A Role Reversal

by Crazy Ivan

First let me apologize for the long hiatus between blog entries.  I suppose I underestimated the toll that this Pigeon Forge assignment would take on my energy and thought I'd be able to do a better job keeping this blog up to date.  As it stands, I've gone from blogging two or three times a day to blogging five or six times a week, and I feel that I owe our loyal readers a little more than that.

I'm the late guy in today and I have about 8 minutes before I have to hop in the car and head in, but I did want to take a few seconds to share a really fun moment in my day yesterday.

In places like Dollywood, our sales strategy is pretty simple; get the Myachi in the customers hand.  We spend much of our day standing at the fringes of the passing crowd and yelling "You're in!  Back of the hand!" before chucking a Myachi at some unsuspecting tourist.  Sometimes they catch it and toss it back, sometimes they miss it altogether and take another try and quite often they catch it, look at it and say "what is this thing?"

Myachi Man has aptly described this method as "Myachi Bombs Away" and it's amazingly effective in the right crowd.  A bunch of people all out to have fun all day at the amusement park is exactly the right type of crowd for this and it's worked wonders in the past and continues to work well today.

But yesterday I had a cool experience that I've oddly never had before.  As I'm standing near the booth and tossing people in, an eight year old kid that I'd played with earlier in the day runs up.  He'd already bought a Red Shredder and it was on his hand and in the ready position.

"You're in!  Back of the hand!" he calls out as he approaches.  I pocket my Hound's Tooth quickly, he tosses me in and I toss his Myachi back.  And then he runs off.

I turned to Rush and said, "Bro, I just got tossed in..."

After reading back over that, I suppose it's far more remarkable from the shoes of a Myachi Master, but it was the first time in my 8 years with Myachi that I ever had a kid toss me in a Myachi.  It's always the other way around.

Now that I look at it from the other perspective, I can see why our method is so effective.  Somebody tossed me a Myachi yesterday that I wasn't expecting and it was the highpoint of my day.

So that's all I have time to write now.  I've got to grab Bones and get to work.  I promise to write a longer and more relevant blog tonight.  It'll have pictures, video and it will introduce you to a Myachi Game that I've never before written about on this blog.  Incidentally, it's one of my favorite Myachi games and might be the most martial-arts relevant game that we play.