Useless Facts About Games And Hobbies
Benjamin Franklin was one of the first people to manufacture playing cards in America.
The children's game “Ring Around the Rosy” and the words that accompany it (“Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy, ashes, ashes, all fall down”) derive from the medieval practice of scattering rose petals in a circle around one's bed (“ring around the rosy”) and carrying small bouquets (“pocket full of posy”) as protection against the Black Plague (“all fall down”).
The game billiards was popularized in France by Louis XIV. The king started playing the game at the recommendation of his physicians. The constant stretching exercise Louis received in playing billiards, his physicians believed, would relieve him of his digestive problems.
Modern playing cards were derived from the tarot fortune telling deck. The original tarot was divided into two sections, the major arcane (dropped from the modern deck) and the minor arcane. The minor arcane was composed of four suits: cups, wands, coins, and words. In the modern deck these became the hears, clubs, diamonds and spades. Similarly, the early tarot had kings, queens, and knights (jacks), plus a page who has been eliminated from contemporary decks.
There are 170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ways to play the ten opening moves in a game of chess.
The game of dominoes was invented by French monks. It is named for a phrase in the Vesper services: Dixit Dominus Domineo Meo.
During the French revolution, because they smacked of royalist influence, kings, queens, and jacks were removed from the standard deck of cards and were replaced by “liberty” (queens), “nature” (kings), and “virtue” (jacks). The hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds were changed to peace, war, art, and commerce.
The practice of using ten pins in the game of bowling originated in colonial America as a means of circumventing a gaming law. An eighteenth-century ordinance in Connecticut ruled that “bowling at nine pins” was illegal, and offenders were often jailed or placed in stocks. To get around this law, bowlers added an extra pin to the game, so that they would be playing “ten pins” rather than “nine pins.” The name stuck, and so did the number of pins.
There are playing cards manufactured especially for left-handed people. Normally the pips on a card are in the upper left-hand corner and lower right for the convenience of right-handed fanners. Left-handed playing cards have pips on all four corners.