Pirates and Ultimate Frisbee...

Today, I tabled at at the SeaFair pirates landing, for Jet City. It was a festival, the kick off to "SeaFair" and my teammate's uncle is a pirate. It was mostly a fun fest for kids and gave people a good excused to get dressed up, spend time with the kids and have tasty snacks. It was something I hadn't participated in yet and after an hour of handing out balloons, I headed to a valley in Redmond to watch my friend play ultimate Frisbee at Potlatch 2008. An aside: The potlatch is a festival or ceremony practiced among Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. At these gatherings a family or leader hosts guests in their family's house and hold a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity.

In ultimate "potlatch" is the task of giving gifts to the other team at the end of the game - like My Little Pony stickers and wrist guards when your team is Dark Horse - which apparently had two different themes - My Little Pony and the fact that James Polk ran as a "dark horse" candidate (A dark horse candidate is one who is nominated unexpectedly, without previously having been discussed or considered as a likely choice). It was also another reason to drink beers and play silly games.

Ultimate is a very unique sport and I rather enjoyed it. It was easy to follow like football or soccer - offense and defense were easy to discern. Fouls were variations of fouls in basketball mostly. However, it's completely self regulating - there are no refs - you call fouls when you're being fouled. You play to a certain number of points or the end of 1.5 hours. You rotate in, you play rock-paper-scissors during time out with the other team, you discuss your foul, you drink beer and juice. You wear funny costumes - capes, hats, weird leg things - some of the interfering with play and other doing nothing to enhance it. You eat burritos and drink beer right before you go on the field to play. And then you run like hell for 1.5 hours and jump and throw and catch. Faye's team, which was a motley crew gathered from a couple local teams just to play in this tournament, were in a tight game against the number one Canadian team and they rallied and beat them 14-13. It was very excited - and as close to a nailbiter as you can get in a game that you just learned about.