Time Warp

Let's get it started, in here.

Right now it looks like my blog is suffering from some weird time warp, as what I'm about to post about happened exactly a week ago.

And it was exactly a week ago when I got to help celebrate the Birthday of my good (but blogless) friend Karen. A group of us gathered at her place and played what I'd describe as half a game of Balderdash. I'd read an article that mentioned Balderdash in passing only a couple of days before, so to be sitting there playing it was quite exciting. Here's a quick summary.

Each round has a player in charge, who picks a category (such as a acronyms, dates, strange words or 'famous' people) from a card which has 6 different words and definitions on it. The leader of the round writes down the 'real' definition of the word (or event, acronym, person etc.) and the other players have to each write down what they think the definition is. All the definitions are then shuffled together and read out to all the players, who have to guess which is the truthful one. Points are awarded for guessing the truthful one, or having another player guess your 'fake' definition.

While it was a game I thoroughly enjoyed, to say I didn't do very well would be a supreme understatement. You have to move 26 spaces (you moved when you score points) to win the game and we stopped it when one of the players was well over 15 spaces in. At that stage I'd moved only a single square. Perhaps now some of my definitions seem quite fake, such as that S.Y.B.F stood for Southern Youth Baptist Fellowship, or that on some date in 1956 some people finished building the biggest jukebox ever made, holding 5000 songs, but at the time they seemed quite plausible.

I'd really recommend to any group looking for a change from the usual Scrabble, Taboo and Trivial Pursuit.

Let me pose my own balderdash for you here though, comment with what you think the correct answer is (no cheating on google or wiki!)

Besides the fact that August the 15th is the day after my Birthday, what happened on August 15th 1945?

• The first microscope was invented
• Korea became an independent country
• Agrippina Vaganova published a book Vaganova method ballet technique
• Two of Saturn's moons, Janus and Epimetheus were first observed
• The first book in what would become the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy is released

Now remember what I said, no cheating!