It failed to have the desired effect. . .

A bunch of 12-sided dice, much like the two bags of 25 each that arrived from Amazon earlier today.

Here's an item for wargamers, role-playing gamers, and, indeed, gamers of all stripes who have experience with multi-sided dice.  Who knows?  One day, anthropologists might just study the rituals and courtship practices of gamers, much like Jane Goodall's and Diane Fossey's work with the Chimpanzees and Gorillas of Central Africa.  There's got to be a dissertation or monograph in it at the very least.

A package containing two bags of 25 twelve-sided dice each (for a total of 50 dice) was left on our front porch earlier today.  I ordered these on Friday to use as a way of quickly generating random discussion groups among the students in some of my larger courses.  Upon opening the box and confirming that the contents consisted of the expected items, I felt compelled to perform a spontaneous version of the Polyhedral Dice Erotic Courtship Dance right there in the kitchen for the Grand Duchess.  

Sadly, my dance did not exactly have the effect on her I hoped for.  Rather the opposite.  Instead of leaping into my arms, she laughed for a solid two minutes and, once she caught her breath, told me to go back downstairs.  Sigh.  Something tells me that I might have better luck with Sparrows, Robins, or Grackles next spring.

-- Stokes


P.S.
 The 50 twelve-sided dice are intended to help me randomly break my classes of 48-50 students up into discussion groups of three-five students quickly and easily.  We've done the favorite colors, month of birth, favorite fruit, etc. already, and random group generation is a way to shake things up a bit and prevent cliques that invariably drift off task from forming.  It was suggested by a visiting pedagogy expert who gave a very interesting talk here about a year ago.