At a UMaine hockey game recently, I was reminded of the first time I saw people step dancing. It was on a wooden platform at a street festival in Skowhegan. The dancers moved individually in complicated sequences to the same inner program. They didn't even look at each other. My first impression was that their knowledge of the movements was genetic, that I was witnessing an adaptive behavior of an isolated country clan. At the hockey game, most of the 5,000 people there seemed to say the same thing, make the same sound at exactly the right moment, so that the human-powered pinball game smashing along inside the glass was accompanied by a Greek chorus with perfect timing. Sometimes it's more fun not to know the rules, and to just watch the anthill. I remember a pleasant hour over a beer in Quebec watching people play Bocchi. The hockey game scored high in the PWF index. I saw a man leap across two rows of seats and pound on the glass, protesting some call. I discovered the Polish Wedding Factor in a movie called What the bleep Do We Know, which wanted to be about how quantum reality and neurological processes are kind of alike, and so there were a lot of voice overs from dedicated amateurs, with occasional animated patterns which might have been fun in the 70's, and then by way of anecdotal illumination of something, they would cut to the ongoing Polish Wedding. Ahh, the Polish Wedding. There was music and dancing and passion and confusion and color and the steam bath of a lot of people all having feelings at the same time. I would have thought I'd be in it for the ideas, but I'm not. I'm in it for the Polish Wedding.

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