June 20, 2004

"MARK these dates – July 9th & 10th," reads the stern warning on the front page of this week’s target. Why are these particular dates in the sporting calendar so important? Well, my little cherubs, these are the days when the 29th annual World Championship Domino Tournament takes place. And you thought it was something exciting.

The tournament is held in Andalusia. Not the Andalusia in southern Spain, oh no, it’s the equally world-famous Andalusia in Alabama. The competition has been held since 1998 and there’s a $3000 prize for the champion, which isn’t a bad amount for what is effectively a join-the-dots competition. Also on offer is $100 for the children’s champion which should keep them in McDonald’s and Playstation games for a while.

A quick check of the previous winners’ page shows what I suspected – for a "world" championship, there sure are a lot of winners from the USA. All of them, in fact. And of those, all come from about four states. This is a pretty loose definition of "world championship", I think you’ll agree, but as the southern states still think they were cheated out of winning the Civil War, we’ll let them off for now.

There’s also a concise history of domino playing, which is pretty interesting in the way it links Tutankhamen with Lyndon Johnson through the medium of putting small wooden dotted oblongs on a table.

And if you want to get to Andalusia for the tournament? The website provides directions from either Montgomery (the city, not the field marshal) or Mobile. Whether that’s the town of Mobile or a mobile home is left to your imagination. As this is Alabama – also known as "casting central for the Jerry Springer show" – my money’s on the latter.

If you look at the links page and click "Domino Toppling" you’ll come to a prime example of how not to design a website. Oddly enough, this is for an actual company called Domino F/X, who’ve obviously heard of the concept of effective marketing but want nothing to do with it. Take this example: "The kids do most of the setting we supply the dominoes and train them and the most important thing make sure it will work". These people can train dominoes? Fantastic!