Quiz #100. "... one."
New Year's reflections as I wander down the rabbit hole of rapid-fire Monopoly. Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for January 2, 2021.
If you had asked me a year ago to look ahead to New Year’s 2020/2021, I would not have imagined that I’d be writing the 100th edition of Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz, burrowing down another one of the many rabbit holes that are all too often the focus of my pandemic reflections. In this quiz, the journey down the rabbit hole began on New Year’s Eve and found me stumbling onto a failed attempt from two years ago to liven up the board game Monopoly.
Sara and I are not big New Year’s Eve people. We’re borderline teetotalers and we do not like big parties. Our typical New Year’s Eve is a quiet night at home with a special dinner cooked by Sara. In years past, we babysat for our grandchildren Turner and Marin on years when Ted and Erica came back to New Jersey for the holidays. We’re more than happy to stay at home and off the roads.
So, for us, staying at home on New Year’s Eve on the last night of 2020 was nothing new and nothing unusual. This year, my stepson John was with us. Usually, of course, he’d be out with friends, but 2020 was not usual. Sara cooked a nice meal, lobster tails ordered from the milkman. After dinner, we played Monopoly. We’d long since tossed our old boxes of the board game, but Sara ordered a new one in December, planning ahead for activities to occupy us during the stay-at-home pandemic holidays.
Opening the new, sealed box of the Monopoly game on New Year’s Eve was its own welcome walk down memory lane. The board felt familiar. It was comforting to recall the names of reliable real estate, “Marvin Gardens,” “St. James Place” and of course, “Park Place.” As we set up the board and picked out our pieces, we talked about the demise of the thimble, a game piece eliminated as outdated with some fanfare in 2017.
From thinner boxes of cereal to smaller tear-offs for paper towels, like many things these days, the new Monopoly game itself felt cheaper. The cards for the real estate were certainly a little smaller, their card stock noticeably thinner. The thimble-less game pieces a little lighter. The green houses and red hotels a little less sturdy than I remembered. The color of the money, especially the orange $500 bills, a little less vibrant.
And yet, the game itself felt remarkably unchanged. From spaces like “Free Parking” and “Just Visiting” to cards with messages like “Go to Jail. Go Directly to Jail. Do Not Pass GO. Do Not Collect $200” and “You have won second place in a beauty contest. Collect $10.”
Who thought “You have won second place in a beauty contest” was a good idea? An outdated yet insulting compliment, it remains a card in the Community Chest.
Housebound again on New Year’s night, we played Monopoly a second time--and that’s when it happened. I landed on Chance, got this card and fell into a rabbit hole:
When I read this “Money Grab!” Chance card, I really thought it was a mistake, some kind of Monopoly prank. Every other card from Chance and Community Chest had been the same, familiar and, yes, a little outdated. This “Money Grab!” Chance card was the only one that was different—and it was, well, a little wild. Can you imagine playing Monopoly as a child and coming to a money grab? With competitive young capitalists, I can think of so many ways in which things could go wrong when a child throws bills in the air and every kid tries to grab them before they hit the ground.
And yet, Sara, John and I looked at one another and decided to give the money grab a try. It was in the rules and on this new card. I was the banker but actually came up empty. It turns out it’s not easy to toss a pile of bills in the air and then catch them. Sara ended up with the biggest wad of cash.
We turned to Google to find out more about the “Money Grab!” Chance card. According to boardgamegeek.com, the “Money Grab!” Chance card was introduced in 2018. How had we missed that? It’s really such a crazy addition for such a storied, traditional game. One oft-repeated complaint in the Comments section on boardgeek.com was that throwing the $100 bills in the air and then having players fight to catch them would damage the $100 bills in your game set. User @pawnvdice wrote:
What a great way to end up with torn and crumpled notes...
Still, the principal complaint in the Comments section was how the “Money Grab!” Chance card destroyed the integrity of the Monopoly board game itself. Here’s user @swanstuff in a blog post from January, 2020:
Played Monopoly properly at Christmas for the first time in years with a child who'd enjoyed but outgrown a junior version. Having read all the info on here cautioning against using house rules, we played it by the book and a reasonably enjoyable game was developing. Thought the player was making this card up when they read it out, knowing it wasn't in my 60s/70s set!
The notes (brand new) all stuck together, one person caught the whole pile, and that was the game! Two enjoyable hours decided by one silly card.
The boardgamegeek.com posts also revealed that the “Money Grab!” Chance card was inspired as a way to promote a new modified version of Monopoly from Hasbro in 2018 called the “Monopoly CASH GRAB Game.” Here’s the video in case you missed it:
A YouTube review of the Monopoly CASH GRAB game might explain why it never caught on. Do these adults look like they’re having fun?
“That’s right, you heard me: This Monopoly game lasts minutes instead of the usual four-hour ordeal.”
The Monopoly CASH GRAB game is so 2018. If the pandemic of 2020 has taught us anything, it’s an appreciation of time. Who wants to play a game that’s over in minutes?
On Wednesday, December 30th, I got an email from a fantasy football service that runs so-called “Best Ball” leagues. In 2020, I played in 3 best ball leagues. $10 an entry. I mostly forgot about them until that morning email. In a best ball league, you draft your team before the season starts, paying an entry fee to a stat service and finding yourself randomly assigned to a league with 11 other users across the fantasy football universe. The service runs the draft over email and with a few hours allotted to make each pick, the draft takes several days. The attraction--and challenge--of a best ball league is that once the draft is over, you don’t do anything more. You can’t do anything more. There are no trades, no picking up new players and no setting your lineup each week. You draft 25 players and get points for the best line-up that can be fielded from your roster each week with a prescribed lineup of players by position. That is, you get points from your best 1 quarterback of the week, your best 2 running backs, your best 4 wide receivers, etc. On a roster of 25, you might pick 2 quarterbacks. If one of them gets hurt, you can’t replace him and must rely on the other one for each remaining week. If both get hurt, you’re screwed. In that way, there is a lot of luck in playing in a best ball league, but in the end it’s about picking the right players in the early rounds of the draft and then making the best bold predictions with up-and-coming, wild-card players in the later rounds of the draft. For my one winning team (I finished 6th and 7th in the other two leagues), I picked Derrick Henry and Travis Kelce in the first two rounds. Both stayed healthy and played like studs. But it was my late-round pick-ups of Brandon Aiyuk and James Robinson that stood out. Robinson was a so-called UDFA (undrafted free agent) who became a starting running back for the Jacksonville Jaguars.
As noted in Quiz #82. Promise Made, Promise Broken, I never thought the NFL would make it past October, but I was wrong. I won $75 in this best ball league and it felt good to know that over the 4 months of the NFL season, I had somehow outsmarted 11 random strangers on the internet in predicting which players would emerge over time during the 2020 season.
I slept in on New Year’s morning, sleeping past 6AM for the first time in months. When I woke up, I turned to my morning newsletters and opened my email. A loyal fan of the photo service Shutterly, I get daily emails from them advertising their latest sales. Usually, the emails are annoying. Everything’s always 50% off--and it becomes harder and harder for them to present that as something special. Still, the subject line in the email from New Year’s morning made me smile.
If nothing else, 2020 gave me time to scan old family photos. I’m now done to 16 photo albums and approximately 8,000 photos left to scan. Over the holidays, I scanned pictures I took of daughter Annie on her 10th birthday in 1992. I posted them to social media with this message:
Annie’s comment: “Isn’t this your resolution every year?” My reply: “Reformed and always reforming.”
As noted in Quiz #98. “MFC,” many people have marked the start of the new year and the end of the old by saying “Fuck you 2020.” On social media, I’ve also noticed people posting about their hopes for the new year and their desire to learn lessons from this pandemic. One friend wrote this:
Here's to our new year returning us to what we knew, while holding on what we have learned.
Another wrote this:
“A long December and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last...”
We lost too much this year. Too many people, too many co-workers, too many icons, too many current friends, and strangers who could have become future ones. Too many heroes, known and anonymous. We lost out on too much family time, opportunities to make new memories with our aging parents and growing nieces and nephews. That won’t change at midnight on January 1st, or at noon on January 20th, or the moment we get our vaccines. But what can change now is in us. In our ability to be mindful of who and what we have lost and still be grateful for who and what we have now. The extra text to check-in, the surprise handwritten card. The extra two breaths we allow ourselves to pause and enjoy things like a sunset.
Let’s carry the memories of our departed in our hearts, of our icons on our backs, and let them live through us this new year in our patience, our compassion. Our courage.
“It’s chaos. Be kind.”
I applaud these messages, but I am not ready to start contemplating life lessons in the “After” just yet. Why? Mainly because it’s still happening. So many have been ravaged by hardships, heartaches and loss. We’re focused on staying at home, staying supplied and staying safe. We’re beyond lucky to still be working and to remain uninfected. Despite the promise of multiple vaccines, the grim numbers are stark and clear. The next few months will be dark and deadly.
And yet, this week, son Ted called to say that he and some friends from high school were thinking about renting a beach house at the Jersey Shore this summer. Would Sara and I be able to watch Ted and Erica’s children, our grandchildren, for part of the week? Ted explained that this vacation was contingent on the successful rollout of the vaccine and we agreed to watch the kids with the caveat that we’d all have to be vaccinated by then. We miss our grandchildren and welcome the prospect of spending time with them, but I must say that it felt really odd to be making plans for life in the “After.”
Faced with the pandemic, Sara’s ordered more indoor plants for the house. In November, she ordered amaryllis bulbs for the dining room window. They’re very happy there and have grown like wildfire. We joke that they’ve reached a monster height. Still, they remain a beacon of beauty. A reminder that seasons change, time marches on and yes, we can--and should--make plans.
What did NOT happen?
A. Sara also ordered Jenga, the stacking games with wooden blocks. With a tremor in my left hand, it was not a great game for me;
B. For Christmas, John gave me a cocktail mixing set. I used the jigger and shaker to mix and make whiskey sours on New Year’s Eve, following the recipe with fresh-squeezed lemon juice, simple syrup and Maker’s Mark bourbon;
C. For New Year’s Eve, for the first time, Sara made a cheesecake in her Insta-Pot;
D. At the stroke of midnight, we could hear one unidentified female neighbor releasing a primal scream in their front yard. It wasn’t panic or distress--just a long “F.U. 2020” scream to let it all out;
E. On New Year’s Eve, I stumped John with a riddle from the son of a co-worker, “What’s the last word most people say out loud in any given year?”
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Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #101. “I’d Give My Right Arm To Be Tom Seaver.”
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #99. Numbers.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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