My cousin Brad and I grew up together, and we’ve been cutthroat competitive ever since the day I left him in my diaper dust crawling across the kitchen floor. So when he came to visit, I needed to find someplace where we could let our competitive nature shine. Luckily the carnival was in town.
We ambled down the midway, looking for a worthy contest of our skills, when a mime jumped in front of us and started climbing an invisible rope.
“I hate mimes,” Brad said, trying to scare the noiseless nuisance away. “Even though I’m not a violent man, I often want to shoot them.”
“You’re not allowed to unless your gun has a silencer,” I returned, earning a fake laugh from the mime as he scampered away. “Are we going to play some games or what?”
We first hit the tossing-the-ping-pong-ball-into-the-fish-bowl game, where the more you made, the bigger the fish you took home. Five minutes later, Brad held a goldfish in a little Ziploc bag, while I proudly waved the top prize in his face, much to the barracuda’s dismay.
The next game—shooting a water pistol into a clown’s mouth—didn’t last long since we immediately turned the pistols on each other. We were asked to leave by the booth operator, a nose-studded girl covered in tattoos.
“How does she know when she’s done showering?” I asked as we dripped away.
Next we found the ultimate game of one-upsmanship: the high striker. I grabbed the mallet and struck the lever with such force, the puck launched two, possibly two-and-a-quarter, inches up the tower. Always the show-off, Brad nonchalantly slammed the mallet down one handed, sending the puck scorching up the tower until it dented the bell at the top.
“You were always good at causing damage,” I said.
“No kidding, Ace. You should see the damage to my car right now, which is worse since the insurance company is giving me the runaround.”
“Spill it.”
“I was driving down the highway, minding my own business, when a recliner fell from the back of a pickup truck ahead of me. The car in front of me swerves and misses the recliner, but of course I hit it. Now, not only has the insurance company erroneously claimed this was a collision loss, they’re also calling it an at-fault accident. Can you beat that?”
“Actually, I can beat that, depending on the laws of motion.”
Why was Ace bringing physics into the insurance equation? Find out here.
