the purefinder - archives - Sat, 2004-08-21
« lead mine, Buckden Pike | Main | Bob Mould says some interesting stuff »August 21, 2004
lengtheners
I try not to play games on my computer.
I try to avoid them because I am prone to compulsion and there is every probability that I can easily waste weeks playing freecell, or pinball or tetris. One of the reasons I took the plunge to using a Linuc solely was that I had succumbed to Championship Manager again and I decided that effective preventative action was required to avoid the summer disappearing.
Today, whilst looking for a calculator in my KDE menu, I noticed, in the games section, that I had (L)Breakout. I should have known that it was there - it is only a couple of weeks since I chose to install it.
I'm sure that you know that the game requires you to dexterously control a paddle with which you direct a ball and thus demolish 'walls' by destroying/dislodging their constituent bricks. In the particular version I was playing, some of the bricks allow you to collect bonuses, points and extra powers if you interupt their fall with your paddle.
One of the bonuses which the falling bricks can provide is to extend your paddle, thus making it easier to keep the ball in play.
I realised, as I played the game for a while and began to reliably interpret the symbols on the falling bricks, that I was internally referring to the paddle extending bonus bricks as 'lengtheners' - a word from the Northern Ireland vernacular I hear in my head.
If this was a film we would now fade to a scene in a classroom in a boys school in Omagh in 1978.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The boys, who were approximately twelve, were talking about the pornographic magazines they had managed to see; specifically they were talking about the advertisements the magazines contained - 'Spanish Fly', 'stimulators' and 'frenchies' were all under discussion. One boy had seen an advertisement for 'lengtheners' - condoms with a supplementary penis tip inside to extend one's lad.
I was one of the other boys who were reduced to tears of laughter by the boy's attempts to describe the 'lengtheners'.
Twenty six years later, I still am.
Posted by padraig at August 21, 2004 11:45 PM