GregHowley.com

If you've friended me on Facebook, you've likely been scratching your head at my recent updates. These include "Nerd Elf took his girlfriend to the ant riding rodeo", "A duck with lips is shedding. He removed my facial features. At night.", and "This skeevy guy has a crush on me, but I'm more concerned with the fact that MY HANDS ARE ON FIRE!!"

Let me explain. No no, there is too much. Let me sum up.

This past Saturday night, we visited our friends' house, and I laughed harder than I have in a long time. The kind of laugh where you can't breathe, and your stomach hurts afterwards. We were playing a game that a friend of ours brought. A game which to my knowledge doesn't even really have a name. It wasn't a boxed game, it was more like charades or hangman.

Here's the way the game works: you take sheets of paper and cut them in half the long way so you get long strips. Each person at the table (we had eight) gets one, and writes some random phrase at the top. Something like "He wears his heart on his sleeve" or "I like looking at the stars at night". Then the papers get passed around clockwise. Each person looks at the phrase that got written and draws a picture of that scene. After you draw the picture, you fold the paper so that the original phrase is hidden and pass it again clockwise. The person with the paper must write down, in words, what the picture is, then fold the paper so the picture is hidden before passing it on again. You see how it works - it's like visual telephone. You stop once the papers have gone around the table all the way. This is how we start with phrases like "He kissed his son goodnight" and end up with phrases like "A duck with lips is shedding. He removed my facial features. At night." When you've got bad artists (like me) at the table, it's even more hilarious.

So that's where all those bizarre phrases came from. I'm actually not insane. They were all generated as results of The Game.