Compressed Mesopotamia

So this week, Martin and I worked on several two-person patterns.

First we worked on the Compressed Mesopotamia, which is a 7-club pattern that we've been doing every so often for a couple years, I think. It's a pretty crazy-hard pattern, mostly because on paper it should be done in doubles, but we do it in singles, so it's really fast. The story behind that is basically just that when we were initially figuring out the pattern, we thought that it was one of those 7-club patterns where in the diagram the passes are "one-and-a-halfs"; there are a number of such patterns, and they can be done either in doubles or singles, or doubles over singles (one person throwing doubles, the other throwing singles). Anyway, so we thought that this pattern was like that, and so we decided to try it in singles... Later, when we diagrammed it, we realized that in fact, they're not one-and-a-halfs at all, they're genuine doubles. Which explained why it was, as we'd noticed, really fast!

Anyway, so our longest run is probably something like 10 cycles or so. This week, our best was about 8 cycles. Martin's pattern is pass-pass-pass-handacross, and mine is pass-pass-pass-self. So you can see the end of each cycle by watching Martin's handacrosses or my selfs. This was a pretty good run, it felt pretty comfortable, at least until it started to get really hectic!

Large - 29 MB Medium - 3.9 MB Small - 1.1 MB

Then we worked on the 8-club 1-count for a while. We've also been working on that for a couple years, off and on. Sometimes it really clicks and we seem able to get some good runs over 20 cycles, and other times, we're struggling to get 10. This week we did pretty well, with two runs of about 21 cycles... (We think our record is around 26.) Here's one of those two runs.

Large - 44 MB Medium - 6.0 MB Small - 1.7 MB

Then we decided to try the 9-club 1-count. I don't think we've ever tried it before. We did it in doubles, though I'm thinking that maybe next time we should try doubles-over-singles, which is how we do the 8-club 1-count; it would be a little faster, but his passes to me would be better, which is likely to mean my passes to him are better too... Anyway, so here's the best run we got. He made 9 catches, and I made almost that -- I missed club number 7, but I caught 8 and 9... I'm calling this 4 cycles (a cycle being 2 counts, as in the 8-club 1-count), which isn't technically right, but whatever.

Large - 18 MB Medium - 2.4 MB Small - .72 MB

Then we realized we hadn't done anything with only 6 clubs, so we did some squirrel and moose variations; most notably, the left-handed moose...

Posted by neilfred at June 23, 2003 01:43 AM