The "Hoopla" Game

A game you wish had been forced on more voting adults!

Dear Sophisticated Readers,

For those of you who are reading LaBorde writing for the first time, welcome, we are happy to have you here at The Sophisticated Chimp, currently sponsored by www.silvertrading.net. For those who have been reading my father’s writings (sometimes mine under his name) you will know that we are not always great at being told what to do and that this is a long standing tradition in our family. We even have a family way of teaching it to each generation that follows a simple recipe that I will describe below.

The ingredients for these exercises are very simple:

• Love the little one enough to playfully teach them that life isn’t always as it is presented

• Have a sense of humor

• Allow your creativity to run wild, and

• For the love of the child tell the TALLEST tall tale you can imagine

I will try to convey this technique through an actual example from my youth where my father put me (and all of my friends around me) through this “training”...

Somewhere around the age of seven the gloves came off and I had to pay especially close attention to what my father was saying. I probably didn’t fully become aware of exactly what he was doing and his technique until I was much older, but the training was going on quite regularly despite my lack of awareness of it.

Example from around when I was ten-years-old:

Larry - “Hey son, did you hear about the lunar probe that touched down recently?”
Me - “No dad.”
Friend - “No Mr. LaBorde”
Larry - “They took samples of moon rocks and brought them back to NASA.”
- “They are discovering some truly fascinating things about these moon rocks!”
(We had just been baited)

Me - “Like what?”
(We had just taken the bait & hook, and the game was afoot for my father!)

Larry - “They are finding that some parts of the moon rocks aren’t really rocks."
- “There is almost a softness to them that they did not expect to find.”
- “A lot of these rocks were a yellow-ish color.”
- “They found that they had sodium in them, you know, sodium like salt.”
- “One of the crazy scientists even licked one of these rocks.
- “The whole discovery has gone quite crazy!”
(My father pours on more emotion and doubles down on the story)
- “It all got weird when another scientist used a knife to spread it on toast.”
- “Then a third scientists started eating it!”
(The Crazy bells start ringing in my little head, so he pushes even harder!!)
- “NASA is now testing all products on the dairy aisle for moon rocks.”
(Too far!)

Me - “Hoopla Dad! The moon is not made of cheese!”

My father would then smile from ear to ear and be excited that I was able to confidently assess the B.S. level of the situation and call him on it. In this particular case I remember picking up on it at least three or four steps before the punch-line, but my poor friend was taken on a ride all the way until the very end, a task my father considered a community service for the surgeon’s son.
I think he bought us both ice cream after that one.

Format:

1. Introduce a topic or answer a question with a feasible first couple of sentences that are designed to progressively get more and more out-landish.

2. Never allow the story to go on too long and endanger the possibility of allowing the truth stretching to live beyond the story, or for the little ones to feel betrayed.

3. Winning the game was simple, the faster we called “hoopla” the bigger dad smiled. 

4. If our friends were sucked into the game and we realized what was going on, there was an unwritten rule that we had to let dad know with a look and let him have a couple more rounds before we’d save our friends and explain to them that he was stretching the truth.

This game was played at any time of day, without warning, around anyone in our company. It’s sole purpose was to teach my sister and I to listen carefully to authority and realize that if dad can stretch the truth all other authority figures are human and must be carefully listened to as well.

The game was rooted in love and it always felt playful, but the lessons it taught were invaluable to all those who played.

Later in our lives we would occasionally be in our father’s presence when politics were reported on. After discussing it a bit he would sometimes look over at us and say, “Obviously some parents were not playing the hoopla game at a high enough level and this politician knows that.”

It’s good to question a bit. Far too many things that are considered absolutely solid in society (like monetary policy) are built on unquestioned assumptions. There is no substitute for curiosity.

It was also in this period of time that our father would slowly walk up behind us while we were eating and ask, “Have I told you about the Tax Man?” which triggered a mad scramble to cover our plates. That one is pretty self explanatory…

(:

Thank you SilverTrading.net, +1 (901) 546-1274 for making this possible!
If you have any questions on precious metals this is a great place to start.

Chris
The Keyboard Chimp