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I live near a beautiful park and, every day, I see groups of people enjoying themselves with what has become a favorite recreation here in my neighborhood -- the frisbee. Their fascination has led me to do my own kind of research into this frisbee craze. It's really quite interesting.

The frisbee, as we all know, is the most common name for those flying discs or flying saucers. They are usually made of plastic and are about 20 to 25 centimeters of 8 to 10 inches in diameter. These frisbees are designed to fly aerodynamically when someone throws them in the air with rotation and they can be caught by hand. Playing with a frisbee is like playing catch with a rubber ball, although frisbees are much more fun.

There are many types of frisbees available in the supermarkets and other commercial venues. There are disc golf discs, which are smaller but denser than your typical frisbee, plus they are made to follow a particular flight profile that can increase or decrease their stability and distance. Once people realized that dogs just love chasing those flying frisbees down, they designed special discs made up of more pliable material that are more resistant to the bite of a dog and which can prevent injuries to the dog that are often associated with more rigid materials. After that, naturally the next frisbee craze was in the form of disc dog competitions which tested the disc-catching skills of dogs. There are also now ring-like discs that are similar to Saturn's rings and these are known as Aerobies and they normally fly farther than the regular frisbee. The latest frisbee incarnation takes the form a lit flying disc which is growing more and more popular for evening and night time play. It's called a flashflight disc and players can enjoy playing with them even when the sun goes down.

There is actually a wide array of different games that utilize flying discs. These include Ultimate, Freestyle frisbee, Disc Golf (the traditional game of Golf played with flying discs (frisbees) instead of clubs and balls), Durango Boot, Double Disc Court, Guts Frisbee, Flutterguts (also known as Flutter Frisbee), Friskee, Disc dog, Dodge Frisbee, Goaltimate, Schtick, Fricket (also known as Cups), Hot Box, Fris-Nok (the traditional Icelandic-Canadian game), Extreme Frisbee (a less official, more violent game) and Speed Frisbee (like a tennis game with a disc).