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Magic: The Gathering (I)
Posted 3:53 PM, Oct 29, 2007 |
I’ll come back to D&D later in this series of fantasy-themed reminiscings, but since Jerry mentioned Magic: The Gathering (M:TG) and it was also mentioned in Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I thought I’d reminisce fondly about M:TG, the game that essentially replaced D&D.
The main character, Oscar, in Diaz’s book, laments M:TG as taking all the story and imagination out of the fantasy world, destroying his D&D group, and just generally being boring. That’s one way to look at it - it certainly isn’t a role-playing game, even though it tries to act like one, making the players out to be “planeswalkers” casting spells and dueling with other planeswalkers. But really, it’s just a card game.
A card game my friends and I were totally immersed in for 18 months, maybe longer, it’s hard to say. We got in somewhere around Revised / 4th Edition (they just released the 10th edition of the core set, and have also released about 20 expansions since we quit playing - I’m too lazy to count). Back then, the card pool we had to choose from was pretty small - a couple hundred cards in the core set, scraps of Antiquities and Legends that were already out of print, and some other stuff I’m forgetting. Nowhere like the 9,000+ cards available today.
I’m not sure where we picked the game up from. One kid in school, Eddie, had tons of cards, had some Alpha and Beta Moxes and other old stuff that, nowadays, could probably be used to buy a Geo Metro, and the game had already been around for at least a year before we picked it up. Surprising that it took us that long, considering how the game was right up our alley.
We loved this game. We put together decks, dueled it out in school and after school and on weekends - I’m surprised our cards didn’t disintegrate from overuse. Now, I play online, and a lot of the cards we used to use aren’t available online - they’re working on filling out their back catalog of digital cards while keeping up with the steady flow of new expansions - but every once in a while I’ll run into something that used to dominate the decks back in the day.
Online, I own a Force of Nature, but it’s actually pretty useless compared to stuff like Krosan Cloudscraper. The thing is, Force of Nature was the first card I remember buying as a single, and it cost me $8, one dollar for every point of damage the brute would do if I didn’t pay its upkeep. The Force went in a plastic sleeve, I wrote up a proxy and stuck it in my deck, and away I went.
(I only remember buying maybe 3 single cards while I played - I bought the Force, a Royal Assassin, and a Preacher. I bought the Preacher as a gift, actually, to someone who really liked the Quinton Hoover art.)
The Force of Nature and Royal Assassin are still floating around the digital world, having been reprinted relatively recently in actual, real-life sets, along with the once-monstrous and now mostly-overcosted Mahamoti Djinn. (The Preacher was recently reprinted in the Masters Edition set, an online-only set featuring classic cards that is basically like getting nostalgia pumped intra-venously.)
I remember one Saturday playing against Jerry’s deck and just getting pummeled, game after game, by a crew of Mahamoti Djinns. That card used to totally wreck people back in the day, and now they’re about $0.05 each online, and probably not a whole lot more expensive in real life.
It’s hard to express the fondness we had for the game, as well as the coolness factor (especially considering the glut of collectible card games still on the market today), but it was, in its day, totally new. It’s also hard to explain what any of these cards do to a non-player, or why they were awesome, but take my word for it, they were awesomely powerful back in the day and are nostalgically powerful nowadays. Selling my Magic cards for somewhere around $150 was one of the poorest decisions I remember making, and not just from an economical point of view (although they’d be worth a heck of a lot more, probably, if they survived in any decent shape).
Anyway, every time I see one of those old-school cards played online, it’s like I’m not really playing online anymore, but still playing back at old Duluth Central High School; around Jerry’s kitchen table with a whole crew; or in Sid’s basement, listening to the first Better Than Ezra album and ignoring the setting sun.
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Dungeons and Dragons (II)
Posted 11:06 AM, Oct 28, 2007 |
I have about 1,000 fond memories of playing D&D, and I’m not going to relate them all here - I’m going to relate very few of them, I suspect. But at least one:
Over the summer after 8th grade, I think, we went up to Barry’s house. Barry was a friend of Jerry’s younger brother and a pretty cool kid, as far as D&D-players went. So we went up there and it was this gorgeous summer day, little wind, so we actually played outside on a picnic table they had.
Now, some months prior, Barry’s family had won a Powerball jackpot - I don’t know how much it was worth at the time, but if memory serves, they won the actual jackpot, i.e., matched all the numbers and the Powerball, so it was a significant amount.
Anyway, so we were playing D&D and Barry’s dad returned with lunch for us. The lunch was a giant sackful of McDonald’s cheeseburgers. In retrospect, this was not the decadence that I thought it was. At the time, though, we were all in awe - we had never seen so many cheeseburgers in one place, and here they were, all for us, and for free.
Barry’s dad had come up to the table with this giant sack and simply turned it upside-down over the center of the table and out poured these burgers in a giant pile. It’s kind of like when they’re down to two players in the World Series of Poker and they used to just dump the money in the middle of the table. (Now, they have so much money I think they have to stack it or it won’t properly fit.)
So we ate free McDonald’s cheeseburgers and played D&D. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was, well, pretty awesome.
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Dungeons and Dragons (I)
Posted 6:24 PM, Oct 26, 2007 |
I was reminiscing at work the other day about what I did for fun when I was growing up. (I’ve also been reading Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the main character with which I share some (but not all) interests, or maybe all of them but just to a lesser degree.) In any event:
Somewhere along the way I discovered the fantasy genre and became aware that wizards and dragons “existed,” and that was a big deal. We - a close group of 5 friends - spent vast amounts of time during 6th grade playing Dungeons & Dragons. We played in class, of all things - we were all in the “advanced” math and reading groups and got all our work done with no problem. We were excellent students, and in our spare time, we’d gather in the back of the classroom, where I actually used a rolling multi-tiered computer cart as a desk and “quietly” play D&D. In retrospect, this must have been horrendously distracting.
There are many things to say about my 6th grade D&D experience, so it looks like that will take up the entirety of this post.
My parents did not want me to play D&D. This was in the time when shows like 20/20 were frightening innocent parents into thinking that kids were dressing up as elves and paladins and buying katanas and slicing each other into bits underneath bridges and in abandoned barns. So, I was not allowed.
There was also the fact that my parents didn’t like the whole wizardry/magic aspect. It was a combination of these two things that somehow allowed me to play the Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game with no problem but still restricted me from the grand-daddy RPG that is D&D. Wizards and role-playing was just a little too much.
I remember being perpetually amazed and also frightened that I was engaging in an activity that I had been explicitly told I couldn’t do, that I was engaging in this activity daily, and doing it with the blessing (implied or otherwise) of my 6th grade teacher. For me, parent-teacher conferences were a nightmare - my grades were fine, but if my parents found out about my level 7 druid, I would be finished.
My parents never found out - I don’t know how they didn’t, but they didn’t. (I also realize that playing D&D is not the most brazen act a 6th-grader has ever gotten away with - sadly, it’s the most brazen one I ever got away with, or even attempted.)
We played D&D through the summer before high school with a variety of people - mostly my friend Jerry and I, and then, once his brother was old enough, his brother and all his friends joined the group. There were always people around for a game - sometimes it seemed like the game never really ended - I would go home from a long session of D&D in Jerry’s basement, come back the next day and everyone would still be in the same place, the dice already rolling across the table.
We played in Jerry’s basement as a rule - Jerry’s room was in the basement, but other than that one finished room, the rest of the basement was unfinished, with open studs and unpainted sheet rock, piles of laundry from the chute upstairs, and his cat slinking around. It was cool and dark and the perfect place to summon demons, or just play D&D.
When we played in 6th grade, we played hack-and-slash D&D, basically just going from battle to battle. It wasn’t until a year or so later that it occurred to us that our characters could function and live above ground, exploring cities and countryside instead of the same old dungeon pathways - not that we got tired of it in 6th grade. Our D&D then was basically just rolling dice.
Later, it got into storytelling and longer campaigns, but I don’t think we ever really achieved true D&D geekdom - we never used miniatures, we never dressed up, and we never changed our voices to act like our characters. In that regard, our characters never really came to life - most of them never spoke to one another. We, the players, would speak to one another all the time, explaining what our characters were going to do, but the characters were all mutes, essentially.
In later years, maybe 11th and 12th grade, when we were all playing Magic: The Gathering and had left D&D far behind, I sometimes found myself wishing we could get together and play again. However, many in our group had gone our separate ways, as people do, and we never really got a good game in again after we started high school. It would have been awesome, though.
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Here and There
Posted 11:58 PM, Oct 24, 2007 |
1
that was a place i once was,
a topography of what might have been,
carved by a river in the shape
of a snake’s tongue lapping at soil.
that was a shape i once was,
all curls and thick glasses
and pale jowls the color
of snow under moon.
that was the color i once was,
the color of expectation,
rosy and warm, my hands
scrabbling for footholds.
2
it’s like jumping from the silver streak
of an airplane with a parachute, barely
there, and you can feel
the strings snap like thunderclaps
whizzing by your ears,
ringing like a telephone that doesn’t,
and you have to remember
what it might sound like;
the knock on a hollow door
like the beating of your heart
in your hollow chest.
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Graphic
Posted 4:34 PM, Oct 23, 2007 |
This graphic, via the Minneapolis Star Tribune (and ultimately the ESRI and the National Interagency Fire Center) is the best graphic I’ve seen about the Southern California wildfires in terms of location, size, and number of people displaced. I’m not sure why this graphic isn’t being used elsewhere, other than the fact that it’s probably already outdated.
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Bunk
Posted 12:04 PM, Oct 23, 2007 |
Recently, going around the L.A. crew here, was this “test” of a spinning dancer, intended to determine whether you were right- or left-brained, creative or rational, and so on. I “took” it, found that I was right-brained and creative-minded, and then immediately turned away from the computer to work on some symbolic logic. Despite the poem I posted recently (that may be evidence of my right-brained side), I pronounced the “test” bunk.
The folks at Freakonomics side with me, going so far as to say that the test actually predicts the opposite, and wondering whether the author got the directions wrong when he typed them up. I think the whole thing is bunk - I don’t think it’s an indicator of what kind of person you are any more than tea leaves, a Ouija board, or the flip of a coin, but it is at least slightly reassuring that someone people listen to agrees that there is, at the very least, a problem.
Also, below the description of the left- and right-brain functions on the spinning dancer page is a link that says, “Are you a genius? Take this quick test and find out.” I clicked the link, which returned a “Page not found” error. So what did I do? I backed up and clicked the same link again, getting, no surprise, the same error. I am not a genius, apparently, but the good news is, it was a quick test.
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Write What You Know
Posted 12:08 PM, Oct 21, 2007 |
I wrote a novel in which
the main character was really a thinly
disguised version of me: thin,
bookish, disproportionately large feet,
breath like the inside of a clam,
someone for whom obscenity
is like oxygen.
My character did the same things
that I do: smoked cigars the circumference
of quarters, watched children’s television,
wore oversized sweatshirts with denim
shorts underneath, and puzzled
about his heritage, like trying to remember
dates from history. It’s in there somewhere,
I know, he knows.
Thirteen publishers later, the novel sold,
and I saw it in a bookstore once with the thick
black remainder mark from a felt-tip pen. It
wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.
There were a lot of reasons it didn’t sell well -
I’m uninteresting, the plot was like a tree,
with branches and unresolved ends
and gnats and spiders gumming
up the works, but the biggest problem
was the reviews. One reviewer
said the main character didn’t seem
“realistic” or “plausible,” and I haven’t
picked up a pen since.
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Bugs and Plants
Posted 9:30 PM, Oct 20, 2007 |
Bugs: Today I came home from the bowling green and found a little black insect crawling on my arm. He had yellow and red fuzzy things on his back and was maybe a quarter-inch long. Nothing too worry too much about, and, since I try not to kill insects, I was watching him crawl on my arm prior to taking him outside. And then he bit me. I could actually see the little tiny welt of flesh rise, and hear his little insect cackle. I flung him across the room and then smashed him with a paper towel.
Plants: It is a windy night here in Los Angeles, with gusts and screen-door rattling and general noisy windiness. Unfortunately, the wind has torn off a significant portion of Constance, the Dutchman’s Pipe (and my favorite plant) I’ve talked of and photographed here. Constance actually became damaged by her own weight - she’s giant and tendril-y, and had been hanging over (and supported by) the railing on the balcony. I decided to move her so she was entirely over the balcony, as her dying flowers were going to fall off and litter the pool area. As I did that, she succumbed to her own greed and sloth and a large part of one of the tendrils cracked.
I fashioned a splint out of a giant pencil received at McMenamin’s Kennedy School hotel in Portland, Oregon, and the cracked area slowly began to heal. Until tonight. The wind tore through the cracked tendril and sheared it almost entirely off. There was just the skin holding it together, so I snipped it off. The removed piece is about 30 inches long and is currently in water inside a tall pilsner beer glass. I don’t think it will be replantable, but perhaps - it’s worth a shot. (I snipped off the bottom, dead portion of the tendril to expose some living plant to the water - it might actually turn out for the best, as the damaged part looked completely dead, so I’m not sure that tendril was getting any water, anyway.)
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More on The Office
Posted 10:17 AM, Oct 19, 2007 |
Ha ha, so not like this site is becoming some television review site, but seriously, last night’s The Office? (Well, first, more and more people are chiming in and complaining about the season so far, including Radosh.net (the reference to the stolen pizza-boy-kidnapping plot line reveals itself again) and also over at Slate, which interestingly has the opposite position on Ryan as one of the previous articles I linked to. There’s too much in the Slate piece, though, to talk about, including their take on Jim and Pam, etc.)
But let’s try to recap last night’s episode; by the way, about 3/4 of the way through the episode, I asked the EC what had happened in the beginning of the episode, and she couldn’t remember - I had to struggle to recall. That’s the sign of a rambling episode.
Last night:
- Michael has another job.
- Michael loses his job.
- Ryan shows up for some presentation.
- Darryl is with Kelly.
- Darryl is not with Kelly.
- Kevin has a concert that nobody goes to.
- Andy woos Angela with a new cat (something which Dwight tried in an earlier episode but inexplicably didn’t work)
- Jim and Pam go to the beet farm, which, like, seriously?
- Michael tries to clear up his debt, but ends up jumping a non-moving train. Huh?
Okay, so lots of these things are related, but really, all the stuff about Michael - that’s one episode. And all the stuff about Jim and Pam at the beet farm, well, that’s cutting room floor stuff. That’s a Saturday Night Live sketch, and not a very good one. Throwing manure? Bedtime stories? Come on.
I remember being discouraged by the beginning of the second season of Arrested Development, and I actually stopped watching for a while after the horrible Martin Short episode, but that show rebounded nicely and quickly. Hopefully The Office can do the same after a horribly rocky start to this year - it’s the only sitcom I watch, literally, and life needs a little levity.
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Media
Posted 11:16 PM, Oct 18, 2007 |
When I think about “media,” I often consider the following: television, music, movies, and books. I know there are other things to be thrown in, like art, theater, and so on, but you can’t spell “media” without “me,” and that’s who’s writing this post.
Now, I own Arrested Development on DVD, along with all of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but rarely watch them. I own a ton of books but rarely reread them. I also own numerous movies, but rarely re-watch them. And I think this is the case with a lot of people.
But music: people buy music and listen to it over and over again. But not so with other media? Why the difference?
My only guess is that music is easily relegated to the background. Books, certainly not, and movies and television, also, less so. So that’s my guess. Illuminate.
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Trim The Office, Please
Posted 1:54 PM, Oct 18, 2007 |
There’s been much discussion about this year’s episodes of The Office around YoG headquarters, although most of it has been centered around Jim and Pam. One of us feels like having Jim and Pam together removes, basically, the central conflict of the show, thus making it inherently more sappy and less entertaining. Then, there are those of us who like to see Jim and Pam together because, well, why can’t people be happy? (But, we also secretly know that it’s not going to last - something will get in the way, and the imbalance and conflict will be restored. I mean, honestly, everyone from episode #1 knew that Jim and Pam would get together eventually, and how long can you realistically drag out this budding romance? Time to let it happen, at least for a while, and then start messing with it.)
But anyway, none of that is my point.
Near the 45-minute mark of last week’s episode, I turned to the EC and said, “Is this over yet? What are they doing?” The episode was a jumbled mess, and I swear I read somewhere online that the kidnapping of the pizza boy was lifted from some other show, somewhere, but can’t find it now.
It’s time to end these hour-long mashed up jumbles and get back to 22 minutes. These people agree.
Also, Will Leitch agrees with my take on the episode from a couple weeks ago, when Michael (un)wittingly drove his car into a lake, which was: huh?
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Users Who Read This Site Also Read…
Posted 1:44 PM, Oct 18, 2007 |
I was on Amazon today (while logged in to my account there), checking out a book, The Driver: My Dangerous Pursuit of Speed and Truth in the Outlaw Racing World by Alexander Roy, and happened to glance at Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section.
The first thing in the list, Bob Bondurant on Police and Pursuit Driving seems pretty logical. A few items after that, a less illogical item: Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. Now, longtime readers know that Murakami is, in fact, my favorite author, and I’ve read After Dark, a book I own because I ordered it from Amazon.
I’m sure this has been asked before, but just how accurate is the “Customers Who Bought This Item…” section? Is there really an overlap of readers (besides me and, I’m sure, a very, very small minority) between the worlds of outlaw racing and Japanese fiction? I doubt it.
I tried checking out books on other topics, such as prenatal care and numerology, and both of those “Customers Who Bought…” lists seemed genuine, containing only books on prenatal care and numerology, respectively. So who knows?
Turns out this post isn’t very interesting.
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Yahtzee Optimization Routines
Posted 2:08 PM, Oct 17, 2007 |
Special thanks to Year of Glad’s own Stat Boy for sending in this link to a Yahtzee Optimal Player and Proficiency Test. If you’re like me and Stat Boy, you spent a fair amount of your collegiate waking hours playing Yahtzee, and maybe you even majored in mathematics just so it didn’t look quite so dorky when you worked out the expected value of a starting roll of 1-2-4-5-6. Maybe.
It’s a nifty tool that, in theory, takes the luck out of the dice and just tells you, basically, how good the choices you made were compared to the optimal play. How it computes what the optimal play is is, well, suspect, as is the randomness of the die rolling. Scores seem to be inflated (again, thanks to Stat Boy) if you try to do what the OPPT wants you to do. But shouldn’t that be the case? I mean, if you try to guess what the OPPT wants you to do, doesn’t that mean you’re trying to make the optimal play? So shouldn’t your score increase?
Sure, yes, yes. But should it increase to the tune of 4 Yahtzees in one game? Perhaps not. And the debate rages on.
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Animal Farm
Posted 1:13 AM, Oct 17, 2007 |
Read all of Orwell’s Animal Farm tonight. I’d never read it before, and for some reason always had it in my mind that it was some sort of “difficult” book filled with “turgid” prose, but, of course, it isn’t.
It’s pretty good. I didn’t understand Russian history, but I do a little better, now, and I also liked the part where the pigs got drunk.
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Downtown LA is Alive and Well
Posted 11:25 AM, Oct 14, 2007 |
Last night, the EC and I, along with assorted other oddities, went to an art show in downtown Los Angeles. It was over in the garment district, and thank goodness there was gated parking. We knew one of the artists, so we went in support, listened to some poetry, saw some art, got some culture in our heathen bones, and then went to have some drinks.
We went to the Library Bar in downtown, which isn’t too far from the art gallery - they’re only separated by one thing. That thing is Skid Row.
Skid Row is a wild place. There were tents spread out along the sidewalk here and there, as it’s starting to get a little chilly (not Minnesota chilly, but still too-cold-to-be-outside chilly) here in Los Angeles at night. There were a fair number of “pedestrians” walking about, securing drug deals and sexual favors. We saw one of the latter occurring on the sidewalk. Oh blessed City of Angels.
We left City of Angels and, after much negotiating of downtown streets and parking options, arrived at the Library. I had a Trappiste Rochefort 10, listed on the menu as “one of the best beers in the world” and “a masterpiece.” At 11.3% alc/vol, it was a little much, but it was delicious. A good once-a-year beer, probably, especially at $10/bottle.
Hunger started to set in, so an associate (Dr. Dr.) and I set out in search of food - the bar wasn’t serving food any longer. A girl outside told us that Carl’s Jr. was closed, and the bouncer directed us to IHOP, just a few blocks away. But what a few blocks it was.
There was a street party going on, everything closed off by giant black curtains. There were chefs cooking outside, giant colorful balloons, and music. Beyond that, we have no idea.
Then, we saw five rats in their natural habitat, scrabbling around under cars and in the dirt, dragging their fleshy little tails around. Oh joy for the beautiful city, like paradise on earth.
Lastly, right before the IHOP, a homeless woman yelled to us that “the glass-house lasers were destroying her teeth.”
We saw two more rats on the way back from delicious IHOP (an egg-topped burger around midnight is the way to go, and by “go” I mean possibly urging yourself toward the grave.)
For those who say that downtown Los Angeles is dead, I refer you to the list of exciting things downtown has to offer, all in one Saturday night:
1 art show
1 on-street sexual favor
1 semi-populated tent city
1 reference to glass-house lasers
1 terrific beer
7 urban rats
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Value
Posted 11:21 PM, Oct 11, 2007 |
Seems like the new Radiohead is all the rage, mostly because you can download it for however much you feel like you want to pay. I finally got the server to cooperate with me and got my “copy.”
Turns out, I’m finally tired of Radiohead. If they came out with an album in the stores, I wouldn’t pay a penny for it. That makes me feel okay about how much I paid for In Rainbows - good for one listen and then to just fade away.
In other news, here, at YoG, you aren’t paying anything and you’re getting insightful commentary. You’re also getting close to getting a story that’s been brewing for quite some time, (don’t bug me, I’ll get to it), but first I have to finish that symbolic logic all the kids are talking about.
If I have a band, I’ll name it “Symbolic Logic.” It’s not a very good name, or at least doesn’t seem like it until you realize that my band will only be playing Kraftwerk covers.
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Working in a Digital Mine
Posted 12:56 AM, Oct 9, 2007 |
Since I can’t talk about what happens at Ye Olde Math Shoppe, I will be forced to talk about what else I’ve been working on, which is mainly revising and rebuilding the web page for the Santa Monica Lawn Bowling Club. My version of the site is still not quite what I would do if I was building it from the ground up, but I’m not, and don’t have the time to. So I’m taking what was there and just rehashing, cleaning, reorganizing. I even took the time to learn a little PHP along the — hey. Wake up! Sorry for using “PHP” in this weblog.
I’ve also been working a bit out of an old Algebra textbook — hello! Stay with me. Anyway, not, like, your high school algebra. It’s different, because algebra really means something else entirely, something pretty far, mathematically, from your good old high school algebra.
I also made up a story tonight about a boy who finds a gold coin and uses it to buy soup. In the bottom of his soup bowl, he finds two gold coins. He then uses these to buy a satchel, in the bottom of which he finds three gold coins. He buys dungarees, a soap dispenser, a tam, a bugle, a copy of the Torah, and finally a beer stein - a really fancy one. He’s disappointed that the beer stein does not contain even more coins, and so he is, for the moment, broke. He gives the stein to his alcoholic father as a gift, and, after his father drains the stein in one fell gulp, the boy finds more coins at the bottom of it. He is delighted and refills the stein over and over.
Well, anyway, so he goes to school after summer vacation and tells the class about his wild, multiplying gold coins. They ask for proof, so he reaches into the pockets of his gold-purchased dungarees and finds holes in his pockets. He sadly realizes his multiplying fortune is gone. When he gets home, he tells his father, who is so upset he smashes his expensive beer stein. The flying glass actually kills the boy.
The father sobers up (quickly) and picks his boy up to weep/bury. Lo and behold, though, from the boy’s gaping wounds are pouring all manner of gold coins. The end.
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Sizzler: In Rare Form
Posted 10:46 PM, Oct 6, 2007 |
Not sure entirely why, but the EC and I went to Sizzler for dinner. I think it was in an effort to show me how bad it was so we could, in the future, just go to Souplantation over and over again. (Funny thing, though - I didn’t need any convincing.)
Anyway, I ordered the peppercorn steak, cooked medium. It arrived and was possibly still moving around on the plate. I held my ear close and heard a faint, plaintive “moo.” I cut into the steak and was immediately concerned: it had the squishy, swaying motion of a steak that has been left out of the freezer to defrost for the afternoon but hasn’t actually seen the face of a grill.
I cut into it a couple places and it was rarer than rare. I sent it back, and then it was brought back to me several minutes later. The exposed parts of the steak were now cooked, and looked medium-esque, so I cut into some other parts. Alas, still rare! Of course. At this point, the steak may have been rare, but may also have still been closer to raw than rare.
The waitress came by again, and I told her it still wasn’t close, and that I just wanted my money back. She said that was fine, and left for five minutes or so. We got our money back for the raw deal, ha ha, and finished off the night with a fine chicken breast and mac ‘n’ cheese from Kookooroo, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
Getting our money back was, apparently, a lengthy and tumultuous process. It took, like I said, at least five minutes, and the EC and I discussed that refunds, almost regardless of where you are, always take a long time, and they’re always a big hassle, requiring managers, keys attached to brightly-colored coils, and enough keypunches to write a short story. I posited that, perhaps, this was intentional. The more of a hassle it is to get your money back, the less likely you are to bother with it.
I really don’t know if this is true or not, but it’s a theory. (It’s a more exciting, conspiratorial theory than the simple fact that returns actually cost the company money and result in cash being handed to customers, something which could easily be abused by $7.50/hr employees.)
There isn’t really a good ending to this story, other than that the EC and I just ended up wondering why we went to Sizzler in the first place; both of us secretly expected it to not be very good. Also, we considered writing a letter to complain, but the best possible result would be coupons to Sizzler, which is, in a way, also the worst possible result.
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Sell Everything
Posted 12:10 AM, Oct 6, 2007 |
Half my readership won’t care about this post, which concerns contemporary Swedish indie-pop music. If you are in the half that will care, read on.
And when you’re done reading this, go and sell however many Beatles or Led Zeppelin or Shins albums or whatever, however many it takes so you can afford Jens Lekman’s Night Falls Over Kortedala when it comes out on Tuesday, October 9th.
A few points about the above statement:
1) If you haven’t already been listening to Jens Lekman, shame. But there’s never been a better time to start.
2) I’ve only listened to 6 tracks. So, like, if it turns out that tracks 7-12 really stink, or they’re all in Swedish and one is an instrumental using solely that Riccola horn, well, I can’t be held responsible.
3) How, one might ask, do I already have the album if it doesn’t come out until next Tuesday? Well, I’d love to be able to tell you I got an advance copy from Lekman’s record label for review purposes. I could tell you that, but it would be lying. The unexciting fact is that I pre-ordered it from the label and it arrived in the mail today. But I still have it before you.
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Gallery: Flowers and Animals and
Gas Stations, Enjoy!
Posted 11:59 PM, Oct 2, 2007 |
Here are some more photos, not of flowers, nor of that other thing I promised not to mention anymore, but rather of some things I took pictures of at night. There are flowers and animals and also gas stations, so enjoy.
Flowers and Animals and Gas Stations, Enjoy!
This gallery was the hardest one in quite some time since, as I was putting it together, my web-page building software inexplicably stopped working, so the search was on for another one that could admirably do what my old, barnacle-encrusted program had once done.
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Today’s the Big Day
Posted 9:16 AM, Oct 1, 2007 |
You can watch me on Crosswords today, possibly. After today, I’ll shut up about it.
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