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World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

(www.theguardian.com)
424 points notamy | 3 comments | 15 Oct 24 03:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Duanemclemore ◴[15 Oct 24 05:49 UTC] No.41845323[source]▶
I learned about conkers when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time...

"We bust our way into a megafreighter I still don't know how, marched on to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder thing I have not known. Lost me a year's pocket money. For what? Conkers.

The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx," said Zaphod. "He gave us food, booze - stuff from really weird parts of the Galaxy - lots of conkers, of course, and we had just the most incredible time."

Of course in this well pre-internet age I had to wait literal YEARS to find out what conkers actually WERE. Luckily my aunt was an anglophile and went there six or seven years later. Before she left I asked her to find out what conkers were for me. When she returned she told me what they were and... to be honest I was kinda bummed out it wasn't something more elaborate.

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russellbeattie ◴[15 Oct 24 08:05 UTC] No.41846101[source]▶
I was about to post the same thing! I've thought about this literally for decades.

I also had to wait for years to learn what conkers are - and I'm still confused. I'd love to know the context/history/culture that DNA was referring to because it doesn't make any sense to me as written

So conkers are chestnuts on a string used for childhood smashing competitions. Ooookay.

But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"? Was that something that should be expected from an adult, or maybe specifically a captain of a ship? And why would a child think chestnuts were as special as the weird galactic stuff?

To this day, I think he was referring to something else which got lost or changed in the editing process. Maybe there was a side bar about "cosmic conkers" that got omitted, but the later reference was kept. Something.

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1. amiga386 ◴[15 Oct 24 09:37 UTC] No.41846750[source]▶
It's a childhood story dressed up in sci-fi. If an American child had told it, they might have said they demanded baseball cards, and the amused captain would have given them food, booze and "lots of baseball cards, of course". Children all over the world occasionally make demands of adults and are thrilled when the adults oblige them; their bold dare paid off! Children make up games at school, so when all the chestnuts fall off the trees, children make a game from the mass availability of chestnuts.

It's a British story - it's ostensibly space opera, but really it's more a space-themed Radio 4 comedy. It's British by default. Hence bypasses, council planning departments, stubborn bureaucrats, substances almost entirely unlike tea, solving problems by going to the pub, moaning about the weather, cricket stoppages, getting drunk, implacably morose people, smugly insincere corporate drones, being annoyed at overly flashy Amer... people like Zaphod, and so on. And conkers, of course.

It reminds me of the Twitter thread by an American who had never heard of boarding schools asking "what did you think in Harry Potter was magical but it turned out just to be British?" [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]

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2. dcminter ◴[15 Oct 24 09:48 UTC] No.41846818[source]▶
Re your last note (which is hilarious) I was hugely amused to discover that many Americans reading in Potter about Filch "punting" the kids across the temporary swamp assumed he was kicking them over rather than using a flat bottomed boat. Understandable but much funnier than the original intended.
3. pyrale ◴[15 Oct 24 14:53 UTC] No.41849243[source]▶
> [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]

Savage reply.