This is Conlan

I haven’t been able yet to right up my experiences at the Second Annual Blogger Olympics, which took place on Saturday, April 25. The Games pitted Fresno-area bloggers against each other in a no-holds-barred, no-bars-held-unless-you-count-a-minigolf-putter-as-a-bar duel to the death in mini-golf, skee-ball, air hockey, arcade basketball, and Wii bowling. The Games were unofficially sponsored by The Beehive, which has the unofficial recap here.

The participants were, no particular order, as follows.

1. Brodiemash of Dumb Drum.
2. Kathy of The Beehive.
3. Mike Oz of The Beehive.
4. Adam of Gustav’s Groupie.
5. Michael of Weird Fresno.
6. Mikey of The Fresnan.
7. Me of here and there.
8. James of Taste Fresno/South of Sunnyside.
9. Marisa of It’s Worth Recording.
10. Roopam of CBS47.

Weird Fresno has some additional photos. A lot of other lazy bloggers have video and stuff but haven’t posted it yet.

What no one has mentioned, however, is the spontaneous act of blogger generosity (or bloggerosity) that occurred at Blackbeards. This may be because bloggers are, by our nature, humble and unassuming individuals, never ones to toot our own horn. However, as you know, I’m a maverick, so I toot often. Especially in bed, because no one’s around and I’m not ashamed anyway. It’s natural. Even Jesus did it.

So anyway. At Blackbeards, because we are all expert skee-ballers, this event left us with a stockpile of prize tickets (not to mention a few leftover tokens). We briefly considered trading them in for the rubber dead-rat-in-a-trap, but ultimately decided that it would be best to select one lucky child at random and present him or her with our valuable collection. This was nice enough, but what really made it a Christmas miracle was this: while we were standing around, I dropped one of my extra tokens into one of those dome things with the lights that go around and you have to hit the button when the light gets to you and it’s really pretty stupid if you think about it.

So I hit the button. Needless to say, but I will anyway, my expert eagle eye hit the light on the nose, causing the machine to spew forth up to and including 100 tickets to add to our loot! Next, we spotted a nerdy-looking kid in glasses who seemed like the type who’d grow up to be a lonely, self-loathing nerd who would of course start a blog. He was perfect. We chased him down through the arcade and cornered him on the upper level. He was confused and frightened.

“This is from Fresno bloggers!” we yelled, throwing the tickets and tokens at his feet. “Tell your friends!”

I think The Fresnan may have popped him one in the chin (just a light jab, not a knock-out blow) before we turned and left the kid crying onto the controls of Street Fighter.

We felt pretty good about ourselves after that. Pretty good, indeed.