Sometimes when I leave work it's very late at night. At such odd hours, CSPAN Book-TV airs on the radio, and I've had a number of enjoyable cold nights in the car listening to stuff beyond the usual politics.
The most recent one was, as is fairly common, not a book by someone I suspect I'd be ideologically, let alone theologically, agreeable to or with -- based on a mention she made in the broadcast to the effect that 'Monopoly started out as a grass-roots left-wing financial teaching tool, and developed into a symbol of big business.' (paraphrase).
But I found the broadcast intriguing for the historical aspect. The book was called The Monopolists. Aptly so, because of the behavior of the company Parker Brothers in trying to wrest, and keep, control of the rights to the game. And that brings me to this:
Here is the C-SPAN video of the Q&A: http://www.c-span.org/video/?324580-1/mary-pilon-monopolists
Just wanted to share my little historical discovery. I'm going to guess that the video is the audio equivalent of the broadcast I listened to a few days ago, and encourage you, if you're bored and a little curious about board games and patent lawsuits, to listen to it and find out why those 40,000 board games happen to be buried underneath a condominium complex in the middle of America.
~ Rak Chazak
The most recent one was, as is fairly common, not a book by someone I suspect I'd be ideologically, let alone theologically, agreeable to or with -- based on a mention she made in the broadcast to the effect that 'Monopoly started out as a grass-roots left-wing financial teaching tool, and developed into a symbol of big business.' (paraphrase).
But I found the broadcast intriguing for the historical aspect. The book was called The Monopolists. Aptly so, because of the behavior of the company Parker Brothers in trying to wrest, and keep, control of the rights to the game. And that brings me to this:
[in answering why she wrote the book] "I think we need a document to explain why there are 40,000 board games buried in Wisconsin."Please excuse me if it was Minnesota; those states are hard to distinguish and the quote is from memory.
Here is the C-SPAN video of the Q&A: http://www.c-span.org/video/?324580-1/mary-pilon-monopolists
Just wanted to share my little historical discovery. I'm going to guess that the video is the audio equivalent of the broadcast I listened to a few days ago, and encourage you, if you're bored and a little curious about board games and patent lawsuits, to listen to it and find out why those 40,000 board games happen to be buried underneath a condominium complex in the middle of America.
~ Rak Chazak
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