People You Can Impress: Anyone who knows what kabbadi is.

The Quick Trick: Are the players over 10 years old? Congrats, you’re watching kabaddi (we hope!)

The Explanation:
Tag is a simple child’s game. Kabaddi is a simple child’s game taken to maddening heights of silliness. To clarify “tag,” we’re talking about freeze tag, blob tag, “you’re it” tag, team tag, and any other of the variations of the game where the object is to touch another person, thereby rendering him or her “out” or “it.”

To clarify “kabaddi,” we mean breath-holding, scary, chanting tag. Enjoyed primarily in India, kabaddi is a team sport played on a bisected field about the size of a volleyball court. Each team consists of twelve players, with seven of them taking the court at a time. The teams alternate offense and defense. The offensive team designates a “raider”—a player chosen to infiltrate enemy territory and “tag” as many opposing players as he can. The tricky bit? He’s only allowed one breath’s time to do all his tagging. To prove that he hasn’t drawn another breath, the raider is required to chant the name of the sport the entire time he’s on enemy soil. “Kabaddikabaddikabaddikabaddikabaddi . . .” If he can’t get back to his team’s side before stopping his chant, he’s out. Strangestrangestrangestrangestrange. . . .

Good to Know
While you probably won’t need a translation service to join in a foreign game of tag, you just never know (kids can be so cruel). So, in an effort to make sure words don’t provide any sort of stumbling block, we’ve provided a handy translation guide to help
you out.

Tag’s Pseudonyms Across the Globe

Japan: Onigokko (where “It” is called “Oni”)
England: It, dobby, tic, or tig
Ireland: Chasing
Brazil: Pega Pega (“catch catch”)
Australia: Tiggy, tips, or chasey
Finland: Hippa
Colombia: La Lleva (“the carrying”)
France: Chat (“cat”)

People You Can Impress: Mystified fans of either sport who don’t understand the other.

The Quick Trick: Is the bat round? You’re watching baseball. Is it flat? Then it’s cricket. (A slightly slower trick would be to hang around for five days. If the game’s still going on, it’s cricket!)

The Explanation:
The technical aspects of these games are very different. Base- ball has nine players, cricket has eleven; cricket has two bases, whereas baseball has four. But their foremost difference is philosophical. In short, baseball favors defense, while cricket favors offense. Consider the 2003 baseball season in which the prolific Boston Red Sox scored 961 runs in a 162-game season. By comparison, the average cricket team scores 320 runs in a single match. There is also a faster rotation of players in baseball. A rotation of nine batters will have their chance at the plate, or be “put out,” four or five times in a game. In cricket, however, it takes about six hours to retire (or call out) eight men.

A cricket batsman can be retired in one of three ways: The bowler (pitcher) can knock over the offense’s wickets—a set of sticks set up behind the batsmen; a field player can catch a battled ball before it bounces; or a fielder may tag the base the batter is trying to reach before he gets there. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. In fact, since a cricketer bats until he’s retired, it’s not uncommon for a batsman to drive in 50 to 100 runs in a single turn. (Can you imagine Barry Bonds hitting a homer, trotting around the bases, and then picking up the bat to hit again, and again, and again?)

So why are these cricket batsmen so hard to call out? Number one, they never have to swing. In baseball, if you let pitch after pitch go by, you’ll either walk or be struck out, ending your time at the plate. But in cricket, you can swing whenever the mood strikes. Plus, even when a cricketer does make contact, he’s not required to run. If he doesn’t like his chances of making it safely to the other base, he can just stay there and try again. Other cricketer advantages include the ability to hit the ball in any direction (no foul lines here) and a hefty 6-run score for batting the ball over the fence. Six runs? That means Barry Bonds’s record-setting 73 single-season homers would have been worth 438 runs. Wow. Then he wouldn’t even have needed steroids (allegedly).

People You Can Impress: manly sports enthusiasts in former British colonies

The Quick Trick: If the players don’t have padding, it’s Australian for football.

The Explanation:
Rather than rip off American football, the Canadian Football League actually started as modified English rugby, then borrowed heavily from its American counterpart until the two were almost identical. The first difference you’ll notice about Canadian football is the field. It’s huge—110 yards long (with two 50 yard lines and a center line), 65 yards wide, with end zones 20 yards deep.

Canadian play is similar to American football, with interesting differences. There are 12 players to a side. The game moves fast, as the play clock is only 20 seconds and you have to go ten yards in only three downs. The backfield can have unlimited motion before the snap, so you can have receivers and “slot backs” moving at once, even toward the line of scrimmage (so they can be at a full run when the ball is snapped). There’s an added way to score, too. On a kickoff, punt, or—get this—missed field goal, the receiving team must advance the ball out of the end zone or the kicking team gets a point (called a single, or rouge).

Today the CFL is composed of nine teams, including the Montréal Alouettes (“The Als”) and the Edmonton Eskimos, with the perennial powerhouse (or powerhoos if you’re Canadian) being the Toronto Argonauts. They’ve won the coveted Grey Cup (their Super Bowl) 14 times.

Australian Rules Football (“Aussie Rules” or, more charmingly, “Footy”) is what happens when a penal colony decides to play rugby. The huge field is a modified cricket oval, but there’s no standard size. You’ve got a center square, two 50-meter arcs, two 10-meter goal squares, and four posts at each end (two very tall goal posts flanked by shorter “behind posts”). Each side gets 18 players, with cool positions like ruckman, rover, ruck rover, half-forward, and back pocket.

Play starts with a “centre bounce” (or “ball up”) and the ruckmen jump for it. The ball is bigger and rounder than an American football. You can kick or punch the ball but not throw it. You can also run as far as you want with it, but you have to bounce it every 15 meters. If you’re tackled, you must kick or punch the ball away to a teammate. If you catch a kicked ball cleanly, that’s called a mark, and you get a free kick toward the other team’s goal. Kick the ball between the two center posts for a goal (six points), or between one of the center poles and a behind pole for a “behind” (one point). As for scoring, you can tell who just scored what by watching umpires in white lab coats and funny hats make appropriate pointy motions.

The sport is one of constant motion and an absolute blast to watch. The tackling is truly brutal, and acrobatic “high marks” or “species” are spectacular. Plus, they don’t wear pads. Heck, their “guernseys” don’t even have sleeves.

The Quick Trick: There is no quick trick to exercise. It takes commitment!

The Explanation:
We in the western hemisphere tend to think of yoga as a way to stretch out or shed stress. But the practice began as something very spiritual. Those who practiced yoga (yogis) did so to control their bodies and free themselves from temptation and achieve nirvana. In fact, yoga actually predates Hinduism.

The main yoga practiced outside India today is called hatha yoga. The point is to balance your body and your mind through controlled breathing (pranayama), mental focus, and a series of postures called asanas, like the well-known Lotus (padmasana) and Downward-Facing Dog (adho mukha svanasana). Some ascribe a spiritual dimension to the practice akin to its Eastern origins. This kundalini yoga uses asanas to release life energy clustered in seven chakras, or centers of spiritualenergy.

Bikram, a kind of “hot yoga” named after its originator, increases flexibility (and sweating) by doing yoga in a really hot room. Bikram, by the way, is not quite as exotic as it sounds: The main studio is on La Cienega Boulevard in L.A.

Pilates, on the other hand, combines the idea of mind-and-body union with an emphasis on physical development and fitness. It was originally named Contrology by its inventor, Joseph H. Pilates, and although it’s not as old as yoga, it’s older than you’d think. Pilates came up with the exercises while working as a nurse during World War I! His focus was to “control” the muscles with the consciousness. Instead of lots of repetitions of simple movements (like dumbbell curls), Pilates stressed doing fewer reps of more skilled movements, thereby engaging the mind. He came up with over 500 of these (today there are thousands). Of course, his original method involved a lot of specially designed machines as well (basically modified gymnastics apparatuses, with springs added for resistance), including the Spine Corrector Barrel and the Cadillac, the latter involving a bench and parallel bars and looking an awful lot like a torture device.

The Pilates method gained popularity in the U.S. when it was espoused by two dance giants of the era: Martha Graham and George Balanchine. Along with yoga, it saw a huge resurgence in the 1990s, when it was heavily endorsed by Madonna.

Celebrity Roundup
Every celebrity faces a stark choice during his or her ride on the fame train: Will I choose yoga or Pilates?

Yoga: Ricky Martin, Meg Ryan, Jerry Seinfeld, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Gwyneth Paltrow

Pilates: Jennifer Aniston, Lucy “Xena” Lawless, Hugh Grant, Patrick Swayze, Daisy Fuentes, and Rod Stewart

Materials Needed: a tolerance for French words

People You Can Impress: your aforementioned mortal enemy, Zorro, and fans of The Princess Bride

The Explanation:
To the uninitiated, fencing can be a bit baffling. For instance, in modern fencing, the touches are registered electronically but there’s still a referee (also called a president) who can call hits that didn’t register electronically or overrule ones that did. But all that’s beside the point. To begin with, fencing can be broken down into three major categories.

The first is foil, the lightest and most flexible of the fencing weapons. In foil, the only valid target is the opponent’s trunk (roughly from the top of the collar to the crotch in front, and to the top of the hipbones in the back). The arms, legs, and head are no good, and only hits with the foil’s tip are counted. Basically, foil fencing is a modernized form of what was, traditionally, sword-fighting practice—like, if someone made a sport out of hitting tackling blocks.

If you are really dueling with a seriously sharp rapier, any touch anywhere on the body would smart. And that’s the origin of the épée, a heavier, more rigid version of the foil, with a triangular blade and a larger, “bowl-shaped” blade guard (to protect the hand). In épée, a person’s whole body is fair game, including the head. Like foil, épée touches must be made with only the tip, and both disciplines require the fencers to stop after each touch is made, whether on a valid target area or not.

The last discipline is saber, an incredibly fast-paced whack fest that’s a hand-me-down from the days of cavalrymen slashing away on horseback. The fencing saber is heavier and has a large, curved hand guard. The target area is anything from the waist up (the parts you’d be swinging at if you and your opponents were both on horses). But two big differences make saber the most frenetic of the disciplines. First, the edge of the saber can be used as well as the point, so slashes are valid hits; and second, the bout does not stop after an off-target hit, so the opponents will whack and slash at each other until a legal hit is registered, making it a hoot to watch.

Vocab Lesson
Like ballet, fencing is of (mostly) French origin and uses a list of French words longer than the average baguette. For instance, the strip on which the bouts take place is the piste. An attack that strongly grazes the opponent’s blade is a froissement. One that starts before a stoppage in play but lands after is called a coup lancé. And a leaping, running attack is called a flèche.

People You Can Impress: guys named after cities

The Quick Trick: Look at the table: If it’s bigger than the standard American pool table, you’re playing billiards or snooker. If there are more than three balls on this big table, it’s definitely snooker.

The Explanation:
When it comes to distinguishing pool from other billiards games, size—and we’re talking about tables here—definitely matters. Pool, for instance, is the game you’ll probably find in most American bars, using tables that are generally 41⁄2′×9′ (although tables can be as short as 7′). Billiards and snooker, on the other hand, are played on a huge table 6′×12′.

Of course, there are other differences as well. The most common pool games are 8-ball and 9-ball. In 8-ball, a player must pocket all the balls of his type (stripes or solids) before sinking the eight ball. Nine-ball, however, only uses the balls numbered 1 through 9. And while the balls can be sunk in any order, the first ball struck every time must be the lowest-numbered one on the table. The first player to sink the 9-ball, even if other balls are still on the table, wins.

As for billiards and snooker, the first (semantic) rule of thumb is that balls are “potted,” not “pocketed.” English billiards uses only three balls: two cue balls and a red object ball. Billiards players can accumulate points in three ways: winners (potting the red ball), losers (potting your cue ball off the red ball), and canons (hitting the red ball and the opponent’s cue ball in one stroke). If you’re looking to rack up points, try combining these shots. Just like everything British, there are lots of rules—not to mention variations (including some that don’t involve potting balls!). Generally, however, players alternate turns when one fails to pot a ball or fouls, and play continues until one of the players reaches a predetermined score.

Snooker, on the other hand, is a British obsession invented by Neville Chamberlain (he of appeasing Hitler fame). It uses 22 balls: 15 red; one each of yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black; and a cue ball. It too has lots of rules, but the basic object is to alternately sink red balls and colored balls. Each red is worth one point, and the others range from two points for the yellow up to seven for the black. Oh, and red balls stay in the pockets and colored balls keep coming back out until all the reds are gone. Then the game finishes with everyone trying to sink the colors in the correct order. Whatever individual or team has the most points wins. Whew! And you thought calculus was hard.

Good to Know
According to the Billiard Congress of America, during the Civil War billiard results often received wider coverage than war news.

People You Can Impress: track nerds and, well, more track nerds?

The Quick Trick: Check out the feet. The rules of racewalking are specific about what should be happening down there. No matter how fast you’re going, as long as at least one of your feet is always touching the ground, and as long as you’re not bending your knees, you’re racewalking.

The Explanation:
With roughly 400 years of history under their collective belt (or fanny pack, as the case may be), racewalking enthusiasts have had plenty of time to pin down exactly what their sport entails. The whole thing began when (apparently bored) English nobles started holding races between their footmen, wagering on whose servant was the fastest. By the 19th century, racewalking was the second-biggest betting sport in America behind horse racing, and in 1908 it became an Olympic event. These days, the true champions of the sport can walk a mile in less than six minutes.

Jogging, on the other hand, has a much shorter history. It began as a conditioning activity for retired runners and gained popularity in America with the 1967 publication of Jogging, cowritten by University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman and cardiologist Dr. Waldo Harris. Only then did average Americans begin regularly participating in “light running” as a way to stay in shape.

People You Can Impress: Europeans (no mean feat for Yanks these days)

The Quick Trick: If it has flying buttresses, pointed arches, and rose windows, it’s Gothic.

The Explanation:
You can’t swing un chat mort in Europe without hitting a really old cathedral. And after your first three or four, they all start to look alike: stone, majestic, impossibly huge. But if they were built between 800 and 1500, there’s a darn good chance they fall into one of these categories.

Prevalent from the ninth through 12th centuries ce, Romanesque architecture combined the influences of Roman and Byzantine styles. In fact, the architecture got its name (in the 1800s, by the way) because one of its key features, the barrel vault, bore such a resemblance to the classical Roman arch. At the time, religious pilgrims were traveling to various shrines throughout Europe, creating the need for buildings much larger than the traditional basilica-style churches. The use of barrel vaults thus allowed for huge interior spaces built entirely of stone. But that also meant the roofs were extremely heavy, so the walls had to be tremendously thick to prevent buckling. Strong walls also meant fewer windows, so the insides of Romanesque churches often look dim and feel like fortresses.

As for Gothic architecture, although the word is now primarily associated with excessive eyeliner and trench coats, the style was born in the mid-12th century with the intention of making churches look like heaven: soaring, colorful, and bright. The biggest difference in Gothic style was the use of flying buttresses. These support structures or towers, set off from the main walls and attached by arches, displaced the pressure from the roof outward. Essentially, this meant the buildings could get taller, walls could get thinner, and there could be a lot of stained-glass windows. Gothic churches sport huge, ornate, petaled round masterpieces called rose windows. Further, Gothic cathedrals were also much pointier than their predecessors, with pointed arches and tall spires (instead of blunt towers) characterizing the style.

Name-Dropping
Buildings to mention when discussing the Romanesque and Gothic styles:

Romanesque: the Cathedral of Pisa (which includes the Leaning Tower), Italy; France’s Mont St. Michel.

Gothic: Westminster Abbey, London; the Abbey of St. Denis and Notre Dame Cathedral, both in Paris; St. Peter’s in Rome (a Renaissance example); and Chartres Cathedral in France

People You Can Impress: archaeologists, Egyptologists, the gods

The Quick Trick: South America and Egypt built pyramids. Mesopotamia built ziggurats, which look like South American pyramids with ramps.

The Explanation:
We’ll start with the most famous, the Egyptian pyramids. Today it’s generally believed these towering structures were tombs. What has been found inside, however, is precisely executed layouts. For example, inside each pyramid a narrow shaft extends from the innermost chamber to the outside, aligned exactly with the polestar. Thus archaeologists have argued that the pyramids were thought to be a vessel or machine to get the pharaohs to the heavens.

The pyramids are spooky for many reasons. The stones are laid so exactly that you can’t even fit a knife blade between them. They’re almost perfectly square, and aligned to the points of the compass with uncanny accuracy. And while there are pyramids at several spots in Egypt, the best known are at the Giza “Necropolis” (City of the Dead). Of course, the jewel of these structures is the Great Pyramid of Khufu, a pharaoh of the fourth dynasty who you may also know by his Greek name, Cheops. In fact, until the 14th century, the Great Pyramid was the world’s tallest building.

A debate has long raged about how the darn things got built. The current leading theory is that a ramp spiraled up from the quarry and around the rising structure. The ton-and-a-half stone blocks were moved on wooden sleds most likely lubricated by water or, as some have suggested, milk. As impressive as the pyramids are today, picture them in their original form, covered with gleaming white blocks of smoothed limestone.

The pyramids of South America, no less impressive, have a stair-stepped design that reflects their different purpose. These structures were temples to the gods, and each was fronted by a massive staircase and topped with a temple. In the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), for example, there was a huge pyramid called Templo Mayor where at one ritual in 1487, 20,000 people were supposedly sacrificed.

Egypt and South America don’t have a monopoly on pyramids, however. There are 16 of them in Greece, some even older than those at Giza. China has ’em, too, as does Sudan.

Ziggurats are a lot like the South American pyramids, with their stair-stepped shape and temple tops. But ziggurats were not places of worship; to the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians that built them, they were the gods’ actual homes. In fact, only priests could enter. And while South American pyramids have long staircases, ziggurats have ramps and steps. Many ziggurats also had seven tiers, representing the seven known planets or the seven heavens. For the most part, the ziggurats that still exist can be found mainly in Iran and Iraq.

People You Can Impress: geeks, nerds, Sons of Krypton, and teenagers bitten by radioactive spiders

The Quick Trick: Marvel’s biggest names—Spiderman, The X-Men, The Hulk, Fantastic Four. DC’s biggest names—Batman, Superman, Justice League of America, Wonder Woman.

The Explanation:
The Marvel vs. DC dogfight has raged since the beginning of comic book time. DC is older, taking its name from 1937’s Detective Comics. In June 1938, the company released what would become the most valuable comic ever: Action Comics #1, introducing a fella from Krypton called Superman. This essentially launched the Golden Age of comics, in which DC introduced icons like Bob Kane’s Batman (in the also ridiculously valuable Detective Comics #27, 1939), The Flash, Hawkman, and The Green Lantern (all in 1940), Aquaman (in 1941), and Wonder Woman (in 1942).

Meanwhile, the company’s rival, Timely Comics, staked its claim with Marvel Comics #1 in 1939, introducing future mainstays the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. A new hero, Captain America, debuted the next year when the legendary writer Joe Simon and incredible artist Jack Kirby combined powers.

After waning through the ’40s and ’50s, the costumed hero genre rose again in the late ’50s with DC’s Justice League of America. In 1962 Timely, now called Marvel Comics, introduced the Fantastic Four, the brainchild of Kirby and a writer pennamed Stan Lee. The Silver Age had begun, and it would introduce the biggest hero of the era: Spider-Man. The creation of Lee (who would later go on to lead Marvel) and artist Steve Ditko, Spider-Man debuted in 1962’s Amazing Fantasy #15.

As for differences, one big distinction between the companies is characterization and setting. Marvel gets credit from fans for making heroes out of more realistic characters (think of the teen misfit Peter Parker as Spider-Man, or Logan, the angry, dangerous alter ego of Wolverine) who live in real places, like New York City. DC fans counter with the dark, tormented persona of Batman’s Bruce Wayne, although DC has often based its action in fictional places like Gotham, Metropolis, and Smallville.

In the 1970s, Marvel attempted to buy DC and all its characters. In true comic fashion, DC screamed “Never!” and sold to Warner Communications instead. Since then, Warner has revived DC franchises with the huge Batman movies and Superman TV shows Lois and Clark and Smallville. Graphic novels from DC and its subsidiary imprints have also been hugely successful, like The Watchmen and The Sandman series, or made into movies, including The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Marvel, too, has continued to roll with the success of its Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Hulk, and Fantastic Four franchises.