Saturday!

Somewhere, in my effects… probably in a box somewhere (marked “stuff I can’t yet bring myself to throw away”)… there is a little mirror with a print of what was then the lineup of Van Halen over it. It’s just the right size for a school locker. I want to say that it was post-5150 but pre-OU812 which would mean that I won it in the summer of 1986 or 1987.

I won it at the carnival.

It was one of those games where you throw pay a buck to throw 3 dull darts at under-inflated balloons and get the opportunity to win a novelty worth less than a quarter.

So many memories.

I think I’ve reached the point where, when I finally go through that box, I can throw this mirror away.

My favorite carnival games were the dart-throwing one, the crossbow-firing one (I almost won that one, once! The crease created by the puncture made its way to the white paper outside of the target, though, and the man told me that my shot didn’t count), and the pingpong ball in the fishbowl one.

Though, now that I think about it, that last one has some ethical issues that never occurred to me before.

In any case, we’re going to the fair tonight and part of that is usually to walk through the midway and be dazzled by the lights and the cacophony and, this time, *NOT* drop however-many-dollars on items that probably cost less than a tenth of what we paid for them.

And it’s not like they’re going to have a mirror with the Gary Cherone version of Van Halen printed on it.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]