When I Want to Laugh I Think of Allan Sherman

Folk singer, Celebrity, and Nut. — Allan Sherman’s greatest albums from 1962 and 1963.

Continuing on with my occasional list of albums that have had the most influence on me, I am heading back to the early 1960’s and the First King of Song Parodies, Allan Sherman. Before Steve Dahl rocked with “Ayatollah,” before Al Yankovic foisted his weirdness upon us, I was memorizing the lyrics to every song on Sherman’s three hit albums, My Son the Folk-Singer, My Son the Celebrity, and My Son the Nut.

A TV producer with a knack for putting funny words to well-known tunes, Sherman, a Chicago native, was a mega-star for a short period of time. He had a Top 40 hit with “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” he parodied the French Revolution and Louis the 16th to the tune of “You Came a Long Way from St. Louis,” and he dipped into his own heritage with “Harvey and Sheila,” the story of a Jewish couple set to “Hava Nagila”. And yes, that is where Barb derived the name for our pond swans. More on Barb and “Hava Nagila” below.

My family had all three albums. I played them on our old mono record player incessantly, my parents allowing my 7-year-old mind to be indelibly marked. Just how permanent was the damage? Badly enough that just last month I was able to perform an acapella duet rendition of “Hungarian Goulash” while quaffing beers and eating schnitzel at a Haufbrau Haus restaurant just outside of Cincinnati.

I wasn’t the only family member with Allan Shermania. I remember my sister Linda and her friend Marilyn performing “Here’s to the Crabgrass” while rushing a high school sorority in 1965. They didn’t make it into the sorority, maybe because by then Sherman’s career was already on the wane. His health was waning as well; he died in 1973, ten days short of his 49th birthday.

And inspired by the master, I have been writing parody lyrics ever since…

—–

Hava Nagila: Alan Sherman parodied it; Harry Belafonte loved it. And Barb couldn’t get enough of Belafonte’s version on the incomparable (more than a year on the charts) 1959 album Belafonte at Carnegie Hall. She even asked Brett Lavender, the wacky, New-Yorky, DJ to play this version at Laury’s Bat Mitzvah. If Barb had a Top Ten list this album would rank right near #1.

____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; }
/* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.
We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

//s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.mailchimp.com/js/mc-validate.js(function($) {window.fnames = new Array(); window.ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]=’EMAIL’;ftypes[0]=’email’;fnames[1]=’FNAME’;ftypes[1]=’text’;fnames[2]=’LNAME’;ftypes[2]=’text’;}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true);

An Album for My Dad on Father’s Day

sinatra — Dad enjoyed this Sinatra album from the ’50s.

I’ve written about my dad before, but with Father’s Day coming up, I thought I would dedicate the next entry on my Favorite Record Albums of All Time list to his memory.

In the early 1960’s my dad briefly joined The Columbia Record Club, one of the “Buy 4 Albums, Get 1 Free” variety that was advertised every week with an insert in the center of TV Guide. I am not sure how long we had a membership, and my memory of what albums he ordered is quite foggy. But I do remember one, This is Sinatra!

This is Sinatra! was a mid-stage album for Frank, a collection of some singles from the 50’s and a few new tunes. This was well before the more kitschy “New York, New York,” and “Something Stupid” Sinatra. I absorbed most of the songs on Side One – we are talking LP’s here, of course, no CD’s or downloads in those days! “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “Love and Marriage,” and “South of the Border” were all stored in the recesses of my mind, with the latter resonating every time we “went down Mexico way.” Side Two is more of a blur.

I can’t say the album turned me into a big Sinatra fan. I was a bit young for that, and the British Invasion was headed this way. But watching a Frank Sinatra Special on a PBS Pledge Drive the other night brought back thoughts of that album and my dad just in time for Father’s Day.

The Columbia Record Club wasn’t the only subscription service that Dad got hooked into. A few years later he joined the “Literary Guild of America,” a great way for getting hardcover copies of current best-sellers. I remember him ordering (and my reading) political thrillers like Fletcher Knebel’s “Vanished,” my first taste of John LeCarre with “A Small Town in Germany,” and, as a curious 12-year-old, my introduction to literary porn with Phillip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

Dad like waitresses too, but I don’t think he had a subscription for those.

Anyway, Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Maybe somewhere you, Mom, and Linda are listening to Sinatra croon. I hope so!

____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

<!– Begin MailChimp Signup Form –>

What Mind Games Do YOU Play?

So keep on playing those mind games together
Doing the ritual dance in the sun
John Lennon, Mind Games, 1973

Remember the game Rack-O? You might not. It was originally marketed by that old game master Milton-Bradley and has been around since 1956. Each player started with a plastic rack loaded with 10 numbered cards in random order. On each successive turn, the players picked a new card from the deck and inserted the card anywhere they wanted in their rack. The goal was to be the first player to wind up with a rack of 10 cards arranged from lowest to highest.

Rack-O never seemed to be as popular as other custom card games such as the classics Uno and Mille-Bornes, or current games like Apples to Apples. But I always enjoyed it when I could persuade my sister or a friend into playing a game or two. I don’t think I ever tried it with three or four players, the two-player head-to-head competition seemed just right.

Does anyone play the game anymore? I can’t recall if we had it when the kids were growing up. If we played it at all, memories of it are swamped by those of our nightly games of Killer Sorry. And a quick Google search shows that there is no electronic version. I suspect that these days if you can’t do it digitally, you aren’t doing it at all.

So why write about this old, never-very-popular game, other than the fact it was created the same year that I was? It’s because of a vision I had last week. I was walking Milo, planning my activities for the coming day. And in my mind, I suddenly had a vision of a Rack-O rack. Each planned task was a different card, and I was mentally moving the cards back and forth in the rack, lining them up in the order that would make my day most efficient. I was weighing various priorities against the time the task would take, and where I could best accomplish the task. Some would be at the lab, some at home, and some could go either way. Was it my imagination, or once all was set in place, did I startle Milo with a little yell of “Rack-O?”

Rack-O Brain. That’s what I am calling it. Figure out the things I need to do, put them in order and then just go do ’em. Woe to the person who gets in my way or disrupts that schedule. And once everything is done it’s “Rack-O!” and “Lights out!”

Rack-O Brain is different from a chess mindset A good chess player is seeing many moves ahead and envisioning what the final result will be. I need to put things into place before I can see the big picture. No coincidence, I was always a lousy chess player.

Rack-O Head, chess brain, or something else. What kind of a brain are YOU?

____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

Your Doctor Hates the Electronic Health Record. I Love it.

We have all had the experience. We go to our doctor for an annual physical, or to work out some specific problem, and they spend most of the time reading their laptop or typing data into it. Personal contact and face-to-face time feel smothered by the need to enter all your information to be stored in some vast cloud. Is it worth it?

Electronic Health Records (EHR) have been around for quite a while now. They started out in hospital settings but moved into doctors offices in force a few years ago when the Federal Government partially subsidized their purchase and Medicare began instituting payment policies that virtually required physicians to use them in order to receive “maximum” reimbursement. All while collecting lots and lots of data.

The drawback, and one of the reasons physicians hate them is that they are massive time sucks. “Maximizing” reimbursement is a losing proposition if maximizing patients 1 through 5 means that you can’t schedule patients 6 through 8. Some practices hire “scribes” to enter data in the EHR while the physician examines the patient. That works for some.

These systems are also notoriously balky and require hard-working IT teams to keep them at a functional level. And heaven (or Medicare) forbid a change in regulations. Updates can wipe out a system for days, grinding information transfer to a halt.

So whether they go by the name of Epic, or Allscripts, or any of dozens of others, most clinical offices hate these things. But I love them. Before the EHR, I was working in isolation. On receiving a biopsy to diagnose, my only information about the patient’s clinical history was a code number or two identifying a clinical condition. Beyond that, it was anyone’s guess.

Now I can feel like I am part of the team. I have full access to the group EHR and patient’s record. Let’s say I see a set of changes on a prostate biopsy that raise a certain flag for me. I can flip onto the EMR and confirm my hunch that the patient had a previous diagnosis of prostate cancer treated with radiation therapy. I can reset my mental slide review to incorporate the appearance of post-radiation changes. At other times, I can find the pathology report of a patient’s original biopsy, even if it was performed by a doctor not part of our group and interpreted at a different laboratory. That helps me read the patient’s “active surveillance” follow-up biopsy.

Bladder biopsies performed in the office are frequently very small scrimlets of tissue. It can be difficult for even the most diligent pathologist to determine if the architectural changes are an artifact of the biopsy or true papillary growths of a bladder tumor. A few clicks of my mouse and I can read the urologists complete cystoscopy note and learn what they saw during the procedure and just what they biopsied. It’s almost as good as being in the procedure room as the biopsy is being taken.

Looking at a stained urine slide under the microscope sounds straight-forward. But being able to read the EHR lets me know if a patient has had a urological procedure in the 24 hours preceding their turning in the urine specimen. Findings that at first glance look abnormal can be explained once I know the patient just had a cystoscopy, something I might not be aware of without the EHR.

Yes, your doctor might grumble. You might regret the loss of eye contact with your provider. And you might not be a fan of all the data that the government is collecting about you.

But I love it, and it helps me give you better care!

The opinions above are those of the author and not UroPartners, LLC.

____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

Trump Trickle Down

“The next person who has asked to speak at the Watertown Citizen’s Forum is Grady Fornstock. His chosen topic is Watertown: My Kind of Place.”

“Thank you for inviting me to be the keynote speaker at the Citizen Forum Day here. Hey, you’re a real cutey. Busy later?

“I’m looking out and I know this is the biggest crowd you have ever had for Citizen’s Day, even if the Daily Slime won’t report it that way. You know they just like to report made-up news, like about that traffic stop last week. Not true, not true. I wasn’t speeding and there was no money attached to my driver’s license when I gave it to the very fine state trooper. And if there was a fifty I think it was just stuck on by a drip of secret sauce from my morning Big Mac. No harm, no collusion.

“You know I almost didn’t make it here this morning. I was watching GCN, the Good Cable Network. They like talking about all the greatness I am bringing to Watertown. No made up news on GCN, just good stuff about how I have the most customers at my restaurant and what a good job I do at keeping my labor costs down. They never go into the kitchen so they haven’t heard all the Spanish back there, but I assure you it is all above board, all very legal. No dreamers, just good solid people who pay me so I won’t turn any of them in. Great, isn’t it!

“Remember the guy who owned the restaurant before me? LOSER! Paid the waitresses a decent wage and didn’t even water down the liquor. I think he was born in Rwanda or some other @hole country. I hear they want to name the street after him. I guess @hole Avenue has a good ring to it. Maybe I’ll sell some souvenirs. Have ’em made in Haiti or Mozambique. I got guys there.

“You know my brother is a doctor, the best doctor we have seen in Watertown for twenty, or maybe fifty, years. Never a problem; only writes prescriptions when people really need ’em. I know, he has written me a dozen or so. Always necessary, always for enormous pain, I have to be honest. On my feet all day at the restaurant, back starts to ache, even though I am in perfect health. Still a 1 handicap on the golf course.

“Speaking of doctors, they don’t get paid enough. But I am working on that. Going to meet with the head of the Insurance Committee. Scary guy, a little crazy. But I can talk to him, tell him I am serious about this. I’ll get my brother big bucks, big bucks. It’s what I do. No one better.

“My kids are playing Little League now. Have you seen those games? They have idiots for umpires. You would think 17-year-old kids would have better vision. But this one ump, Big Smelly Kid, keeps calling the pitches thrown to my son strikes, even when they are, I don’t know, 2 or 3 feet above his head. I told that 17-year-old moron ump he should quit; if I had known he was going to be the ump I never would have let my kids play. If he doesn’t quit soon, I’ll have him fired. The head of the league owes me big time over that party we threw at the restaurant last month. How could I know what those girls did for a living?

“So I am thinking of running for Mayor of Watertown. Elect me and I promise, I’ll never work another day in my life. Just making Watertown great again.”

——————————-

The opinions above are the opinions of the author, not UroPartners LLC

____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

photo credit: Neil. Moralee Grumpy. via photopin (license)

Miss America Changes And Other Contests Should Too!

No more swimsuits, no more evening gowns. In the biggest development since firing Bert Parks in 1979, the Miss America Organization has revealed a change in focus for the Miss America Pageant. Physical appearance is out, replaced by an emphasis on the organizations stated mission: empowering women and handing out millions of dollars in scholarships. Personality and intelligence will be championed. These are good goals and I wish the pageant (excuse me, it is now a “contest”) well.

I would like to take this time to announce several other updates in various competitions, contests, and quests. Changes will begin immediately.

Forget the Super Bowl. The NFL Champion will be the first team to guarantee at least half of their players and coaching staff will show up for a White House greeting from President Trump.
The Nobel Prize for Literature will continue to be canceled until someone can interpret any of previous award winner Bob Dylan’s lyrics.
All future music and video award winners will go to whomever Kanye damn well says they should go to. It is expected 95% of future awards will be his to keep.
Meryl Streep will be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress whether or not she makes a film in a given year. Robert DeNiro and Johnny Depp have requested this designation for themselves as well.
The National Spelling Bee Champion will here-to-fore be the 17-year-old who can create the largest number of new Emojis in a 20-minute time span. No new dog poop Emojis will be permitted.
The World Cup Soccer Champion will be determined by…never mind, don’t care.
The winners of “The Voice,” “American Idol,” and “America’s Got Talent” will be the contestant to most accurately predict the number of hook-ups, divorces, and leaves of absence for “exhaustion” among the coaches and judges.
The “Airline of the Year” will be any airline that makes me happy. Leading contender this year, EVA. Look ’em up, they are good.
Print Magazine of the Year will go to any magazine that still appears in print.
The President of the United States will not be the winner of the popular vote, but rather the candidate who obtains the blessing of a mystical body known as the “Electoral College.” What, we ALREADY do things that way??? That explains a lot…

—-

____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

Lunar Eclipses and Mad Men: My List Continues

dark-side-and-wish — “The Dark Side of the Moon” meets “Wish You Were Here”

Post #2 In My Favorite 10 Albums Challenge List.

A friend recently asked me what musical groups were still on my list of “bands I had never seen but would like to.” I don’t have such a list, but if I did Pink Floyd would be on it. That being said, I know I will never see them because 1) they are no longer a band, and 2) Roger Waters holds strong anti-Israel, pro-BDS beliefs (if you don’t know what that is, email me at les.raff@post.com) that would keep me from attending any concert he performed in. So though I will never see “The Floyd,” their music still hits my top ten album list. The question is, which album?

The easy answer is “The Dark Side of the Moon,” the 1973 Pink Floyd album that sold 46 trillion copies and spent nearly 7 decades on the Billboard 200, a record matched only by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Weird Al Yankovic’s “Polka Party!” But perhaps familiarity does breed contempt, as I now shudder every time the cash register rings at the beginning of “Money,” reminding me of the perpetual cash machine the album provides for Waters, Mason, Gilmour, and Wright.

So what is eclipsing “Dark Side” for me? It has to be Pink Floyd’s 1975 follow up, “Wish You Were Here.” It is only five tracks long, though track one, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” has many, many parts divided over both sides of the LP. SOYCD, like the title track, is a love song. But neither composition is aimed at a spouse, a girlfriend, or a mistress. The two pieces are a paean to Syd Barrett, the band’s long-gone, drug-addled founding member. Syd died in 2006, amazing all who had assumed he had already been dead for at least twenty years.

The album also includes”Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar,” darkly humorous condemnations of the music/recording business. The latter features the prophetic lyric “By the way, which one’s Pink.” This was many years before Alicia Beth Moore raised her glass and claimed the title. Maybe all those drugs gave the bandmates a peek into the future.

And that’s it. Five tracks. Blink and you miss it. But don’t worry. As long as WDRV, 97.1 The Drive, is still playing Classic Rock you don’t have to wish, this album will always be here.
____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

Can This “Terrorist” Be a Therapy Dog?

milo-at-rest — Milo contemplates his future as a therapy dog.

Barb loves dogs. And as an Occupational Therapist, she loves treating her patients. So is it any surprise that she has always wanted to have a therapy dog? No, not the ones wearing the vests that wind up in front of you on your trans-oceanic flight, those are service dogs. Her ambition is to have a dog she can take to hospitals, therapy centers, nursing homes or schools, to provide comfort and a more tranquil environment for those in need.

She tried it first with our previous dog Max, the gentle giant. In his puppyhood, we took him for an evaluation and were discouraged to learn the odds were stacked against his having the demeanor and learning the skills that would be needed in a therapy setting. Barb was crushed at that failure, but we had many happy years with our lovable Mini Irish Wolfhound.

Milo our pomeranian-rat terrier rescue dog joined us in November, and Barb has been committed to the challenge of creating the first Raff Animal Therapist (R.A.T.) We began with basic obedience training in group lessons at a training center not far from home. And what a group it was. Some big, some little, some furry, some hairless, some friendly, some not-so. And the dogs were a mixed bag as well!

We were led by four different instructors who tried hard but weren’t always on the same page. Milo at times appeared confused, as did Barb and I, but the pup passed his “Good Citizen” test on his first attempt. Unfortunately, his coterie of instructors wasn’t quite as impressed as we were and recommended that we reregister him in the basic course, which of course we did. “He is a terrier, or as I like to call them, a terrorist,” one of them repeatedly told us. “Smart, but with a mind of his own. He can do it, but this will take time!”

This past spring Milo finally took a leap forward and matriculated into a class preparing show dogs for their time in the ring. We have no idea why this was recommended to us, as Milo will never be on the contest circuit. Have you seen the movie “Best in Show”? After a few weeks of this training, I can tell you it only begins to scratch the surface of what that show world must be like.

Speaking of movies, do you remember Alex Baldwin in “Glengarry Glen Ross”? His motto: ABC–always be closing. Our instructors have that down pat, as they have sold us four leashes and three collars. But they have been generous with their treats, for which Milo is eternally grateful.

So where are we now? Milo just began a class to prep him for the entrance exam into Therapy Training. It’s like taking a Kaplan course for the LSAT, only the stakes here are higher. Will he make the cut and become a rat terrorist R.A.T? It is too soon to tell, but Barb and I have agreed, this will be our last attempt. If we can’t teach a dog to do therapy, I’ll just train our next one in pathology. And does anyone need a leash?

____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

Anti-American? Who Gets To Say?

nfl-flag-transparent — Do the NFL’s new rules tell us what an American is?

“The NFL is being anti-American.” That’s the email subject line on the David Leonhardt newsletter I received Thursday. David is a columnist for the New York Times and I subscribe to his daily newsletter, generally going along with his somewhat left-leaning views. And I concur with the premise of this one, too. He strongly disagrees with the new National Football League rule that penalizes and fines teams whose players decide to “take a knee” during the playing of the National Anthem. He feels the rules violate the player’s right of self-expression. I agree with him–it’s just that subject line (which he may not have written) that I have a hard time with. I immediately thought of an incident from about 10 years ago.

I was still a member of the Board of Education of Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, though no longer President. The Board, the District, and the School had all been running smoothly for many years, and the public comment portion of our meetings was typically short and non-controversial. We were able to spend our meeting time discussing educational issues and celebrating the successes of our students.

Until our agendas weren’t quite so smooth. A more conservative segment of the population became vocal, attending Board meetings and questioning the guiding philosophy and practices at the high school. Suddenly the biological sciences we had been instructing our students in became subject to dispute. Creationism started staring us in the face. And the patriotism of our Board members was also called into question. Were we failing in making America great?

The Board held firm on the most important issues, the curricular ones. But we did “cave” in one regard, one of the few times in my 16-year tenure in which I disagreed with a Board decision. We decided that all future Board meetings would begin with our facing the American flag, putting our hands on our hearts, and saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

I have no problem with the Pledge. I respect the American Flag and would never do anything to dishonor it. But I have an extreme distaste for being dictated to by a group of “patriots” as to what I have to do to display my own patriotism. I have always felt that being a law-abiding, voting citizen, who volunteered much of his time to serve his community, was proof enough of my love of country.

Not wanting to be disruptive, I didn’t take the “protest” approach. I stood at the beginning of each meeting and recited the Pledge with my colleagues. But I always felt like a phony. And each time, I knew I would never impose my idea of patriotism on anyone else.

So if some football players take a knee, that’s ok with me. And if the NFL wants to prohibit it, well, I think that is wrong. I just am careful as to who I call anti-American!
____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

Favorite Album Forum: My List Begins with the Beatles and the Stones

stones-beatles — This Beatles, Stones combo would make a smash double album!

Roger Marcus, a friend, fellow traveler, game show enthusiast, and trivialogist, has invited me to join the Facebook Favorite Album Forum. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be spouting on about ten different albums and what they mean to me. In addition, I will be inviting other friends to contribute their favorites.

I’ll be mixing these posts in with the usual collection of blogs. Since this is a Facebook project, if you want to contribute your ten, please do so on Facebook and be sure to “Friend” me. If you are not on Facebook, you can either sign up (another victim for Mark Z.) or just email me (les.raff@post.com) your ten favorites and I will post them for you.

Enough housekeeping! For my first entry, I plunge into the Beatles vs Stones debate. Although I was always more of a Beatles fan, I can greatly appreciate the rock’n’roll mastery of the Rolling Stones 1971 album, Sticky Fingers. The album cover, with a real live zipper, was notorious, but it was the music that rocked. Brown Sugar got things galloping, Wild Horses slowed things down. For me, the real treats were the guitar riff on Bitch, and the fantastic jam at the end of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, the best four and a half minutes of Stones vinyl anywhere.

Beatles anyone? While most rock critics would choose Rubber Soul or Sgt. Pepper as their most iconic, trend-setting, albums, I delight in A Hard Day’s Night (1964). A soundtrack to the movie of the same name, side one starts out with a ringing guitar chord that always makes me stop and listen. And so many of the songs just fill my mind with their related movie scenes. Side two (on the UK version) is a collection of non-movie songs that work great too!

Beatles or Stones-either way it’s a great choice, a choice that is still relevant 50 years later. Any thoughts on these two top albums? Let me hear from you! And look out for more great sounds in the weeks to come.

____
Like what you read here? Add your name to our subscription list below. No spam, I promise!
___

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

	Les Raff on Ending It With An Old Fri…
	SACHIN KALE on Ending It With An Old Fri…
	Nancy M on Ending It With An Old Fri…
	John Petru on Interchangeable Choices
	J. P. Karlinsky on 24 and Me

Subscribe to our mailing list

So keep on playing those mind games together Doing the ritual dance in the sun John Lennon, Mind Games, 1973

Subscribe to our mailing list

Subscribe to our mailing list

Subscribe to our mailing list

Subscribe to our mailing list

Subscribe to our mailing list

Subscribe to our mailing list

Subscribe to our mailing list

Subscribe to our mailing list

So keep on playing those mind games together
Doing the ritual dance in the sun
John Lennon, Mind Games, 1973