[WikiEN-l] No joy in Maddenville, a parable

[G Donato]

Ron Ritzman wrote:
> Once up a time there was a man named Jimbo King who liked American
> football more then anything else in the world. He liked it so much
> that he created a town for him and anybody else who loved football. He
> named the town "Maddenville" and it was open to anybody who liked to
> play football, watch football, or even just talk about football.
> 
> So people started to move into the town and leagues and teams were
> formed for people of all ages. For playing the game, Jimbo set a few
> basic rules as "pillar rules" such as "the game will be played on a
> field of 100 yards with a regulation football, the games will be
> divided into 4 quarters of 15 minutes, 7 points for a touchdown, 3
> points for a field goal, and a few others. Only the minimum needed to
> keep the game "football". All the other rules were decided by
> consensus.
> 
> For the first few years everything worked fine. One league or another
> had games everyday and the townspeople set up websites, forums, and
> blogs for talking about the games and to agree upon the rules.
> Sometimes there were disagreements over rules like how many downs the
> offence had to move 10 yards or the definition of a forward pass but
> all these were eventually settled by consensus and there was joy in
> Maddenville.
> 
> One day a stranger named "Casey" moved into town who had some new
> ideas about how to play football. He thought it should be played on a
> diamond shaped field with teams of 9 players who would take turns
> hitting a little white ball with a wooden bat and try to run around
> the bases to score. He presented his ideas in the forums and the other
> townspeople politely told him that what he was proposing was not
> "football" and therefore would violate the pillar rules. However,
> Casey was a very stubborn man and wouldn't take "no" for an answer so
> he kept on proposing his ideas in the forums.
> 
> At first the townspeople remained civil about this and tried their
> best to convince Casey that his game wasn't "football" but he kept on
> insisting that the game should be played his way. He would claim that
> many other townspeople agreed with him and supported him in email but
> were afraid to speak up because they didn't want to be banished by the
> "footcabal" which he claimed was a group consisting of Jimbo King and
> a few of his "cronies".
> 
> His next move was to create a "cardboard consensus". He made cardboard
> figures of people and set them up at the fields during the games. They
> all had looping tape players that made them chant "BAT AND BALL" over
> and over again. He then created blogs and forum accounts for all his
> cardboard figures and had them all post support for his ideas.
> However, this all failed to convince the townspeople that he had a
> consensus and he eventually was banished after he was caught with a
> bulldozer trying to plow diamonds into the football fields.
> 
> However, the banishment only enraged Casey and he vowed revenge on the
> town. First he set up a website called "Maddenville Review" and he
> used this to attack Jimbo King and many other townspeople. Then other
> strangers started to show up with their own ideas on how to play
> football. One claimed that football should be played on an indoor
> court with teams of 5 trying to throw a big brown ball into a high
> netted hoop. Another claimed that football should be played by trying
> to kick a big white ball into a rectangular net because that's how the
> rest of the world plays it. All these strangers had their own
> "cardboard consensus" and bulldozers and it got to the point that the
> townspeople were spending more and more time arguing with the
> newcomers and their cardboard figures and repairing the damage done
> with their bulldozers and less time playing football. No longer was
> there joy in Maddenville.
> 
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That is very good. Shame about the lack of happy ending. Now back to 
[[CAT:CSD]] ;)

GDonato