Innovations in
Sleep-Aids & Backgammon
Innovations to help
us sleep are few, far between, and usually come in pill
form. I came up with the concept of Virtual Dreaming out
of pure frustration with a medical community that seems
to have given up on any homeopathic sleep-aids. I have
always thought that innovation was the lifeblood of
human advancement and am reminded of an 'innovation' my
brother and I came up with for the game of Backgammon
decades ago.
In our early teen
years my younger brother and I were avid Backgammon
players. As anyone who has ever played the game knows
there comes a point in many matches when conceding is
the prudent thing to do. You get so far behind in some
games that spending another five minutes 'playing it
out' makes no sense. But, give up? Why, that's simply
un-American! My brother and I saw this as a basic flaw
in the rules and we innovated a better, more dramatic
ending. We came up with the innovation of
double-doubles. That's right. I said
double-doubles. If you are getting your butt kicked
you can insist on your right to take a shot of rolling
the same number on all four dice and miraculously snatch
victory from the cold boney fingers of certain defeat.
It was kind of the 'Hail Mary' pass of North Alabama
Backgammon.
I was two years older
and therefore wiser about strategies and the odds when
it came to that game. So, like most older siblings, I
reveled in the lopsided victories I could heap on my
little brothers fragile ego. One winter's night I had
beat him not twice, not thrice, but nine times in a row. I
explained to him that at no time in human existence had
anyone ever lost ten games of Backgammon in a row as it
was not statistically possible. In the proceeding
millennia of Backgammon play, of the countless boards
unfolded and chips laid out, a ten-game beatdown had
never occurred. I further explained that he must have
something wrong with the wiring in his smallish little
brother brain as 'pure luck' should have helped him win
at least one game. I offered to stop the carnage right
there and then but, like a true 13 year old warrior, he
insisted on tempting history.
Game ten began like
all the rest. He played 'safe' moves and I countered
with aggressive moves. He switched to aggressive moves
and I played the odds. He had a moment when he thought
he could possibly win this one only to be beaten down
again by my brilliantly played 'back' game. Oh yes, dear
reader, this was a Backgammon game for the ages. When it
appeared all was lost my little brother stood, red faced
and full of vinegar, and claimed his right to
double-doubles. Now, the odds of rolling double-doubles
are about 200 to 1, or there about, and even though we
had been using the double-double rule for a good year I
had never seen a successful roll. I chuckled to myself
and handed over my dice. He shook the four cubes in his
leather bound dice holder while doing a kind of
ritualistic spinning dance of the primitives. He rolled
the bones:
6 - 6 - 6 - 6
Now, there was no
crowd there that day. Had there been a crowd they
certainly would have exploded with excitement. My little
brother certainly did. He never gave up, had beaten the
odds and did not have to live out the rest of his days
with the knowledge that he was the singular human who
had lost ten Backgammon games in a row. His celebration
was something to behold. Even I had to congratulate him.
That night we both felt that our innovation of
double-doubles would spread from North Alabama, thru the
southeast USA and permeate out into the big world. It
was that good. It's still that good.
Thirty something
years later I see that our double-double innovation has
not been incorporated into international Backgammon
rules...
yet. But I can guarantee you that should my younger
brother and I ever play another game, and it looks like
all is lost, one of us will shout out '
double-doubles!'.
Return
to Sleep
Thoughts
