Every once in a while I get an angry email from someone who stumbles across this old Boing Boing post about the scissor bucket carny game. The emailer tells me that carny games aren't rigged and that the games are purely skill-based. — Read the rest

Yesterday I posted some photos of an old carnival game that belongs to a woman named Marsee who works at O'Reilly. She inherited it from her grandfather, who was a carny and owned the recieved the game as a gift, but never used it. — Read the rest

This weekend I looked at a ball toss carnival game from the 1930s. It belongs to a woman who works at O'Reilly (publishers of Make). She got it from her grandfather who used it in carnivals in the 1930s and 1940s. — Read the rest

We've all heard "Underwater Basket Weaving" used as a synonym for easy, impractical college courses. Turns out that underwater basket weaving is challenging, rewarding, and offered by at least two American universities: UCSD, and Saint Joseph's College Indiana. So whence the joke about UBW? — Read the rest