and those just a bit too into it.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060118/cgw052.html?.v=34
http://www.usarps.com/site/index.php
Subsc. Req.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114135380757088331.html
"Maybe This Dispute
Can Be Settled Using
Rock-Paper-Scissors
Two Leagues -- One Highbrow,
One Not -- Spar Over Soul
Of Familiar Child's Game
By TIMOTHY W. MARTIN
March 3, 2006; Page A1
NORMAL, Ill. – Gavin Vansaghi was sipping a beer at Brewe-Ha's tavern here when a woman in a Bud Light T-shirt approached with a proposition: Would he like to play rock-paper-scissors? If he won, she said, she might even go to Las Vegas with him.
"Of course," he recalls saying.
Scenes like that have the world of competitive rock-paper-scissors in an uproar. The weeks-old U.S.A. Rock Paper Scissors League, formed by a pair of Hollywood television producers, is enticing members with Bud Light girls, a racy Web video and a $50,000 prize. The tactics have drawn the wrath of the Toronto-based World RPS Society, revived a decade ago by two brothers who set out to bring decorum to the child's hand game.
"We are certainly not very happy with what the USARPS is doing to cheapen the grand sport of rock-paper-scissors," says Graham Walker, co-managing director of the World Society. Matti Leshem, who helped create the U.S. league, calls Mr. Walker's group "highbrow and intellectual," adding, "We're much more rock 'n' roll." Mr. Walker's brother, Douglas, says, "To put it really simple, they would call us pompous blowhards and we would call them ugly American knuckle-draggers."
The squabbling is over an ancient game that involves two players flinging a hand at each other on a 1-2-3 count. A fist is a rock, a flat hand is paper, and two extended fingers signify scissors. Rock smashes scissors, paper covers rock, scissors slices paper. Typically, the winner takes two of three throws.
The Walkers -- Graham, 38, an advertising executive in Prague, and Douglas, 34, a Web consultant for a public-relations firm in Toronto -- are lifelong rock-paper-scissors fanatics. Douglas says he stumbled upon a long-dormant Toronto society while searching for strategies to beat his brother. In 1995, they restarted the club with a new Web site, attracting players who eagerly chatted about playing without ever holding an official contest.
"The game is the most democratic game possible," Douglas Walker says. "You have all the equipment as long as you have one functioning hand." At the society's first international tournament in 2002, Toronto's Pete Lovering outlasted more than 250 players while competing in a green bathrobe adorned with "1974 World Champion." Today, the society counts 3,000 members and calls itself the sport's governing body.
Fox Sports Net broadcast the World Society's 2004 championship in a one-hour special produced by Mr. Leshem, 43, and Andrew Golder, 45. "We saw the potential to stage this on a much bigger scale and bring levels of show business they weren't doing," says Mr. Golder, who helped create cable-TV's "Win Ben Stein's Money.""
THis happened in my fraking town?.....and i didn't know! ? damn...
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