Subject: Re: Dorbel -- the masses have spoken

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 15:51:35 EDT

>dorbel (n) In rolley-hole marbles tournaments, a two-point bonus score
>awarded when a player passes more than three holes on one turn

When I sent this definition in, Melissa asked me to explain rolley-hole 
marbles to her sometime.  I don't know much about it.  I ran into it about 15 
years ago on a family vacation in a state park in Tennessee, where they hold 
the annual national rolley hole marbles tournament.  (They had a few 
competitors from Kentucky, and maybe another state too, so they called it 
"national.") The field is a flat, rectangular patch of dirt, maybe 6 feet 
wide and 10 feet long (I could be completely mis-estimating this) with 
several (3?) marble-sized holes dug in it, maybe 2 feet apart, in a straight 
line.  The object of the game is to roll your marble into the holes somehow.  
As I said, it's been about 15 years, and I've never run across it since.
I seem to recall something about the marbles being traditionally made by 
placing round pebbles in little potholes under waterfalls and coming back in 
a few years when they were eroded into spheres, but maybe that was something 
else.
A few years ago somebody's choice of word had to do with some card game I'd 
never heard of, but it was for real.  So I thought I'd make up a definition 
based on a real game.
-Fran

---

From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 10:01:10 -0400

>never heard of, but it was for real.  So I thought I'd make up a definition 

Which is why, when, I see a card game I don't understand, it's gleek to me!

phma

---

From: Aussie Meyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 09:16:56 -0700

> Which is why, when, I see a card game I don't understand, it's gleek to me!

And now we may all become Holey Rollers!  

Rolley-hole marbles sounds like a heck of a game to me, very impressive,
almost golf-like in scope.