Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Another Reagan Crime Uncovered

He traumatized the MIT tiddlywinks community:

There's more to tiddlywinks than flipping small discs into a little pot. There's a complex lexicon (to "nurdle" is to "shoot a wink too close to the pot to be pottable or otherwise useful"), 31 categories of official rules, a journal ("Winking World") and newsletter ("Newswink") and lively trans-Atlantic competition between the Brits and the Yanks, their two countries the last still containing avid winkers.

One of those is Larry Kahn, widely regarded as one of the best in the world. The mantelpiece in the rec room of his Vienna, Va., home holds 44 tiddlywinks trophies. He was world champion in 2001, and featured in Sports Illustrated in 1995.

....Serious tournaments began at Cambridge University in England in 1955. The U.S. game coalesced at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s and '70s.
Most of today's active players are MIT graduates of the 1970s....


Kahn frets over the outlook for the sport. MIT, once the American bastion of tiddlywinks, no longer has a club. Several dozen Americans participate in tournaments, instead of several hundred decades ago.

"I blame (President) Reagan," Kahn said. "The kids then got worried about getting jobs and stopped being frivolous. Then they got into computer games."

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