2.28.2008

Exhibit 7.13

For some reason, employees at the company where I work are walking over to a gym to play dodgeball tomorrow. Frankly, I'm all for it. I can't say I was ever actually that into real dodgeball but the video game Super Dodge Ball (or, as I like to call it, real dodgeball) for the NES was my favorite game as a kid/awkward teen.

I don't even know where or how we acquired Super Dodge Ball. All I know is that by the time I was 14 I was pretty much unbeatable. Mostly that was because by 14 my friends were too busy buying cologne and getting in fist fights after school to actually play me, but it wouldn't have mattered.

The premise of the game is simple. Your dodgeball team travels around the world to play teams of ethnic stereotypes in crude approximations of the countries they come from. For instance, in China, you play in front of a picture of Mao. In Kenya, you play on dirt. For the better part of my life, I assumed that the people in Iceland actually did live on large sheets of abnormally slick ice thanks to this game. After you beat all of the insensitive caricatures, you have to face a sub-human, undoubtedly cheating team from the U.S.S.R.

Even though communism had more or less collapsed by the time I played this game, it certainly didn't diminish my thrill every time I beat Boris (the Soviet's best player, naturally) and his gang of Politburo-backed hoods. I imagine this is how Ronald Reagan felt all the time.

Anyway, assuming what I did in a 20-year-old video game is applicable in the real world--and honestly, why not assume that--I should be both amazing at dodgeball and have unusually shiny hair tomorrow.

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