Fun With Bowling Alleys

I went to a bowling alley today.  I didn't bowl, but I did watch the other people who were there bowling, which is twice as fun, with none of the painful humiliation of throwing gutter ball after gutter ball after gutter ball.

Not that I've ever done that.

...

Well, anyway...

So, I was at the bowling alley watching my dad and my siblings bowl.  It was quite entertaining.  Sister A bowled using a technique that I will henceforth refer to as "Kamikaze Slam."  She would hobble up to the lane (she hobbled because she has a broken foot, so now I call her "Chief."  If you cannot figure out why I call her Chief, I am disappointed in you.  Here is a hint:  Think Disney *coughthefoxandthehoundcough*)  after she had finished hobbling up to the lane, she would let go of the ball, which would then fly into the air and land on the lane in a bowling ball sneak attack.  Then it would roll down the lane, but it would usually end up in the gutter before it reached the pins.

Sister B used a technique that I like to call "Little Granny Ker-plunk."  She would walk up to the lane, stop, then toss the ball into the air (using both hands, mind you.)  The ball would land on the lane and proceed to meander down towards the pins.  Her strategy made me think that she thought that the pins would spook if approached too hastily, so she was trying to lull them into a false sense of security by making her ball go slower than an ailing slug.

My brother, on the other hand, used a technique very similar to the one that I used to use when I bowled.  I call it "Bumper Pinball."  In this technique, the player goes up to the lane, with his or her ball in hand.  With the bumpers in their correct position, completely blocking the gutters, the player then takes the ball and rolls it on a diagonal toward the bumper.  The ball then rolls back and forth between the two bumpers, eventually reaching the pins (hopefully knocking down more pins than a more traditional technique would.)  As ridiculous as this seems, this technique is actually highly effective, and my brother used it to beat everyone in my family.

Ooh!  Another fun thing about that bowling alley:  it had a Lord of the Rings pinball machine.  I have a picture of it on my phone, but I can't take pictures from my phone and put them on the computer and it's all blurry anyway so it wouldn't really be worth it and this is a really long run-on sentence and I should stop now.