Madventures has a habit of leaving all the important decisions to the old reliable game of rock, paper and scissors. The Cantonese people of China play their own version of this merrymaking called gosukumi. Here’s a quick index of rules to get you started.

The symbols are god, chicken, gun, fox, and termite. God is the thumb, chicken the index finger, gun the middle finger, fox the ring finger, and termite the little finger.

The sukumi relationships are as follows: with God and Chicken, chicken is sacrificed to god and thus loses. With God and Gun, the gun introduces people to god and thus God wins. The termite eats the God’s statue, as one does, and thus the termite wins.

Confused yet? Good!

The gun defeats the chicken. The fox defeats the chicken too. The chicken defeats the termite. Pretty self-explanatory!

The gun defeats the fox. Other than that, the god and the fox are bosom buddies, as are the gun and termite, and the fox and termite take no notice of each other, so these symbols tie with each other. So the god and the gun rule. And the chicken? Well, not so much.

And that’s all she wrote, really.

Protip: Gosukumi is simple and addictive! Now you have something to kill the time with the next time your stuck in a bus or your plane is forced to circle the airport.

Now that you’ve seen real life cricket Kung Fu, perhaps you were bitten by a bug? Click here for some basics you need to learn before entering the hobby..

Originally published in The Journal of the American Medical Association

By Nicholas O’Teen, MD

One of the emerging 21^st century pandemics alongside H1N1 and HIV is SBSD, more commonly known as Sentient Being Sympathy Disorder.

It has been known to affect outwardly rational people, usually living in the wealthiest nations of the world.

The symptoms include spoken out loud flatulentus cerebellum akin to Tourette’s syndrome. Common examples are “Fluffy is a member of our family”, ”Holy cow, why is there no beef in Big Mac in India?” and “That just proves that they are all uncivilized barbarians in that part of the world.”

Even more common example of SBSD is the artificial labeling of animals between “livestock” and “pets”. Again, this usually happens where polypeptides are plenty and severe energy intake reduction rarely occurs.

Moreover, SBSD often causes arbitrary mental forms and processes such as choosing to call some animals ”he” or “she”, yet others “it”. This is done to feel better about our food choices in the golden age of the industrially mass-produced nutrition.

People suffering from the malady usually don’t know they have it. They have domesticated, even projected emotions on certain animals and are unable to see that in some other conditions and cultures those creatures can be not only a viable, but vital food source.

Many of the claims made under the influence of the disorder towards these cultures are quite incoherent, like blaming some nations “eat pets” – which makes about as much sense as playing petting zoo in a tiger cage, just because one loved Tigger as a kid.

For example, in the early 20th century, eating dogs was common in Germany and some parts of Switzerland, but otherwise Europeans usually frowned upon it. These days such practices are of course unheard of, yet it rarely occurs to people that they might be in minority in their nutritional choices.  In many parts of Africa, canine consumption is not unheard of, simply because there are not enough protein sources running around.

In Islamic culture, eating dogs is forbidden under Muslim dietary laws, but in China, eating dogs is a tradition spanning centuries. It is done not only for culinary, but also for medicinal purposes, since dogs are known to lower your blood pressure and keep you warm.

Indeed, one man’s pet is another’s livestock.

Luckily, SBSD is somewhat easily healed. Open your eyes, broaden your mind, maybe even try traveling to another country, perhaps another continent altogether.

Where Mickey D’s may not be an option.