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March 5, 2008
Let's Play Stump Speech Bingo!
Having watched the presidential candidates give stump speeches a gazillion times, it didn't take long for me to start recognizing certain phrases. On Twitter, several of us even began to joke about having drinking games every time McCain said "my friends" or Obama said "hopemonger," for example. So it occurred it me it would be fun to create some kind of game for spotting all the catch phrases they use in their stump speeches again and again. So I came up with Stump Speech Bingo. I tracked down some code that would allow me to generate random bingo cards, which I then populated with stock phrases used by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Here's an example of a randomly generated John McCain bingo card:
Since my blog isn't printer friendly, you won't want to print out this page. So I created a new page that would generate random bingo cards for each candidate: Game rules: Before a candidate begins a speech, have each player print out their own copy of the candidate's bingo card. (It'll generate a new random bingo card when you reload the page.) Then, as the candidate uses stock phrases from his or her stump speech, look for them on your card. If you find a match in one of the boxes on your card, mark off that box. The box marked "BINGO" is a freebie that you can mark off immediately. As soon as you get five across or diagonally, call out "stump speech bingo!" and you'll be the winner. (If you're playing via Twitter, simply tweet the message to your friends.) If you have any questions about the game or would like to suggest other stock phrases from candidates' stump speeches, please post a comment here or email me at andycarvin _at_ yahoo DOT com. I'm also hoping to create special editions to be used at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions - stay tuned! And special thanks to Karl Geiger for making the source code of his bingo card generator available on his website. -andy
Tags: Barack Obama | election 2008 | games | Hillary Clinton | John McCain | presidential candidates | rhetoric | Stump Speech Bingo | stump speeches
Posted by acarvin at March 5, 2008 8:48 PM
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