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My big birthday games order is here!
What you see there is Samural, Tikal, Ark of the Covenant, For Sale, Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix, Poison, Coda, Times Square, Battle Line, Tichu, and Bohnanza!
And that’s not including the copy of Louis XIV that James and Al got me, tastefully arranged in a wicker basket:
Games Day at my place, everyone!
The first installment of Mother Jones magazine’s Flash-based database is now online.
This is no small article. All the information in it is sourced and cross-referenced. Unfortunately many people already knew the information contained in it, and more won’t believe it anyway. Emperor Bush’s supporters have become increasingly fact-resistant, and in fact now are content to say that only what they believe is relevent.
There’s no way to look at this information and not come to the conclusion that:
1) The President, the Vice President, and those around them are liars.
2) Their lies have cost and will continue to cost lives.
3) They do not care at all about protecting you.
4) Their only concern is amassing wealth and power for themselves.
Period.
I still have some stickers, if you want some:
After reading this:
New Tokyopop Website Offers Exclusive Manga
In addition to making some manga available for reading online, the new Tokyopop site will also offer fans the ability to order some exclusive manga in book form that will not be available through retailers. The titles are a combination of never-before-released series and series that were launched through the trade that are now being converted to Web exclusives. Among the series that have previously been sold through retailers that are now being sold only through the Website are One, Neck and Neck, Heaven Above Heaven, Sorcerer Hunters Authentic Relaunch, Soul to Seoul, Dragon Head, Dragon Voice, and Arm of Kannon.
I was prompted to email this:
Dear Tokyopop persons,
I just read the news that your manga ‘Dragon Head’ is going to go to being exclusively distributed through your website. I’m sorry to hear this, as it ensures I will no longer be buying and reading Dragon Head, a book I really enjoy.
Right now I get new volumes through my comic shop, Modern Myths, as part of my regular order. This is convenient for me and helps support a shop I like. Moving to web-exclusive removes this convenience, asking me to place an additional order somewhere and pay shipping. As much as I like the book, and I like it very much, at the end of the day it’s just a funnybook, and now that you’ve made it more of a hassle to order it, I won’t do so. I can live without it.
In addition, this now makes me wary of buying any of Tokyopop’s titles. What if I start to enjoy something else and then find that it too will be made more difficult for me to get hold of? Rather than go through the annoyance of such a thing, it’s easier to simply avoid your titles altogether.
I urge you to reconsider this decision, as it is alienating to your readers and to the retailers.
Thank you for your time,
Dave Lartigue
Swell move there, Tokyopop.
(Hat tip: Chris Butcher)
Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity
As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”
Until the last year, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by the rising value of benefits, especially health insurance, which caused overall compensation for most Americans to continue increasing. Since last summer, however, the value of workers’ benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data.
At the very top of the income spectrum, many workers have continued to receive raises that outpace inflation, and the gains have been large enough to keep average income and consumer spending rising.
For emphasis:
As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s.
Once again, John Lydon, ladies and gentlemen: “Ever have the feeling you’ve been had?”
I finished Infinite Jest this weekend. And by “finished” I mean, “decided life is too short.”
I got about 100 pages in, not counting footnotes pages, before saying, “Yeah, okay, we’re done here.” It’s not a bad book, just tedious. The good bits are just mired in pretentious logorrhea. It’s like sitting on a plane between a six year old with a new joke book and the guy from your creative writing class who claims to love Gravity’s Rainbow.
It doesn’t take long before you realize you don’t care what the particular drug he’s talking about is or does. And in even less time you realize that the phrase “Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment” is funny only so many times, and it’s debatable if “times” should even be plural. I kept waiting for a point to show up amid all the “get me I’m clever” crap, and was afraid that that was the point.
So I’m done with that. I’m either too young or too old for it. Maybe some other time I’ll try it again, but I wouldn’t count on it.
So now I’m onto some quick reads and will pick a book or two for myself, and then you folks will get another chance to pick for me, even though I wasn’t totally thrilled about the first two things that were chosen.
The first band I ever got into with any depth was Kraftwerk. My friend Gene introduced me to them via the song “Pocket Calculator” and I was hooked. My other friends weren’t crazy about them, but fortunately others were. Others like, oh, just about every electronica artist ever. Kraftwerk virtually invented electronic music.
Probably the best known song of theirs (not counting the 22-minute long “Autobahn”) is “The Model”. It’s certainly the most covered song of theirs. For your entertainment, here are several versions of this landmark work by a seminal band.
Here’s the original, from their album The Man Machine (the cover of which is parodied in the image above).
The first cover I ever heard of a Kraftwerk song was by punk band Big Black. Their version of “The Model” is more about the crunchy guitars.
German industrial band Rammstein has also covered the song, in a similar fashion, but with German lyrics:
Also with German lyrics, here’s The Cardigan’s take on the song:
The Cardigans — The Model (mp3)
At the other end of the spectrum, the Balanescu Quartet’s album Possessed features string quartet versions of Kraftwerk songs (as well as David Byrne songs), including this version of “The Model”:
Balanescu Quartet — The Model (mp3)
UPDATE! Here’s another cover by a band called “Canasta” that I don’t know anything about:
These final two covers are of the song “Showroom Dummies”, from the Kraftwerk album Trans-Europe Express. First, let’s hear the original version:
Kraftwerk — Showroom Dummies (mp3)
Now here’s a Latin version by “Señor Coconut”:
Señor Coconut — Showroom Dummies (mp3)
And finally, a version by Japanese noise-rock band Melt Banana:
Melt Banana — Showroom Dummies (mp3)
As you can hear, Kraftwerk’s music appeals to people of all nationalities, personalities, and musical genres. Next time you’re thanking your deity of choice for various blessings, do include Ralf, Florian, Wolfgang, and Karl, won’t you?
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Legomancer
When I was told that Sydney, Anne and Stewart’s four-year-old daughter, wanted to play a game, I got excited. I wondered which one she’d bring out to play. Would it be Twilight Struggle, a gripping strategy game based on the Cold War? Perhaps she would choose Space Hulk, in which armored soldiers desperately fend off an alien invasion of their spacecraft. Or maybe she was into old-school hex-and-counter wargames like Squad Leader. She may choose a classic abstract brain-burner like Go.
Turns out, I was wrong. The game she chose was Angelina Ballerina’s Dancing Game.
Now, I’ve never been much for dancing, as Becky can tell you. In situations in which dancing might be happening, I’ve always opted out, preferring to have people wonder why I’m not dancing instead of why I am. So I imagined this was the kiddo’s not-too-subtle jab at my presumed abilities. Well, I wasn’t going to stand for that, so I charged right into Angelina Ballerina’s Dancing Game (ABDG).
I’m going by the rules as told to me by the four-year-old, so they may not be completely accurate, but ABDG is a roll-and-move game in which you go around a board with colored spaces.
If you land on a straight-up colored space, nothing happens, unless there’s a rainbow bridge hooked to it, in which case you can cross the bridge. The whole point is to land on an Angelina Ballerina space, at which point you choose a card with some ballet move on it. You are then required to perform the move and add it to your dance card. The game continues until Sydney’s dance card is filled.
Once your dance card is filled, you get to perform the dance you created. Shown above is my filled card. And here’s the elegant performance it generated:
So as you can see, it’s not that I can’t dance. I simply usually choose not to.
ABDG is a fine game, but it’s no Tigris and Euphrates. I can’t imagine what Sydney sees in it.
