blogwaffe

Haskell and Joanna introduced me this summer to a fantastic board game called Carolus Magnus. I’ve looked for it off and on since then, and finally found it at Game Zone on Colorado. By the way, that’s a pretty cool store. The proprietor really knows his stuff, and it’s pretty well stocked. Plus, there’s a ten percent discount for Caltech students. Props to Dixie of the reference.

Anyway, Carolus Magnus is the best three person game I’ve ever played (and it’s supposed to be awesome for four as well). I’ve never seen a game with similar game play. For starters, there is one and only one moving game piece: Charlemagne. And all players have split control over where Charlemagne moves.

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Checking my campus mailbox this morning, I was delightfully surprised by an interesting missive: The January, 1987 edition of The UFO Report. I can only assume some local… is nutjob too strong a word? went through Bridge and put copies in random boxes.

Pretty awesome, though.

The first… article tells the tale of a man and his motorcycle – both driven to seek out extraterrestrials where any reasonable human would most expect to find them: in the woods ripping down the occassional tree and yelling a lot. After passing up the possibility to closely inspect one, nay, two clearly alien spacecraft, he heads to the nearest town for a drink and a chance to interview the locals who had taken advantage of a similar opportunity. Unfortunately, those locals had a dying aunt, or some such, and it wasn’t a good time to discuss the issue. Given, though, the nature of the periodical, you can safely assume he eventually found some aliens (…or did he???). It is particularly remarkable that, in the account, there are literally dozens of witnesses who, one supposes, could verify the presence of our hero near the sighting, yet at the time when he claims to have seen the beast(s?), the author was alone. Naturally, no details about the author are given.

A very entertaining read. Almost as good as the accompanying illustrations.

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We arrived at the Paseo at six thirty: precisely the time we were told by our invitation would be the appropriate one. We found ahead of us some several hundred people. People who had cheated. They had read the invitation as well, surely; yet there they were. All queued up and looking behind them (at us) with smug little grins and knowledge that they, certainly, would get in, but we… well it would be best not to harp on it.

But that was all right. We tried to tell ourselves we were having a fine time chatting amongst ourselves (Paul.za, Mom.za, Greg, Heidi, BJ and Adam), and that we might even get free passes to see something else if we were refused entrance. Plus, many more people lined up behind us, so we got to assume smug little grins of our own.

I am, of course, referring to our chance to see a screening of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And we were, of course, wrong; we did not get free passes to see something else when we were refused entrance.

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Everyone has no doubt heard of the Cassini Spacecraft launched in 1997 which last year began a series of flybys of Saturn’s moons. Well, on Christmas day, the Hyugens Probe was released from Cassini and began it’s mission: a closer inspection of the moon of Titan. While the Hyugens Mission is primarily an atmospheric one, it was designed to land on the surface (find it liquid or solid), and take some surface measurements and pictures.

January 14th, Hyugens descended into Titan’s atmosphere and it’s four hour data collection spree began. Four hours for two reasons: (1) the batteries wouldn’t last too much longer, and, more importantly (2) because Hyugens transmits to Cassini, not to Earth. And Cassini wasn’t stopping.

Well, as of 2am this morning, a lot of the data have been analyzed. Except for some awesome pictures, though, little has been released; wait until next week, say.

But, I can say that there is quite a high probability that there exitsts life on Titan.

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Trrx perq ~ ntr.

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“KrebPbby” zl nff.

A truly generic “look at me, I have a ‘blog'” post:

Jon Stewart wins, CNN cancels Crossfire. For the piranhas out there: more from Google News.

The day of that “interview” will go down in American Media History, I think. As will some hopefully comical pictures of a certain bowtie wearing personality.

In fairness, and as Ars points out, Jon Stewart’s interview is doubtfully the cause of the cancellation, but it’s certainly correlated.

McSweeny’s has an amusing site in which quotations from Dubs are altered so that any reference to God is replaced by a famous name found in Trivial Pursuit.

I should point out that I found this via the most random internet related event that has ever happened to me; I found a truly bizarre confluence of web pages.

I googled “America the Book” in hopes of finding why the Open Letter to Sean Penn was not in my edition, but was in the edition I saw at Vromann’s last month. I ended up at Comedy Central’s site where I noticed that Jon Stewart et al. will be reading from their book at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on January 13. All proceeds from this ticketed event will go to 826nyc.org, a “nonprofit writing center designed to help students ages 6-18 develop their writing skills.”

But, that begged a certain question; what is the significance of “826”. It’s not their address. I looked around on the site, but didn’t see any explanation.

Several hours later I was looking at mertner.com where Allan posted some useful advice on multiblogging with wordpress that I’m using here. Another user of the site, Morten, linked to Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software. A pretty interesting read. Anyway, in his about page, Joel paraphrases something from Timothy McSweeney’s mcsweenys.net, the provenance of the above article. And what else do I find there but a faq about 826NYC.net.

To quote Keanu Reeves: “whoa”.

That’s the long of it. The short of it is that I still don’t know why my copy of America the Book doesn’t have the letter to Sean Penn in it nor what “826” means.