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The Domino Folk

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Was God A Dominos Player

or

The Domino Folk

by Professor P Arcel-Force, holder of the General Electric Chair of Recreational History at the University of Guam

My associate Herr Doctor Norbert Dentrassangle's excellent article on Japanese bridges caused many raised eyebrows and voices in the starchy upper crust world of dominos research. Many people consider him to be an eccentric and a man who jumps to conclusions. Recently we were discussing our current areas of research and he mentioned that he had several ideas and that he'd be very grateful if someone could take them on as he was bogged down in research on Easter Island.

I have spent many hours, minutes even, in complicated research following up his initial theory and what I have discovered will shake not only the world of dominos to the root but also the whole established history of this island, if not that of the world.

Dominos was invented in England, not Japan, and not in recent times either but in prehistoric times. My research shows that before the beaker people came along there was a, now extinct, branch of the human race that I have called the domino folk. The domino folk were a simple race who scraped a living from the soil; they had a simple belief :they believed that the world was the creation of a single god, a god they called Morris (the vestigial remains of the complex ceremonies they performed are now grossly parodied by Morris Dancers). In their life 99 seems to have been a very, very important number and it features heavily in the basic stone carving they carried out.

Of course it is not for their carving that the domino folk are remembered for indeed the world has been ignorant of their existence now for many a century. No the domino folk passed out of the memories of man, but left a lasting mark on the landscape on England.

The domino folk believed that one day Morris and his fellow Gods would return to the planet Morris had made and would play dominos. Of course being Gods Morris and his friends would not play with the humble bone dominos that the domino folk played with and so they set about cutting out a huge set from the natural stone of their local countryside. These stone dominos were then laid out in boneyards awaiting the arrival of Morris; but Morris didn't come. Over the centuries the domino folk went to great extremes to try to encourage Morris back to earth they dragged stone all the way from Wales. They built complex domino cascades hoping that they could encourage Morris to tip the first domino over and cause the complex patterns they had spent hundreds of years building to topple over. But still Morris did not come. Eventually the elders started wondering if Morris thought that it was too late to start playing dominos and so they built an astronomical clock to show Morris that there was plenty of time.

But it was all to no avail. Morris failed to show himself to his people, belief in him waned and the domino folk dispersed across the landscape promising to meet up sometime in the future.

Of their houses and villages nothing remains, but their dedication to their belief in Morris is still visible to this day. Although ravaged by time and pilfering of the stones by other tribes, you can still see the elegance of the cascade built in Wiltshire, which we know as Avebury. Silbury Hill has been stripped of all its stone dominos and the terracing has been flattened but it is easy to picture it with its spiral of dominos waiting for Morris to topple the bottom domino and watch the cascade spiral its way to the top. Of course their most famous creation - their astronomical clock - still stands largely untouched, and although we have known for sometime that is was a clock we seem to believe that Stonehenge was built to work out when it was midsummer