The Dukes are a bunch of no good cheaters

Bam! Great throw, good hold, awesome picture!

If you are friends with Moorman on Facebook you know that we recently took our annual trip up to Island Park, Idaho for some fun in the great outdoors, if you can call it that. There are a couple things which we do that are kind of traditions for us, they include the following:

1. Firehole River in Yellowstone: We go swim in a freaking river! It's natures water slide, what more could you want?!
2. Playhouse Play: So far we've attended two, both have been excellent, one included a groping incident. A must see (the play, not the groping) if you're in West Yellowstone during the summer.
3. Bubble Gum Blowing Competition: Don't judge, it's intense. Next year we're going to have medals for the winners, unfortunately you can only compete if you're a Duke.
4. Delicious Ice Cream: If you end up in West Yellowstone, and don't stop by Arrowleaf ice cream, you've shortchanged yourself and should be ashamed. Shame!
5. Candy Store: When you get done with the Ice cream, you should wander on down the street to the candy store. It's got great fudge, and delicious taffy. Once again, if you don't go, you short change yourself and you fail. Fail!
6. Rafting the snake: This is a new one as of this last trip. We're gonna probably keep it going. We take a raft down the Snake river. Pretty straight forward.
7. Listening to the song Diane, by Therapy: This is a...different...tradition, to say the least, if you've heard the song you understand why, if you listen to the song, we hope you laugh as much as we did when that the first verse was over.
8. Jumping on Ricky while he's trying to sleep: Since Ricky is the old man of the group, he usually goes to bed early, that being said, the rest of the Dukes see fit to jump on him once he's gone to bed, 3 out of 4 Dukes agree that this is a fun activity.
9. Stargazing on the dock by the river: We enjoy a good stargazing experience down by the river, you can't see anything but the stars, and it's amazing.
10. Cards: This is the whole point of this article, cards. Cards are played almost religiously while up at Island Park. Any and all games are welcome here. This last time we were up there the following games were played: Spoons, Settlers of Catan, Farmers Rummy, Pounce, and Killer Bunnies (oh how we played Killer Bunnies...over, and over again). We played a lot of these games multiple times, and that brings us to the title of the post...we as dukes, are terrible cheaters, and we are terribly good at cheating.

To illustrate how bad the cheating got, I will just start with the worst, and it's pretty bad. So we were about to start a game of Farmers Rummy, the parties present were the Dukes, Ricky's Grandma, St Brenda, McCall, and Matt. The game would have likely been a normal game where everybody played on the board, little to no cheating. However, Grandma decided to start the game off with two comments that would sink the game faster than that blasted iceberg did the Titanic, these comments were "There will be no cheating, and no laughing". Now if you know The Dukes, you know that we love both of those things, a lot.

So the game was afoot. The Dukes took up positions at the end of the table and immediately started trading cards under the table. First hand, Ricky laid down a fistful of kings, so many in fact, that the odds against him getting them are staggering . Second Hand we somehow ended up with a stack of cards, mostly wilds, which was passed around under the table. Eventually St Brenda got wise to the games and forced Ricky to switch spots, breaking him off from the group, and severely impairing his cheating ability. (Remember kids, if you're gonna cheat, cheat in groups). Eventually the game was coming to a close, Moorman had given up and gone to talk to his girlfriend, leaving Ricky to pass cards to McCall. Zac and Coombsy were scavenging a pile made up mostly of wilds like turkey vultures.The only completely useless cheater was Matt, he just failed, in ways that cannot be described. In the end the only people not cheating were Grandma, and St. Brenda. The game ended with Zac and Coombsy winning, amassing nearly a thousand points, leaving the rest of the group completely in the dust.

In the end the moral of this story is that if you play a game of cards with the Dukes, you're best chance is divide and conquer. If you can get them to turn on each other, you might stand a chance.