No new updates
As you can probably tell, I’ve been MIA for the past week or so. Miss Possible and I have been on vacation this past week, touring the beautiful California Coast with her family. Regularly scheduled updates should start back up next week..
Mrs. Larby
I’ll help today Brandon!!! Here’s something you can post if you’d like.
This past weekend, the Captain and I were blessed with a visit from our Italian relatives from Lugano, Italy. It was very exciting for me to introduce Larry to my relatives from the motherland. We are a new generation of Italian Americans connecting with our foreign relatives and I always try and stress the importance of keeping connections alive with our counterparts abroad. The relatives that visited with us this past weekend were cousins from my Mother’s side. Next week we get a visit from the cousins on my Father’s side who will come to us from Verona, Italy. This is a very rare occurrence…to have two sets of relatives coming in one year! All together, my parents get to play tour guide for three whole weeks this summer.
When the relatives come to America, there is a long list of things they like to do:
1) Shopping - anywhere they sell Levis is a must!
2) Open top New York City bus tour
3) Broadway show
4) Yankees or Mets game
5) The Jersey Shore and Atlantic City
6) Either Niagara Falls or Washington DC (in the case of this summer, my parents are taking one set of relatives to Washington, DC and the other set to Niagara Falls
7) Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty
8) Central Park and the Museum of Natural History
Yes, it is a very exciting few weeks. One new thing we attempted to do this past weekend was to try and teach them to play Whiffle Ball. They very loosely understand the concept of baseball so we thought as a good prequel to our Mets game this week we would engage my cousins in a game of Whiffle Ball. For starters, Mr. Larby and I very quickly discovered that the ability to hold a baseball bat (or yellow plastic whiffle ball bat) is as second nature to us Americans as dribbling a soccer ball is to the Italians. No matter how hard we tried to explain the stance, feet and hand position, or even the motion swinging the bat, it looked like they were trying to chop wood…literally!
Then came the explanation and attempted translation of ‘whiffle’ to these non- english speaking folks. We spelled ‘whiffle’ in English, French and Italian…they never heard of the word before. We attempted to pronounce it as ‘whiffolo’…we got a lot of blank looks. We tried to tell them that the holes in the ball were actually called whiffle’s…they didn’t accept that. Then one of my American cousins explained that the holes in the ball created a whistle when the ball was in flight and so we got the name ‘whiffle’. They accepted that, albeit dubiously. However, the interaction left the rest of us questioning the true history of Whiffle Ball.
This is what I found; I hope you find it interesting:
For starters, I have been spelling it wrong…it is actually spelled WIFFLE BALL.
Wiffleball is a variation of the sport of baseball designed for indoor or outdoor play in confined areas. “Wiffle” is a registered trademark of The Wiffle Ball, Inc. It is played using a perforated plastic ball and a long, plastic (typically yellow) bat, generally on a triangular playing field.
The Wiffle ball was invented by David N. Mullany of Fairfield, Connecticut in 1953[1] when he designed a ball that curved easily for his 12-year old son. It was named when his son and his friends would refer to a strikeout as a “wiff” (actually whiff). A classic Wiffle ball is about the same size as a regulation baseball and is hollow plastic no more than 1/8th of an inch thick. One hemisphere is perforated with eight 3/4″ inch oblong holes, with a solid second hemisphere. This construction allows pitchers to throw a tremendous variety and size of curveballs. Wiffle balls are typically packaged with a hollow, hard plastic, yellow bat that measures 30 inches in length and about 1.25 inches in diameter.
The game of wiffleball (also whiffleball), which sprung from the invention of the popular Wiffle ball, became immensely popular as a backyard, sandlot and picnic game in the 1960s and ’70s. Since 1980, the game has also exploded as an organized sport, with many successful sports leagues and tournaments now played across the United States and as far away as Spain. These competitions have been known to draw dozens of teams or more, typically consisting of 2-5 players per team, with widely varying rules and field dimensions. Since 1996, the internet has facilitated the expansion of wiffleball throughout the world, bringing players and teams closer together through hundreds of Web sites.
June 25th, 2007 at 8:00 am