I was amused this weekend, if not particularly surprised, to learn of quizbowl connections among the group I play boardgames with. I suppose the center of that particular Venn diagram is fuller than one might suspect, no matter how marginalized "geek stuff" is in trash. More than one gamer has expressed interest in curling, too. That should be interesting. Now, to set up more enclaves of Movie Dictator Nights...



So Saturday afternoon, the much-planned face-to-face game of Diplomacy (if you're not sure what I'm talking about and don't want to follow the link, think of the backstabbing and alliance aspects of Survivor without immunity challenges, product placements, and, um, swimsuit models) finally happened. My jargon-filled recap of same is

here.

Saturday night K. and I saw The Funseekers, a Minneapolis band from my youth who reunited for a Mod fest in Chicago. They were great, and one opening act was good enough for me to buy the CD. The crowd was a little odd, with over half wearing various Mod attire. Kirsti nailed it: like Goths, the women usually look good, but the guys were just sad with maybe one or two exceptions. White belts! Ascots! Orange double-breasted suits! And scooters, scooters, scooters, seemingly all wedged in tightly around my parking space. I needed some Astroglide to get home.



Sunday we went to the last day of the Brandeis Book Sale (everything for 50 cents) with Jenni and Alexis. I got a bunch of stuff that'll become trash prizes, and regrettably few things that I'll keep. We and Steve had brunch and questionable service at Cheesecake Factory, then Jenni came back and hung out with us for a few hours.

A Vast Right-wing Spam Conspiracy?

When people think of spam e-mail, people usually think of natural Viagra, porn, or Nigerian scams. Lately much of my spam has been for Dittohead crap. Flag stuff. Israeli gas masks. Iraq's Most Wanted cards. Axis of Weasels cards. And most recently, in a mail bewilderingly titled "Stop Hillary's Book" (yeah, damn that pesky first amendment --ed.), something called "Axis of Hillary" cards. I'm not sure how purchasing playing cards of any nature is going to "stop" a book, but there you go.

In non-marketing spam news, one of the better bloggers (either Atrios or Ted Barlow, linked in the left column on this page) did an interesting analysis some time ago of the presidential email forwards mentioned on Snopes.com. Apparently there are far more false emails denigrating Clinton(s) then there are for Bush, and of them, there's more of an effort to cast Bush in a positive light than there is for Clinton.

I'm just sayin', is all...

hey, links are back, yo.

Perhaps the best lyrical ad-lib ever?

"Why am I standing here?/I should be kissing her/

Why am I Schlesinger?/I should be Kissinger"

--The Suicide Commandos, covering The Monkees' "She"

Ahhh...

Much better. Acrobat still is unable to make the smart quotes in the font I'm using, but eliminating the need for quotation marks to begin with fixes things just as well.

@#$#$%#$@

So...this place wants a resume in PDF. I don't own Acrobat; probably would be a bad idea to buy it now, considering we'll have to bite the bullet and go OS X. So I tour the north suburbs, looking for a Kinko's or like place where I can convert a Word file to PDF. First place -- no go. They want me to drop off the file as a job, and they can't get it to me until tomorrow. Thanks but no thanks. I head back to the Kinko's in Evanston. Would have been my first stop, but one of my other intended errands was to get a haircut, and I was looking for places sorta close together. There is NO parking available in the tiny development housing the Green Bay Rd. Kinko's. I have to do something illegal to get into the realtor's lot next door (which I'm not supposed to park in anyway). There's one Mac at Kinko's. The rate for the machine is double the others. So I get on it, and distill a PDF...and the smart quotes are missing! They're not re-appearing as ditto marks, they're just gone. It's no wonder I got turned down at the blood bank today due to high blood pressure.

The House...of Buttafuoco

We have another member of the family. We brought my sister's cat, Vinnie Buttafuoco, home with us from our Memorial Day trip to MN. Our incumbent cat, Sofia B., is Vinnie's littermate, and they spent a good eight years together, so we weren't sure how the sibs would get along after four or so years apart.



Surprisingly, there's a good deal of harmony. They're not best buds anymore, but they don't hiss at each other too much, and the extent of the fights have been Sof running up, swatting him on the head, and running away. Both are very goodnatured. Vinnie was great in the car, although the Valium probably had a lot to do with that.



They're very Felix and Oscar. Sofia is a tortoiseshell calico, and is very slight. People see her and can't believe she's full-grown, let alone almost 13 years old. Vinnie is a wicked huuuuge lump of ginger tabby, with paws like catcher's mitts because of his extra toes. He also has a meow like a yodel, or a baby talking.



Buy me a scanner and you can see pictures. Bwaahaha!