Make My Day

My DW granted me a "Make My Day" award. Yay, I made someone's day! :)

I, in turn, nominate Lyoncage, one of my dearest and oldest friends. Lyoncage is a super-geek extraordaire (yes, that's a compliment, for all of you unitiated folks out there), an insightful purveyor and critic all forms of modern media great and small, and a damned fine singer, to boot. ;)

Mr. Brown

If you're a fan of food (and yes, I'm a fan of food....just ask my ever expanding waistline...), chances are you've watched The Food Network. If you haven't...well, you should.

If you've watched the Food Network, then chances are you've heard of Alton Brown, an extraordinarily entertaining guy with his own show ("Good Eats"), a host of books and one of the most creative and innovative presentation styles you've even see on a cooking show. If you think of Rachel Ray or Paula Dean when you think cooking shows, you should give Alton a try...I've never seen anyone else make use of Ken dolls, football plays or sock puppets in their recipe presentations. Alton is fun because he shows us how to make better versions of the foods that a lot of us grew up on or love to eat and feel guilty about (pizza, burgers, cake, cookies...stuff like that...), and shows us ways to prepare them that are both a) new and unique, and b) oddly familiar and traditional. Essentially, he's presenting "high food snob" ways to prepare corn dogs and donuts, which, in my book, is just awesome.

(As a side note, I'd like to mention that "Good Eats" is one of my 5-year-old son's most oft requested shows to watch. It's also the reason that he's always in the kitchen, trying to add "2 cups of flour" and "1 cup of sugar" to anything and everything that is being prepared for any given meal. My son's enthusiasm for Alton's show is also why he and I prepared peanut butter waffles this weekend, and why we had chocolate waffles on Christmas morning...after all, the episode "The Waffle Truth" is one of his all-time favorite things to watch. How many 5-year-old's do you know who are obsessed with a cooking show?)

Recently, my DW located a second show of Alton's called "Feasting on Asphalt", an enormously entertaining chronicle of Alton's motorcycle trek from one end of the continental U.S. to the other, tasting non-franchised, "mom & pop" food every step of the way. Alton & his crew took the back roads of America to, quite literally, get a taste of Americana..and man, did it make me hungry. From cracklin' cornbread to the swinging steaks to old fashioned breakfast diners to speciality biscuit shops, watching Alton's trip made the entire family go and get some "road food"...instead, we wound up at Krispy Kreme, but it was a guilty pleasure he rarely allow ourselves, so it was a real treat. We're seriously considering taking a road trip later this year, to get a little slice of Americana ourselves. ;)

In any case, if you're at all a fan of food, or of "back roads Americana" literature and television in general, you should check out Alton's stuff...you'll be glad you did.

(Oh...I almost forgot to mention that Alton also hosts the new version of "Iron Chef America"...another great show that I'll have to talk about another time...)

To Arms! To Arms!

Back in the day (for purposes of today's blog, "the day" is back in 1984, when I was in the 4th grade and only slightly less mature than I am now), I received the coolest game ever invented: Crossbows & Catapults. (For the record, the other coolest games were "Thunder Road", "Fireball Island", and "Cops & Robbers", but we'll discuss those another time...). In this game, two opponents set up their small Medieval armies (complete with towers, walls, and seige weaponry) on either end of a large, flat playing field. Once set up, you proceed to pummel your opponent's stronghold with plastic ammunition launched from your siege weaponry....what could be more fun than that? Alas, like so many other bits of my childhood (the afore mentioned games, the original S'Mores cereal, etc.) this excellent game went the way of the proverbial Dodo.

Or did it?

A few months before Christmas, I conveniently saw this product in the local Target. My jaw dropped, my hands got all sweaty, and I felt a stirring...yes, my wife was looking even more gorgeous than usual that day. But once the shock of my wife's unearthly beauty passed*, I realized that this game, while cosmetically different, was indeed the same game I'd grown up with (though the actual, physical remnants of the game I'm sad to say, ultimately wound up in the hands of my younger brother, thereby sealing its fate. Leaving something with him is like letting a ravenous wolf babysit your barbecue-sauce lathered toddler...it's just asking for trouble). So much "reinventing your childhood" toy marketing has been waged against today's unsuspecting parents recently (G.I. Joe reissues, anyone? Transformers? My Little Pony? He-Man?), but most of it left me unfazed. While I was certainly a fan of those toy lines when I was a youngster (save for My Little Pony, unless they were being marked, tagged and hunted by my Cobra tanks), their reappearance had little overall effect on me. But "Crossbows & Catapults"...even as a boy I'd had obscure tastes, and to think that someone else had also liked this game enough to actually re-issue it was almost like having my entire childhood validated.

Needless to say, the game went onto my Wish List, and -- praise be the In-Laws -- I received every last piece under the Christmas tree!

The game is simple: as I described above, you pretty much set up little plastic castles and destroy them with toy siege weapons. Back in "the day", your armies were the Vikings and the Barbarians (I always played the Barbarians, because the troops looked cooler). Nowawdays, in this Tolkien-savvy world, the armies consist of Humans and Orcs (I like the new armies better, and naturally play the Orcs, since they remind me of myself, gnarly teeth and all). The rules are incredibly simple, and all movement and distance is measured in inches (which reminds just a bit of Warhammer, even if Crossbows & Catapults...or "Battlegrounds", as it's now called...is an infinitely simpler system, as it is designed for kids.)

The best part? Shortly after Christmas, my 5-year-old son and I broke out the game and played it on the table out in the living room which seconds as my desk. We didn't worry too much about the rules (he's 5, come on), but just shot each other's castles with the new, super-cool weapons like the Orc Triple Crossbow, the Trebuchet and the Battering Ram. We had an absolute blast. The game got put away, but then again this weekend we broke it out again, and this time my 13-year old daughter played against my son. Though she may not ever admit it, they both had tons of fun (even if my son got a little..."possessive" of some of the ammunition pieces). What was fun for me was watching them: here were my kids, enjoying something I'd had when I was their age. It brought back good memories...which means it was a present well worth getting. :)



* Give me a break, it's a like a DC 22 Save, and we all know how low my Wisdom score is...

Happy Birthday!

Today is my lovely wife's birthday -- 29 and counting! :)

I love you, hon...Happy Birthday!

Spread the Word

Stolen from my DWs blog. I normally don't post stuff like this, but this is an important issue, and the argument in this video is quite brilliant. It's about 10 minutes long, but it's well worth it.

Happy Holidays/I Need a New Hobby

I love the holidays. Not so much the last-minute frantic present purchasing, the indigestion from overconsumption of trans-fat laden dips and chocolate treats, or the inescapable hangover from consuming far too much eggnog, but the general...cheer. Both of my children were tremendously excited about Christmas this year (that's not saying much for my hyperactive 5-year-old son, but it speaks volumes in regards to my near comatose 13-year-old daughter), and while it took some time for my wife and I to catch the Christmas bug ourselves, we eventually did.

And boy am I glad.

My son was literally bounding up and down like a jackrabbit on a sugar rush when he rose (surprisingly late at 0730) on Christmas morning, and both he and his sister tore through their gifts with relentless aplomb. Everyone got plenty of loot (between my wife and I we acquired "Lost Season 3", "Battlestar: Galactica Season 1" and "House Season 2", and it was only last night that we finally had the time to push our way through the rest of the 3rd season of "Scrubs"..suffice to say, we've got plenty of tv to catch up on...). My son has been playing his new video games almost non-stop (just as my wife and daughter have been extensively playing Viva Pinata on the new XBOX 360...yes, Santa got a little jolly this year...). And I...well, I've been watching the shows, hanging out with the kids, and above all enjoying my time off. I haven't had to get up before 7 a.m. in almost 10 ten days (which is a sublime feeling), and I've become about as lumpy and couch-potato like as one can imagine.

But it hasn't been all fun and games!

Deciding that the roll of fat that has slowly but steadily creeping around my mid-section is a) not an alien entity, and b) not going away on its own, my wife turned me on to a great website called SparkPeople, which, among other things, has a great tool for tracking your daily calorie and fat intake. Just seeing the information compiled before your eyes is almost enough to motive you to stop eating altogether. (You never knew how many calories "light" popcorn had...). With the aid of exercise (I walk at least 2 miles every weekday, and three times a week I throw in 35-45 minutes of cardio exercise when I have the time), I may actually start to look less like Jabba the Hut and more like a young Obi-Wan Kenobi. (I feat that reference made little sense, but you get the idea...).

I've also decided that I need a new hobby. Right now my past times consist of a) writing (which I have done little to none of in about 2-3 weeks), b) playing D&D Miniatures online (this is pretty much what I do when I'm not hanging out with the family or working), and c) watching movies or TV. Earlier today, after having my poverbial a$$ handed to me in two games of D&D minis games in a row versus some fine European opponents and getting extremely cranky about the results, I came to a realization. While I do indeed hate to lose (and, for the record, I generally lose badly...I can admit it...), it's not the losing that upsets me so much as the feeling that I suck at the ONE hobby/pasttime of mine that I've really kept up with. Its a terrible feeling, like a runner realizing he doesn't know how to sprint, or a knitter who fails time and again to construct something as rudimentary as a dishcloth. The more I ruminated on my two unfortunate losses, I came to realize that the most fun I've ever had playing DDM is when it was NOT my primary focus or hobby (such as during NanoWrimo). You see, I have what you might call an obsessive personality, and I tend to focus on one thing (hobby, job, whatever) with such psychotic intensity that I have been known to actually give myself cramps. This is bad, for such intense compartmentalization lends to my acting like a completely moody dick. And no one wants that, least of all me.

Now, the obvious answer is "Start writing again, dip$hit"....and I will (woe be the world at large). But this is 2008! Time to buck some trends! I want to try something else, a new craft or hobby that I've never tried before!

I just have no idea what. Maybe a "Dad" type hobby, something involving power tools and wood chippers (my wife shudders at the thought, recalling how I nearly severed my right finger in a Village Inn back when I sold knives...). Maybe something crafty to express my Carson Creely side, like knitting, latch hook or embroidery. Or maybe something completely nonsensical and deranged, like improvisational taxidermy or freestyle bison lancing.

Who knows -- if you have any suggestions (oh, ye 8 readers o' mine), drop me a line -- I'm willing to try anything at least once!

In any case, Happy Holidays to all!