World Marbles Challenge

Akeem “The Thumb” Hassan, this year’s favorite

Yes indeed, sports fans, the 47th  World Marbles Challenge starts tomorrow in Kotzebue, Alaska and ends in Durban, South Africa. This course shall be quite the challenge for the globe’s top marbleists with: freezing blizzards, snow blindness, sheer icy cliffs, thirst, starvation, encounters with the Yukon’s very few remaining mastodons, rapids, rush hour in Seattle, cars passing them at 90 miles per hour on freeways, lutefisk vendors, border walls, Black Friday sales, jungle diseases, boa constrictors, gangs of apes, the New York Times(tm) sunday crossword, poisonous snakes, terrorists, pandemics, kidnappers, blow darts, storms in the Atlantic Ocean, crossing the Atlantic in tiny rafts purchased by collecting labels from Ovaltine jars, collisions with oil tankers millions of times larger than the tiny rafts, fishing for fish and pulling up sharks and killer whales, bicycle couriers, more jungles, traversing lands bloodied by unrelenting civil war, Walmart(tm) parking lots, carrying the tons of water needed to cross the Sahara dessert, salesmen, plunging down the world’s greatest waterfalls, poisonous spiders, scorpions,getting eating by crocodiles, getting crushed by hippos, lack of internet connection, and murderous gangs.

Then the Marbles Challenge gets difficult. It’s no picnic moving your marble forward twelve hours a day for six months. What if you lose your shooter? What if you get thumb-tunnel syndrome? It’s best not to dwell on this.

Go luck marbleists! May this be the year that one of you crosses the finish line.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.