Bowling — Balling Up the Score
Clare Briggs
Clare Briggs is a famous cartoonist who lived from 1875 to 1930. Poems by Wilbur Nesbitt.
Features
Hot Posts
Devcat Reports
Due to problems related to a WordPress update, the site's layout had to be moderately altered. Some of the changes are temporary.
Recent Comments
on Open Mic for the week of 3/24/25Kennedy pushes out top Vaccine doc at FDA, I bet we are about a year away from vaccine bans: https:/…
on Weekend Plans Post: Pantherine VandalsDate Nite With Maribou was "Wicked". I'd never seen it, never seen the musical, never heard the soun…
on Open Mic for the week of 3/24/25Is that before or after he tries to migrate Social Security off its legacy systems and onto newer on…
on Open Mic for the week of 3/24/25I don't see even the slightest connection to George Floyd. All reviews say the movie is a trainwreck…
on Open Mic for the week of 3/24/25One full of and run by f*cking idiots.
Comics
-
March 28, 2025
-
They’re Acting Queer in Cleveland
March 27, 2025
-
A Loaf of Bread, a Container of Milk, and a Stick of Butter
March 26, 2025
-
Bowling — Balling Up the Score
March 25, 2025
More Comments
on Weekend Plans Post: Pantherine Vandalson Open Mic for the week of 3/24/25
on Open Mic for the week of 3/24/25
My son was a high school bowler who graduated in 2014. Even then automatic scoring had taken its toll on the ability to keep score.Report
Back during 1978-1982 I was in a Bell Labs bowling league. After enough beer, Labs’ bowlers picked arguments with the automatic scoring machines’ addition. The machines were never wrong at adding. You did have to keep an eye on them because they occasionally got the pin count wrong.Report
The very idea that bowling existed pre-automation blows my mind. I don’t like bowling much to begin with but that the game even existed when they would have to put the pins back up by hand and count the scores manually? *mind blown* I always assumed bowling only came about once machines existed to run the game for you- like frogger.Report
My grandparents had a joke book or two on the various bookshelves in the house and one of them had a bunch of jokes about the importance of tipping one’s pin boy.
Checking the intertubes… automated pin setters date back to the late 40s?!?
A couple of times, we went bowling in the 70s and I remember mom and dad talking about how great the new automatic scoring was.
A few years later, I could swear that we had a bowling section in math class in 3rd or 4th grade.Report
Okay automated pin setters make a lot of sense- could you imagine paying for pin boys?Report
The options before auto-setters:
1. Rent a pin boy
2. Do it yourself
You’d only have to do it yourself for two frames before giving the pin boy a dime.Report
Heh, my “enjoyment” of bowling is so marginal it’d easily tip it into a “nope, never wanna do it no matter how good the company is” mindset.Report
When I was a kid, you still had to keep scores manually at all the lanes we went to, but there were usually lights at the end of the lane to indicate which pins were up and which were down. Scoring was usually on a transparency that projected over the scoring table /ball return where most lanes now have their flat screens with the score and the strike spare gutter ball animations.Report
Like an overhead projector? That you’d write on with erasable marker? That’s just nuts! The past really is another country.
Also… what is with those various strike-spare animations? They are different at various alleys and a lot of them seem like they came right out of a crack hallucination.Report
Bell Labs was way ahead of Bellerose Lanes (Queens, NY) in that era. I remember the grease pencils and transparent score sheets that were projected above each lane for my parents League Night.
Did your automated scoring system look like the one Yogi Berra was selling in this commercial?
https://youtu.be/FFjWXOYVtbU?si=OI9A3ZZ1FW7qITgrReport