Part of the fun of going to the Carnival is really to see a sea of lovely dolls. The eye-catching clusters of life-size Winnie the Pooh bears seem to have a magic power that locks your gaze onto them.

　　Their eyes seem to be saying: "Save me! Take me home!"

　　But you really need a basketball guru or Alladin's lamp to get hold of them to take them home. The game I played required me to throw an apple-size ball into an almost vertically placed basin (about 70 degrees up) four metres away and get the ball to stay in the basin.

　　It attracted many "trajectory" enthusiasts. My friends suggested that I "wait and see" before trying. This proved a truly golden piece of advice. Many balls I threw hit the basin but missed. They rebounded to the ground and I scored nothing.

　　I decided not to waste any more money (20 yuan) in pure "tuition" fees and decided the only way to win was to be a keen observer for a while. The world is governed by dynamics and even if that is not so, it makes me feel happy to accept this as an article of faith. Luck is elusive, but dynamics can be learned.

　　We developed a theory after observing about 10 people having a throw. Many tried to hit the basin's bottom but that turned out to be an illusion. The ONLY winner hit the basin's inner wall.

　　And this phenomenon must have some explanation as the basin is positioned almost vertically. The bottom is almost perpendicular to the ball's trajectory, bouncing the ball right back. But consider the "wall" below. The basin's side, together with the bottom, will "corner" the ball and hold it in place.

　　But there was still too little evidence to support our theory. Only one winner was certainly not enough proof. Just at that moment, the supervisor gave a "master-class" demonstration by throwing consecutively five balls into the basin.

　　Every ball hit the basin's side wall rather than the bottom. Just as in a hook shot in basketball, stiffening the wrist will control the ball and throwing softly helps as well.

　　Watching the supervisor's freak demonstration, an assistant nearby said sourly that he was just making the game look deceptively easy so as to catch more fish like me.

　　But I grinned back: Yeah, he has shown me the light.

　　We decided to test our theory as you can't learn how to swim until you're in the water. But applying theory is never an easy job. At that moment, my hands suddenly became numb.

　　I had been playing tennis for the past few weeks and my first two shots were testimony to that. I threw too hard and the balls bounced high above the basin. For a while, I closed my eyes in bitter disappointment.

　　My mind was running wild, trying to retrieve the feelings of shooting basketball in high school. My friends patted my back to get me to cool down.

　　I managed to throw softly on my last try. Thank god, the ball hit the "wall" of the basin and stayed in! We all cheered as if it were a grand-slam final hit. We finally harvested a small prize after one hour's work.

　　It's not encouraging to ascribe everything to probability - it's happy for one to have faith.