Chinese spinning tops - because, fuck Beyblade

We've all played with spinning tops. They're okay I guess, but the fun soon runs out. Beyblade tried to make them cooler by like smashing them into each other and having a billion variations (Pokemon style). At least I think that's what Beyblade was about - its overpowering combination of lame and insane just overpowered my senses to the point where it's simply invisible to me. Maybe you've got kids and had to experience the Beybladian horror first-hand. This is just one of the reasons I don't have any children.

Anyway, the grandfather of all this are the original Chinese spinning tops. Is there anything they didn't invent first? (Computers! thank goodness). In our video we see some primary / junior school kids playing with them. A kid casts a top at a target and then floats it over his classmates on a string. They play around chucking them through moving targets and throwing them into the air and stuff before their teacher decides to fuck with them and pulls out the giant 100kg (that's 200lb, yankee) version which need a thick rope and a sprinting adult to get it going.

Apparently there's a competitive spinning top scene out there and there's even a world championship held in Orlando Florida. But, it's like all those "world championships" that the Americans like to hold in that they kind of forget to invite anyone else (baseball World Series anyone?). So I'm just going to leave you with a video of the winner of the 2005 Canadian Championship. Luckily he's a posing dick with poor music-choosing skills, so I'd very much like to be there when he finds out that he's almost as good as every Chinese six year-old.