{"id":1841,"date":"2004-03-04T10:36:29","date_gmt":"2004-03-04T15:36:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/04\/1841.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:23","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:23","slug":"book-report-a-kentish-lad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/04\/book-report-a-kentish-lad\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: A Kentish Lad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger was familiar with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/comedy\/guide\/talent\/m\/muir_frank.shtml\">Frank Muir<\/a> from the radio shows My Word! and particularly My Music. It was from listening to My Music, in fact, that I developed my concept of the Maximum Fun Quotient.\n<p>Paraphrased bit I actually heard on My Music:\n<br>Chairman: [lengthy and obscure question, not about Beethoven]\n<br>Panelist: I don&#8217;t know the answer to that, but I do know an amusing story about Beethoven. [tells joke about Beethoven in the afterlife]\n<br>Chairman: I&#8217;m afraid I can only give you half credit for that.\n<p>When groups of friends get together to play games, their goal is maximum fun. In most cases, accepting amusing stories about Beethoven for half credit will not maximize fun (if only because the stories aren&#8217;t all that amusing). If you are playing Settlers, or Outpost, or poker, waiving rules will result in frustration, not fun. If you are playing Word-O-Rama, or Botticelli, or charades much will depend on who you are playing with, and you can test out various types of rules (and lack thereof) to see which work best with your group. Those sets will tend to be specific not only to a group of people, but to a time and place; a group which will happily play a cutthroat and fierce game of Bullshit at nine in the evening may well play a goofy, giggling one at two in the morning, or vice versa. A group may well find taunting and recrimination, scorn and derision, and gloating to be loads of fun; trying to &#8216;cure&#8217; them of this will lower their MFQ. Some groups will enjoy taking a lot of time to haggle over a particular interpretation of a rule, while others will hate that and just want to decide something and keep playing. It&#8217;s good idea to know which you like, before spending all that time haggling.\n<p>The trick, of course, is to remember the MFQ all the time, when picking which game to play, when deciding rule questions, when actually playing, and when discussing the game afterwards. To pay as much attention to whether people are having fun as to the score. To know whether it&#8217;s a good time for that amusing story about Beethoven.\n<p>Oh, and <I>A Kentish Lad: The Autobiography of Frank Muir<\/I> (London: Corgi Books 1997) is an entertaining memoir of a fascinating life.\n<p>Redintegro Iraq,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Your Humble Blogger was familiar with Frank Muir from the radio shows My Word! and particularly My Music. It was from listening to My Music, in fact, that I developed my concept of the Maximum Fun Quotient. Paraphrased bit I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1841"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16938,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841\/revisions\/16938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}