More Squirrels Playing Cards

9 out of 10 squirrels prefer cribbage. It's just a fact.

You can keep your "Dogs Playing Poker" paintings. I have something much better: taxidermy squirrels playing cards. I posted one with the site update earlier today, but I thought I'd roll out the rest of them here.

I'm not sure where they all come from. In my journeys around the internet I just save any weird gaming photos I happen to stumble upon. Some of them (such as the one at the top) are the work of Walter Potter, Victorian taxidermy's mad genius. And some are just the work of people with too damn much time on their hands.

Interesting fact: every tableaux includes a smoking squirrel. And most of them also have at least one kibitzer. See if you can find the tableaux where it appears as though one squirrel has bet his own tail. That's just hardcore.

from the National Museum of Play

Peaceable Kingdom: Stoat (?), Fox, Rabbit, and Cat. (The fox is cheating.)

"You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em..."

Crack! Bam! Dot?

photo from Project Mah Jongg

Cliches and stereotypes almost always evolve out of some truth, and such is the case with the image of the mah jongg-playing Jewish housewife. An exhibit called "Project Mah Jongg" traces this connection, and it will continue to run at The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York into January. The exhibit website is quite good, and has an large gallery of period photos as well as a schedule of special events at the exhibit.

The game was brought from China to America in the 1920s, and by the 1930s it was a genuine fad. It's difficult to trace exactly why one culture adopts a game so passionately, but there's no question that mah johngg was deeply entwined with the Jewish diaspora in America by the 1930s. The National Mah Jongg League was founded by a group of Jewish women who wanted to create a standard set of rules, and after the game's popularity faded in the rest of America, the Jewish community kept it alive. Meredith Lewis has written an article explaining the connection, which you can find right here.

Melissa Martens, curator of "Project Mah Jongg," narrates an excellent 5-minute video that summarizes the growth of the game and the ways in which is became enmeshed in Jewish-American culture.

Googling "mah jongg" can, unfortunately, lead to page after page of links to Mah Jongg Solitaire, which is a stacking game played with the tiles. It has little to do with actual mah jongg, which is really just a card game played with domino-like pieces. If you'd like to learn a bit more about the game, the wiki entry is as good a place to start as any.