Friday, March 12, 2004
I'll take skim milk with that
Today AP released a news story about Krispy Kreme's new donut. Looks like they're developing a low-sugar donut, to lure dieters and diabetics.
This comes a couple days after Tommy Thompson called we Americans "too darn fat"--a sentiment with which I agree wholeheartedly--and the Department of Health and Human Services released a new report detailing the lightning-fast takeover obesity has had on the cause-of-death charts here in the U.S. I knew we were getting fatter than ever, but it's an entirely different to think about obesity chasing heart disease as the number-one cause of death.
If I can't control how many donuts I eat, at least I know that in a couple months I can eat them knowing that they're not as bad for me as they once were. I'm glad Krispy Kreme is looking out for me, to temper my ravenous gluttony. Instead of cutting out their donuts altogether, or cutting back to one a day, I can still eat two of them, and have it be just like I was eating one. And to help out with my new diet, I'll be using skim milk instead of cream in my coffee. Or at least Half and Half.
Thursday, March 11, 2004
High Scorer
Today I decided to give Doom Funnel Chasers a shot. It's the cousin of the Spaced Penguins game I tried and blogged back on March 1. And, it looks like it was my day, because I got on the high score list--there I am, number ten for the day, with 806,295 points. I'll tell you what it felt like for me to get on that high score board. It felt like I had blindfolded myself and thrown four straight bullseyes on a dart board.
I'm basically not so sure I could do it again. I still don't know how these guys get 2 trillion points. "reg," the high scorer for the day, doesn't even get close to the points on the all-time high score board. He's nabbed a whopping 43,749,856 points, which is way better than my score, obviously. But he's still scored over 2,103,734,000 fewer points than the bottom scorer on that all-time board. I mean, I know what it'd take for me to get that many points. I'd have to sit down and run a computer simulation that would calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, their size, their gravity, the location of the bonuses, and then the coordinates from which and velocity with which I should launch my duct tape ball projectile.
That's not to say that there aren't people out there who could not do that. Or even that there aren't people who do that. But I know what it's like to score 10th for the day. I'd think, personally, getting on the all-time score list would be like pulling off that blindfold to find out I'd thrown all five of my plastic darts into the exact same divot in the board--and had none pop out.
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Show Your Bias--Rate Your Patriotism
Today Jill wrote about International Women's Day, and she mentions that despite the generations of toil for women's rights, there's still unequal pay for women. We've really come a long way, but there's still some ground to cover, and it's like that everywhere in the world where women are still fighting battles for their rights.
This weekend I asked my girlfriend if, on a scale of 0-100, she would rate how "proud she is to be an American."
She gave her answer, which was a bit lower than I had expected, and we discussed it. She pointed, for example, to the fact that she is a woman, and that while women still do today have an increasing number of opportunities they did not have at the beginning of the last century, there's still a ways to go. And I, despite all my academic training to recognize equal rights issues, and feminism, and all the rest, had somehow forgotten all of this when it came time to evaluate my personal happiness with my country. At that moment, I was amazed at how easy it was for me to forget that people like me--white males, that is--have never had to fight for any of their rights.
So happy Women's Day, women. It's a bit late, but that's not because I don't care--only because I needed some women to remind me in the first place.
Monday, March 08, 2004
HEEE-YAH!
Yesterday I made the final decision: I was going to purchase Ninja Gaiden at full price, despite my usual tendency to wait until I can find them used for a bit cheaper.
The original Ninja Gaiden, which came out for the NES in 1989, was one of my first true video game loves. I played the hell out of that game, and to this day can pick it up and play through the vast majority of it without practice; I still know where every enemy is, when to jump to avoid their weapons, and when to stop jumping to avoid running into them. When I started to pick up the guitar, my girlfriend told me that once I learned the chords my fingers would never forget them. Playing the original Ninja Gaiden is just like that for me.
So I have a long emotional connection to the game, and the weight of years made the pressure to buy the game quite powerful. Additionally, Blockbuster critically underestimated the game's popularity and bought only two copies of the game for each of its stores around here; that means they won't be likely to be selling them off anytime soon. Sometimes I wonder who decides which games they should buy, and how many, because there are far less popular titles of which they have a dozen copies.
Regardless, since my mind is, admittedly, a little sensitive to Ninja stuff these days, I noticed it when, by happenstance, I noticed a strange and forgotten link on my favorites toolbar: The Official Ninja Webpage, a.k.a. "Real Ultimate Power". While I've been enjoying my new game, I think I take its box's injunction to "Unleash your inner ninja" in a completely different way than would these fellows. This is not the place to go for real ninja information. Actually, I don't think it's the place to go for any kind of information at all. But they have a good time with it, and for some reason I find it easier to laugh at this than I do at any of the stuff from yesterday's post. There's a great deal to be said about knowing when you're acting juvenile....
Sunday, March 07, 2004
Creavity Run Horribly Amok
As a teen I was drawn to the comic book culture like a moth to the flame. That's not to say that I was drawn to the people in that culture, but most everything I could burn hours and money on I could find in a comic book shop: role playing games, miniatures, cool and unusual board games, etc.
As an adult, I've gone a reasonable way to keep that a secret. It's not that I'm truly ashamed of any of that--I mean, here I am, making an open admission of my dorkiness, so it's not that at all. It's also not that I am now the ridiculously cool guy I never was as a teen. I'd still consider myself pretty nerdy. Rather, I think I have a pretty good grasp on what society considers as normal, and what just falls too deep into subculture to be grasped by most people. I also perceive that the amount of energy it would take to explain it is just unreasonable. So it remains a part of my past, and, admittedly, a part of my present, when I can find a few friends with whom to share my closet nerdiness. They tend to be closet nerds, too.
My lovely girlfriend accepts my nerdiness, though she unabashedly teases me about it, which is fair enough. There's plenty about it to be teased, that's for sure. But my background in nerdhood sent tingles down my spine when she said that she was going to a meeting put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism here in Omaha. I'll use a nerdy allusion to make the notion clear--my spider-sense went off, full blast.
I had a brief run-in with the SCA when I was still in high school. As a nerd, the torch carried by the SCA for fun, medieval style, had an immense draw. Like a nerd to their lambent flame, I so badly wanted to attend a meeting that some of my friends were going to. My parents put their foot down, and I didn't go. But when my friends returned from the meeting I got the story, anyhow. They got to dress up in cool clothes, and there were fighting demonstrations, and all these people offered them homemade beer and wine, and--
--and that was it for me and the SCA. Now, I will be the first to admit to my rather conservative upbringing, but even given that, I am absolutely not keen on providing alcohol to minors. It's just not okay, and I don't care who you are. So it seemed umpteen times creepier that these older men and women would get my 15-year old friends dressed up in bosom-pushing outfits (which I heard all about), talk to them in some perverted hybrid of Middle English and Monty Python, and then encourage them to drink their own homemade liquor. I just got a fishy feeling about the whole thing.
Now whether or not that reflects on the broader organization, I cannot say, but it certainly has colored my perspective on the organization. So, though I didn't say as much to my girlfriend as I wanted to at the time, I even so had a few comments to dispense about what was likely to happen.
I should at this juncture mention the reason for my girlfriend's attendance at the meeting. She was not going because she had, after all the taunting about my nerdiness, developed a sudden urge to express her own inner dork. Rather, she has been working on some ideas for her Medieval Literature class, and has decided she wanted to do a photography project. One of her classmates, who apparently is into the SCA, told her about it as an opportunity to perhaps get some pictures that would fit into her period-style photographic reflections.
But after hours of strange goings-on, some weird painting, horrible play acting, and some other mischief, she returned from the meeting. Another friend took a lot of digital pictures, but she had spent money on her film, and wanted to use it on something worth the money to develop.
Now, I'm not certain I mean to formulate a categorical rejection of the SCA and the people who are involved in it. Chances are, however, that had I come across their webpage by just browsing, or by somone else's blog, or whatever, I would have likely commented on it anyway, past history or not.
There are ample reasons why. For example, I found out by using one of their maps that Nebraska is a part of the Calontir Kingdom, and further more, that Omaha is actually the Barony of the Lonely Tower (I wonder if that's a veiled reference to the First National Bank tower, the building that goes the longest way to defining Omaha's skyline). And the Calontir kingdom hosts something called the Lilies war. And that "The Lilies war is Calontir's way to show the Known World that wars can be fun."
No moth draws to this flame. But maybe if I change my mind I can talk to someone on their Curia Regis, like Chatelaine Lady Cerridwyn Eurgledde ferch Owain ap Bychan ap Gruffudd ap Llywellyn ap Siesyllt ap Meredudd, or Deborah Russell.
