Muscles’ guide to Casey pool
Week 1: Ball and pocket names.
In this segment of station news we are going to learn about what it means to play pool on an Antarctic station. Week one will cover ball and pocket names, and in week two we will go over tactics.
Playing pool is no mean feat down here, for one, all of the pockets have names, and the names are either well thought out by us or hard earned by the pocket.
There is the ‘Kiwi drain’ named after Steve ‘Kiwi’ Edwards who was an expeditioner who was here for the winter prior to my season, it’s said that a ball will get right to the edge of this hole then reverse direction and stop just back from the edge. I’m sure there is a hilarious story accompanying this name but I can’t remember how it goes, my group has stuck with this name in honour of the story — even though we can’t remember it.
Moving around the table the next pocket we come to is Newcomb Bay. This pocket got its name for being the closest pocket to…wait for it…Newcomb bay… and also for the fact that way back when Wilkes station was going they used to pile up their waste and push it into Newcomb Bay.
Next is the FOCE hole, named after a science program called ‘FOCE’ which is a study of marine life on the Antarctic sea floor where teams drill large holes through sea ice and send down ROV’s to study corals and sea creatures that (somehow) live down there.
Next up is ‘the pit of Carkoon’ which got its name in a similar manner to the kiwi drain and is interestingly on the diagonally opposite end of the table. Players claim that there is a force–field around this hole that prevents balls going in and sometimes even repels them. Of course the pit of Carkoon is from Star Wars, it is also known as ‘the sarlac pit’ into which Jabba the Hut attempted to throw Luke Skywalker, Hahn Solo, and princess Leia, so the name was a real no brainer for the naming team down here.
The next hole we come to on our tour of the table is ‘The Gap’ which is known for its loosely hanging net (the net the balls fall into), this net has quite a noticeable ‘gap’ in one side where it appears it may be missing a staple or some other means to fasten it to the table… and finally we come to rest at ‘holey moley’ — the pocket that never worked hard for anything, and therefore it was up to us as the naming team to come up with something, and that’s the best we had.
Right so we've got the pockets sorted and now we can do what we came here to do and play some pool, right? Wrong! We will need to know what the balls are called before we can go getting carried away hitting them around the table, so let’s get started. We will start with the 'smalls' or 'solids' first and I will do it in dot form to make it easy.
Green ball — Sweet Pea. Named after a manikin who lives at Casey named sweet pea, and also because the ball looks somewhat like a pea.
Blue ball — Blueberry, because it resembles a giant blueberry
Yellow ball — Lemon ball, its yellow and round like a lemon
Red ball — Cherry because it looks like a cherry (pretty creative so far hey…)
Maroon ball — Ron Burgundy, or Ron for short, because it is burgundy in colour and Ron Burgundy is the legend of the Channel 5 news team
Orange ball — Kenny, ‘cos it looks like Kenny from South Park
Purple ball — Grimace, because its round and purple like grimace from McDonalds
Black ball — Blackfish or ‘the fish’ for short, named after a sorely missed summer sparkie of the same name
OK so that’s got the smalls out of the way, now let’s ‘hit’ the bigs (ha-ha-ha)
Big yellow — Big Bird
Big green — Big Brassik, named after brassica which is stuff like broccoli and brussel sprouts etc.
Big orange — Michelangelo, named after the orange ninja turtle
Big red — Rafael, red ninja turtle
Big blue — Leonardo, blue ninja turtle
Big purple — Donatello, named after the purple ninja turtle
Big maroon — Boney Maroony, a name given to this ball by Jacob ‘Cob’ Taylor, one of the winterers we took over from and the man who we consider the godfather of ball and pocket naming.
OK well that about wraps it up for week one, I hope you've all enjoyed the read so far, and make sure to stay tuned next week to find out about tactics on the table… and let me assure you, you do not want to miss it.
Steve
