Rock, Paper, Scissors

Now here is a coincidence.

I am reading two books, "Fatelessness" by Imre Kertesz, a Nobel Prize winning Holocaust novel, and "One's Company" by Peter Fleming, a British journalist and brother to Ian, who wrote a travel book about his journey to China in 1933. Very different books.

In the Kertesz book, after our fifteen year old hero and tens of other Jewish youth are herded off a bus in Budapest in 1944, and held in a large empty builidng for several hours, the guarding policeman asks them if they knew any "party games". Page 45: "One boy - "Leatherware" as I recall - suggested paper, scissors, stone. The policeman, however, was not too keen on that, saying that he had expected better of "such bright kids" like us."

In the Fleming work, in Hangchow, the author is dining in a restaurant with a friend. Page 167: "From a room downstairs came that sound which so often accompanies meals in China - the staccato, competitive ejaculations of a party playing the "scissors" game. In this you and your opponent shoot out your right hands at each other simultaneously, the fingers being arranged in three postures. A clenched fist means "stone"; two fingers extended mean "scissors"; all five fingers extended mean "paper"........"

I can't wait for Google to put every book in the world on line. As soon as they tell me they are finished, I am going to write my Ph.D. thesis on "rock, paper, scissors" in fiction and non-fiction writing across the ages.