Wii The People

I Guess I'm Game For Anything

Photograph copyright: DAVID McMAHON

Can you identify what I’ve photographed? If you have kids, chances are you might recognise this object. If not, there is a giveaway clue in the post title - but I’m sure you’ll still be scratching your head as you examine the unique pattern on the left-hand side of the object in the frame above.

The weekend brought much-needed rain across Melbourne and the state of Victoria. Saturday, in particular, saw dreary skies, a leaden dawn and a formless sunset. Midway through the afternoon, the sun suddenly made a brief appearance the rough thick cloud.

At the time, I was in the rumpus room and I noticed that the shallow winter sun was casting a beautiful shadow, etching the pattern of the lace curtain across the Wii that the Authorbloglets use. I quickly reached for my camera and the sun, almost on cue, retreated behind the bank of cloud and the shadow disappeared.

For the next half-hour, it was like a game of cat and mouse. The same situation was repeated about six times, while I tried to capture the clearest possible representation of the shadow across the surface of the Wii.

Just for the record, I am a fairly decent but not spectacular player on the old Nintendo 64. I am not great on a PlayStation. But when it comes to the Wii, I am simply woeful. As a reasonable tennis player in my time, I have a wicked kick serve, a whipping backhand, a decisive forehand and I belt the ball as hard as I can. But any time you want an easy victory, challenge me to a game of tennis on the Wii. I’m like a very powerful vacuum cleaner. I suck.


But the photography exercise that afternoon (while the Authorbloglets giggled at my antics as the sun’s rays ebbed and flowed) gave me the perfect platform for a W post. Forget Winter. Forget Weekend. Go for Wii - and here are the pictures to go with it, to boot.

There is a very funny Wii-related story I’d like to share. Some months ago a very good friend of mine who has four children said her youngest daughter had a very sore elbow. Her mother explained, grinning, that it was probably a bad case of the classic injury, the get-out-of-doing-my-homework complaint. She said it tongue-in-cheek, but we could both see that the little girl was in a fair degree of discomfort.

I could see no bruising, no broken skin, no external evidence of any injury. The little girl then volunteered the information that she had been in severe pain since the previous evening. I got her point. As a father of three, I could see that she was telling me the injury pre-dated the homework.

The next day, I bumped into them again. The little girl had her customary bright smile back on her face. I asked her mother if the homework had been completed. Yes, was the answer. But there was an intriguing postscript.

They went to their family doctor. He inspected the arm and asked about the nature of the pain. He rubbed his chin. Then he asked the little girl what she had done that week.

"Lots of homework," was the defensive reply.

But he asked the child what she had done every evening before he made a careful diagnosis. There was not a doubt in his mind that the child had a really bad case of tennis elbow.

"So," I asked the mother, "she’ll be missing a few weeks of tennis lessons, then?"

The mother was genuinely puzzled. Then she explained the child didn’t play tennis.

But she had sustained the injury by playing three solid hours of Wii tennis against her older brother.

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