Blowing Ping-pong Balls. Arrange the players with their hands behind them along the sides of a long extension table, down the centre of which a row of ping-pong balls are placed at intervals of about two feet. Appoint two judges and place them at the ends of the table. At a given word, the players on both sides begin to blow the balls, endeavoring to blow them off their opponents’ side of the table and to prevent any balls from being blown off of their own side. Each ball blown off counts five points. The game is 100 points.
Doing the Impossible. A sure way to raise a laugh among a party of friends, is to claim that you can do an apparently impossible thing, and then get your friends to try it; then, when they have tried and failed, do the very thing they failed on, in a simple way which has never occurred to them. Here is a deception which seldom fails to work and which always provides a lot of fun, even to those who are fooled by it.
Begin by saying something about ant-eaters, which have such long tongues that they can touch the ground with them without lowering their heads, and then ask one of your friends if he can put out his tongue and touch his ear. He will try, gently at first, then harder, and at length make the funniest faces by trying to do that, which is of course, impossible. Then others will try poking their tongues out of the corners of their mouths, and trying to curl them around their cheeks until their ears are reached.
When they have finished, you put out your tongue, and touch your ear with your finger.
The Game of “It.” Here is a game that will amuse any party, but you must first find out adroitly that there is at least one person in the company who has never been initiated into the mysteries. This one is chosen to leave the room, but before he goes he must be told that those in the room will select an object which he is to guess on his return. He may ask as many questions as he wishes when the time comes, one question at a time of each person consecutively, but his questions must be so worded that they may be answered by “Yes,” “No,” or “I do not know.”
When all this has been explained, the guesser leaves the room. The leader then arranges the party in a circle, seating alternately a boy with a girl, if possible, and explaining that each person must think of the one sitting on his or her left, as the object chosen, and answer all questions as if they applied to that person. You may imagine that the conflicting answers arising from such an arrangement will confuse the questioner, and much fun will be derived by those in the secret.
For instance the questioner may ask of No. 1, who is a girl, “Has it life?” No 1 answers “Yes.” He then asks No. 2, who is a boy, “Is it pretty?” and No. 2 very naturally answers “Yes,” for he is speaking of the girl at his left. Then of No. 3, who is a girl, “Is it a girl?” and No. 3, thinking of the boy on her left, answers “No.”
All this throws the questioner off the track—it has life, it is pretty, but it is not a girl. So he naturally asks No. 4, who is a boy, “Is it a boy?” and No. 4 answers “No.”
The questions will now be varied, to find something with life that is pretty, and is neither a girl nor a boy, and the result will be very amusing.