Puzzle Description:

...Ball. Remember these? If you didn't keep an eye on where they were headed, you could easily lose them.

#1: Kristen Vognild (kristen) on Oct 17, 2021

okay, I'm gonna forgive the tall format, this time. ^_^

I wonder why they didn't sole basketball shoes with whatever superballs were made of... (I'm picturing Flubber)

Kristen, what's the issue with tall format? Unless it's the constant scrolling up and down to read the clues? Sorry for that, but the image demanded it.
Besmirched Tea, I would have bought superball shoes, but the landings would have been tough.

I had one! So much fun.

That's it exactly, Gregg! I moved the clues down to the bottom and started there. It just makes the solve more tedious. I can think of three puzzles (including this one) that warranted a tall format. One was a falling leaf, and the other was a giraffe neck.

I agree, Bananas. I recall bouncing one as hard as I could in the grade school playground, losing track of it and then wandering around an adjacent field trying to find it.
Yes, Kristen, tedious is the word. I understand your point.

Super balls were the best! We occasionally played baseball with one, and this skinny kid used to feel like Harmon Killebrew, belting it a mile.

We'd run out of balls pretty quickly ...

Somewhere there's a bunch of them, missing their kids

It's a great puzzle. I do agree with Kristen that the format is a bit tedious but warranted in this case.

In Jr/Sr high school, a friend bounced a large super ball (maybe the size of a baseball) hard in the multi-purpose room to see if he could get it to hit the high ceiling. After a number of attempts, he succeeded -- kind of. It hit one of the covers of the fluorescent light fixtures, went through, and got trapped! For years, we would periodically look up and see the fluorescent yellow blob up there, wondering if anybody else ever noticed.

Years later, we were setting up for a concert, and a different friend decided we should try to extract it. He was really tall, but even when standing on a chair on top of a table and stretching with a long broom handle, could barely reach. He managed to nudge the light cover enough to get the ball to roll to the hole it made on the way in, and out it came!

So what do you think happened next? Of course, he decided to bounce it hard again, to try to hit the ceiling. And guess what happened? Not what we expected -- the super ball shattered, having been embrittled by time, heat, and light. Chunks of super ball went everywhere!

Thanks for sharing your super ball story, Steven. It did not go gentle into that good night.

That's a great story, Steven. There's a moral in it somewhere... um... maybe. Don't know what.

Goto next topic

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