(Roughly) Daily

…While the game dates back to B.C. times and clubs of serious Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) players have existed quietly for decades, a tournament in 2002 launched RPS on its path to being a sport that could compete with Darts, Poker, and Scrabble for ESPN airtime.  

In 2002, two brothers, Douglas and Graham Walker, rented a bar and held the first Rock Paper Scissors “world championship” in Toronto. Douglas says they “would have been happy if 25 [or] 30 of [their] friends came to drink beer and play for a big prize.” To their surprise, hundreds of people showed up. The next year, major media outlets like CNN covered the tournament. In 2006, Bud Light sponsored a tournament and offered a $50,000 cash prize…

More at “Inside the World of Professional Rock Paper Scissors.”

Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitates lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock, and as it always has, rock crushes scissors.

• Sheldon, “The Lizard-Spock Expansion” (Season 2, Episode 8), The Big Band Theory

* description of the Toronto professional Rock Paper Scissors tournament

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As we prepare to throw down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” was copyrighted by Albert Von Tilzer‘s York Music Company.  Vaudevillian Jack Norworth (who wrote over 2,500 songs during his career, including “Shine On, Harvest Moon”) had scribbled the lyrics on scraps of paper during a subway ride; Von Tilzer added the music.  Neither man had ever attended a baseball game.  Nonetheless, their tune (with lyrics revised by Norworth in 1927) has become the unofficial anthem of North American baseball, traditionally sung during the the seventh inning stretch.

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