Musings on Mild Madness

 

I wanted to point out the obvious about the club exchanges. These are the left/right symmetries:

1/3

2/4

5/7

6/8

9/11

10/12

13/15

14/16

When a pattern reverses, the first half can be specified and then the symmetries can be used to fill in the second half.

I went through and wrote down which exchanges the pattern Mild Madness uses. They are:

Mild Madness (Top is Mad)

5 14 S 

6 3 S

Reverses

Looking at it this way, it becomes clear that it uses two of the unusual suspects, the crossing collisions 14 and 16. It also stands out that while the hand-across in the second exchange (14) is necessary to avoid the collision, the fourth exchange (3) is not a collision. The hand-across that the Mad juggler does on this exchange is there to obey the sanity rule. They could instead disobey the sanity rule and "throw back what you got" (throw the natural pass). I believe when this is done it's called "Psychosis" but I'm not 100% sure. In that case the Mild juggler is the only one doing a hand-across. It's worth pointing out you can also disobey the sanity rule so that the Mad juggler does the hand-across for the second exchange (14) instead of the Mild juggler.

I already created a pattern which uses all the collisions (13-16), The Unusual Suspects. Since Mild Madness uses 14 and 16 I wondered if a pattern with 13 and 15 would be interesting (and easier to remember than The Unusual Suspects). I created this one to be similar to Mild Madness:

Straight Jacket (Top is Mad)
5 13 S
8 4 S

Reverses

Write down the labels:

poss-crass poss-sposs self-self

spass-cross cross-cross self-self

Resolve the collision according to sanity:

poss-crass poss-crasso self-self

spass-cross cross-cross self-self

Modify exchanges to obey sanity:

poss-crass poss-crasso self-self

spass-cross spasso-cross self-self

For the mantra split up the passes:

T: crass crasso self cross cross self

B: poss poss self spass spasso self

The pattern then reverses.