Now you’ve got your Paper Fortune Teller! I don’t remember a rhyme… all I remember is being asked to choose a color. The color chosen would be spelled out, each letter prompting the opening and closing of the Fortune Teller. When it stopped, you’d see the numbers inside. This is how we did it: “Pick a color.” “Yellow.” “Y-E-L-L-O-W” “Pick a number.” “3” “1, 2, 3” “Pick another number” “7” Then you’d open up the flap that had the #7 written on it and read it’s corresponding fortune. I don’t know about anyone else, but the more we used the Fortune Teller the more times we would ask, or be asked, to pick a number. That would help keep it fresh a little bit longer. 🙂 But it would inevitably go stale and you’d have to make another one. If you had enough foresight to do it in pencil, then all you’d have to do is erase the old fortunes and write new ones. But those 4 color pens were more fun. 🙂 And girls being girls, you always have to include some kind of mention of how many children you would have when you grew up. It was almost an unwritten rule of Paper Fortune Teller making. 🙂
Most people don’t realize…
Most people don’t realize that all the pigeons in New York City are feral (gone wild) descendants of domesticated pigeons kept on the rooftops as pets, for sport, for show and for food earlier in the century. (Pigeons of the type we know are not native to the U.S.) When you see a flock of wild pigeons spontaneously leap into the air and fly around in circles in a tight group, you are seeing the behavior their ancestors were bred to perform by rooftop pigeon fanciers. The breeders selectively intensified the natural behavior of the birds to fly out from the nest, forage for food, and return to the nest, resulting in specialized strains that can find their home lofts from long distances, covering 500 miles a day (homers), birds that can fly above their loft in circles continuously for 15-20 hours (tipplers, or as they are called only in New York, “tiplets”), aerial acrobats that spin backwards in a series of multiple somersaults (rollers), as well as the garden variety of New York flyers that circle above their rooftops in tight groups, trying to get the neighbor’s birds to defect to them. As a resident of suburban Bayside, Queens in the ’60’s and ’70’s, I kept pigeons, which I was first exposed to by “urban flight” neighbors, who came out of the inner boroughs, bringing their tradition of rooftop pigeon keeping with them. Pigeons, of course, are much maligned, especially for their dirtiness. All I can say is that domesticated pigeons, when fed dry grain and clean water, are clean animals. If you put a pan of water out on a sunny day they will even take a bath. It’s like the difference between an observer’s perception of a homeless person and one who has shelter, clean clothes, and eats good food. My Web site about Bayside in those times is: http://www.covername.net/bayside Dave T.
Ron, we’re in a never-ending…
Ron, we’re in a never-ending struggle to deliver a speedy site that is visually appealing. Most of the images on our pages are fairly small (both in dimension and filesize)… some of the older pages we have are admittedly not as efficient as newer ones (with superior HTML coding techniques that allow the page to display in your browser before the graphics actually load in). Please let us know if a particular area of the site is sluggish for you; we will attempt to optimize it as much as possible! Rest assured that the Streetplay development staff is not sitting in a ultra-wired offices with DSL/T1 lines all over the place. We’re just a bunch of people with using modems, like you. Some of our pages (photo essays) are graphics-only; in a great deal of them the images are typically 200×150 pixels and link to even bigger versions of the picture–they serve essentially as thumbnails, though not as tiny as an icon on a computer desktop. -Hugh McNally Director of development Streetplay.com