The rain game is a game I played once with a mess of campers at Drama Camp. You can play it if you have a big enough crowd of people who can follow simple directions. You set the people up (seated) so that you can point to them either one at a time, or in a circle or by rows- it doesn’t matter as long as you have an order in which to cue them. You will need to repeat the cues several times as they change. The cues will be for the following actions: snapping fingers, clapping hands, slapping knees, stomping feet. You should explain beforehand the actions you will need and the approximate order in which you plan on cuing them. The easiest way to elicit these responses for the actual game is to do it yourself facing the very first person then point down the line slowly. So, once the crowd understands, you start cuing. First make the crowd snap, one at a time. Once they are all snapping, start over at the beginning and cue them to clap. Once they are all clapping, cue knee slaps. Once they are all doing knee slaps, cue stomps. Then once they are all stomping, cue knee slaps. Follow by cuing claps, then snaps, then finally cue them one at a time to silence. The effect is like a rainstorm building and then tapering off. When I did this for the campers I got spontaneous applause at the end. So it’s a pretty cool game.
I have a little orange car. My cute little sunshine drop of car makes me happy. I like parking it next to other orange cars. It’s particularly fun to park next to other orange cars of the same make. This has happened exactly once so far and when I came out to get my car, the other one was gone. I hope the other car owner was either confused or laughed. Or both.
I like to talk about antigenic variance. Antigenic variance (or variation) is how the flu is able to continue to evade our bodies’ defenses although we have already had the flu. Microbes invading us have identifying surface proteins which the human body can remember. If we catch a second round of microbes with the same surface proteins, the body destroys them immediately and we never get sick. Vaccines often use just those surface proteins to ‘prewarn’ the body of what intruders look like. It’s like showing our body the outfit the virus wears. This is also the reason it’s impossible to catch an illness from a vaccine that is made this way. The body can’t get sick if it’s only exposed to an empty shell with no actual virus inside. For the flu vaccine to work, it’s developers must guess each year what the virus will be wearing. It’s like a weird gross fashion show. What will the flu be wearing this season?