Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "I sure hope nothing bad happens to him."
¤ Usage: "Honey, I sure do like that Gollum guy a lot.  I hope nothing bad happens to him."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Origin: I made this one up some weeks ago, after reading in Entertainment Weekly that the main female prosecutor character on Law and Order:SUV was going to be leaving the show. I showed the article to Malaya as well, since we watch that one in reruns. That night when we were watching a rerun of it I started talking about how much I liked her character and how I hoped she'd be on the show forever, which cracked Malaya up.
¤ Notes: This catch phrase is uttered by me several times a week, and is almost sure to amuse us.  It's best delivered in an innocent and hopeful voice, when she and I both know for sure that something bad is going to happen to him, whoever him (or her) may be.  The humor comes from the earnestness with which I say it, and the cluelessness implied by not realizing how very wrong I am.

It can also be used to tease, if I know something and she doesn't, since once I say it she's consumed with worry for the future well-being of the character.  Like for instance since I know how LotR turns out, and she doesn't, and I said it about oh... Frodo.  Or Aragorn. -- December 6, 2003

Monday night things were delayed by an old friend. Diablo II, out of the desk drawer I'd had it lying in for the past 2 months, and back into the CD-Rom.  The official blame is Malaya's jaunty new iMac, which she was going to name Diabolique, but has since backed away from. And in a moment of comedy that's pretty typical for us, she just said, "But if anyone wants to send in a name I'll give it some consideration."

The comedy came in when I immediately said, "No you won't, you'll heap scorn upon the suggestion and laugh at it."  Which cracked her up, since that's exactly what she'd do (unless, of course, the name happened to be good). She did say, before laughing at my reply, "You never know, you might have some Mac users reading your blog."

That also amused me, since what, Mac users have some innate ability to come up with jauntier names for an iMac than PC users would? Or is it just that Mac users wouldn't find the whole concept of actually naming a computer ridiculous?  Perhaps you get more attached to a mac than to a PC, since you think of it as an integral whole unit, rather than just a stack of computer parts; most of which you wish to upgrade and replace at the first possible opportunity? And therefore are more likely to give it a name?

Her second suggestion was Schadenfreude, which while very appropriate is a bit of a mouthful.

Anyway, if you've got a name suggestion for Malaya's new G4 iMac, feel free to send it in and I promise we won't identify you by name when we laugh at your suggestion.

As for the Diablo II, we were curious to see how it would work on her new computer, and since neither of us had played D2 or any other computer game in months, we were due some playing time.

And it was pretty fun, I have to admit. I did a Necromancer and she did a Sorceress, both brand new v1.10 single player chars with very minimal twinking.  Just an Angelic Raiment each (which we hardly wore anyway, due to some luck with rare armor and a general lack of AC need due to our character builds) and the Infernal Set wand for my Necromancer, with a Wormskull for later.  Malaya's sorcy got an Angelic sword and amulet as well, just to speed things along for the first dozen levels or so.  We played on /players 8 up until the Monastery, when we turned it down to /players 4 just to speed things along, since our partial clear had us around lvl 15 by then. We were both 17 for Andy, who we did on /players 2, and we turned it back up to /players 8 once we were into Act 2 and did our quick cube and Radament run.

The day's play took perhaps 3 hours, we played without hurrying, and ended up lvl 20 and 19, and enjoyed it.  Neither of us ever came anywhere near dying other than her Sorceress from a couple of painful Cold Enchanted boss deaths, and that was only because Malaya doesn't like to pick her stats/skills in advance; preferring to go as long as possible without assigning any points, while always keeping quite a few in reserve for later indecision.  It drives me somewhat crazy, when she's running along with 70 stat points and 20 skill points stored up, but I've learned to ignore that and just have fun playing at a much slower speed than I grew used to in the old hyper-competitive days of Hardcore on USEast.

That's one of the main reasons I did a Necromancer now to team with her Sorcy. I knew they'd be a good team; neither of us have the time to play very often and we're not likely to take these characters past Nightmare, and it's more fun for both of us if I'm not doing some superfast (in Normal and NM) killing char like a Zealot or Barb or Bowazon where I'm constantly running forwards at full speed and never want to pause for anything.  Plus neither of our characters is very equipment dependent, so we're not likely to be annoyed by endless failed gambles for a good weapon or armor or some goddamned leech rings.

And it was fun, through Act 1 and early Act 2; with my +1 wand and a decent magical shrunken head I had lvl 4 Raise Skeleton, lvl 3 Skele Mage, lvl 4 skele mastery, and a clay and then blood golem. Enough to have a decent little army, and with the summoned minions so much faster and more deadly in v1.10 I just sat back and saved skill points for later and let my first batch of minions slaughter everything, while I kept the Amp going.  I'd regularly play for 15 minutes without even getting hit hard enough to have to recast my Bone Armor, and I was putting most of my points into energy, so I could keep up the Amp Damage and prepare for the eventual fun of spamming Bone Spirits and Corpse Explosions.

Anyway, I have no idea when we'll play next, but it was fun to get back into the game, however slightly, and it also made me glad that I no longer play it as I used to.  Even three hours of gaming seems to go by in a blink, while simultaneously failing to do anything to satisfy my inner gaming desires.  Desires that I've been ignoring and stuffing down pretty successfully for some weeks/months.

That game went until nearly midnight, and by the time we had a snack and Malaya went to sleep and I had a shower and got back on the computer it was after 2 and I had 300 digicam photos stacked up on my HD to sort through.  Most were from the Xmas SD trip, shots of the fire and the zoo and other things, but there were at least 100 after that.  I started going through them, viewing them in Photoshop, and cropping, resizing, and fiddling with the image quality, levels, lighting, etc on the ones I planned to post here eventually.

I did that while alternating more article'ing and some surfing and some Mah Jong solitaire, and next thing I knew it was nearly 5am and I was exhausted.  So it was (relatively) early to bed, with thoughts of blogging right when I got up in the morning.  However when I did get up Malaya was gone to visit her parents, and I had some household chores to do and then some personal emails to reply to and the rest of those damned photos to edit, and lunch to eat.

And by the time I got some headway made on that Malaya was back home and we ate dinner and watched TV and hung out, and here it is just past midnight again and I'm blogging, but a day late.

I did finish all of the photos though, and I should be posting a new photos page or 3 in the days to come. I really want to get back to writing fiction, but I'm still feeling relatively motivated to catch up on other tasks, so I figure I should just ride this wave as long as it lasts. And yes, that's just the sort of logic that's allowed me to spend the past decade not writing and not getting anything published and not making any real money. What can I say, it's a gift.

Here's a reader email about yesterday's blog topic, the weird parents of childhood friends thing. The mail is from Jeremy.

It's very true about the downright bizarre seeming pretty mundane as a child. When I was maybe 10 or 11 I had a friend called Larry [maybe his real name was Lawrence, I don't recall], but we called him Lamb [after Larry the Lamb - an ancient and now defunct toddlers' TV show from 1960s BBC] and I clearly remember visiting his house on a couple of occasions when I met his parents who were both fairly unremarkable, as I recall. We were upstairs in his house one afternoon when Larry decided to give me a tour of his parents' bedroom. Obviously, you have to bear in mind that being quite young, the tour didn't make too much of an impression on me until a couple of years later, at which point I guess, Larry deeply regretted ever letting me have a peek in the room since the walls were more or less completely taken up with various items of bondage gear, I'm talking chains, manacles, whips, rubber suits, the whole works. There was even a[n] [apparently] home-made wooden dildo rack with various rubbery specimens arrayed on the wall behind the bed. I can't remember all that well what my actual thoughts were at the time, but I do remember not thinking it was too radical; with the overriding sense, being one of slight puzzlement as to what it was all about. I must have been in there only a couple of minutes as Larry was really nervous about being caught by his parents and the whole thing was a much bigger deal to him at the time than it was to me.

Anyway, by the time I had come to an understanding of what all this was for, on the one or two occasions I met his parents - in the enlightened state - I could never again look his mum in the eye and found myself wanting to giggle any time that they spoke to me.

As far as I know, Larry's parents still live in the same house, I just wonder if more than 2 decades later they've changed the decor for something a bit more floral and lace?

Well, that's a bit weirder than anything I had in my article/life, I must admit.

I do recall my best friend's dad when I was in 6th and 7th grade, who had what I now realize was a pretty severe drinking problem.  He went through oh, 20 or 30 cans of Coors Light a day, as best I remember, and was constantly sending Matt (my friend) or myself off to the kitchen to get him one.  It was sort of an honor to fetch one from the fridge, and Matt was forever trying to cadge a sip before dad downed it, though to dad's credit I recall him not letting his 12 y/o son taste the beer.  Obviously dad knew first hand where that road led.

However since Matt was overgrown and not very bright and not at all studious, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if the 30 something man he's since grown into were just like dad; working some menial labor and drinking too much once he gets home from work.  Of course since I've had zero contact or information about him in nearly 20 years, I really have on idea.  Perhaps he got his shit together and got a good wife and put himself through college and has a good job today and happy children. In any event, I doubt he's given me a thought in decades, since I left Texas after 7th grade when I moved out to San Diego to live with my mom, and then my dad sold his house in Arlington and moved out to San Diego as well, about a year later.

¤ A humor site, Mad Kane, has their 2nd annual George Bush quote quiz online now.  There are 20 questions with 4 choices for each, and you must guess which is the real Dubya quote, and which is a made up one.  Since I figure you're all about as likely to read the whole thing as I was (not at all) I'll just cut to the chase and link to the answers page, upon which it's revealed that 3/4 of the answers on each question were actual Bushisms, with only the most ridiculous hick-speak one invented. And lest you think they're invented or spiced up, the sources for and some background info about nearly every quote is provided.

A few of my favorites:

"First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill." (Washington, D.C., May 19, 2003)

I've had this one on my QotD page for a while, mostly in disbelief.  I honestly can't imagine what sort of discussion he was in where it became necessary to preface a statement with this disclaimer. It's also interesting to see his point of view as revealed in this one.  Any of us (I think) would find being rich a strange state of affairs and even if we were going to say what he's saying here (for some reason) we'd word it conversely. "Even if you're not lucky enough to be rich..." or something like that.  For Dubya, born a millionaire and grown richer ever since (thanks to sweetheart deals from Daddy's bidness friends), despite never showing any real ability in business, surrounded by other millionaires, the odd state of affairs is for a person to not be rich.  I hope to someday be this oblivious to the real world, when it comes to financial matters.

Another one, apparently issued after Saddam's capture.  You can sort of tell what he was trying to say here, but not exactly.  Read the whole sentence a couple of times if you need to; it's amazing just how tortured the prose is.

"As you notice, when there's a hole in the ground and a person is able to crawl into it in a country the size of California, it means we're on a scavenger hunt for terror, and find these terrorists who hide in holes is to get people coming forth to describe the location of the hole, is to give clues and data. And we're on it." (Washington, D.C., Dec. 15, 2003)

I guess I also have to give Dubya credit for sticking to the party line and still trying to hammer on the Saddam = terrorist concept, even though it's been completely debunked.  Of course that's assuming Dubya knows better; for all I know he might believe his own speech writers and Fox News and think Saddam was in cahoots with al Queda?

"I wanna remind you all that I -- in, in order -- what -- in order to fight and win the war it requires a expenditure of money -- uhh, uhh -- that is commiserate with keeping a promise to our troops to make sure that they're well paid, well trained, well equipped."

"And the time is getting worse. That's what people have got to understand up there in Washington or over there in Washington down there in Washington, whatever. Thought I was in Crawford for a minute." (Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jan. 16, 2003)

"I want to thank members of my administration who are here who will be involved in the implementation of some of the initiatives that I've outlined to the United States Congress. The Secretary of Education is here, Rod Paige, behind me. John Ashcroft is here... And, most importantly, Alma Powell, secretary of Colin Powell, is with us." (White House, Jan. 30, 2003)

There are plenty of others that are just head scratchers, where it's obvious that he's misspoken, but you're not quite sure what he was trying to say.  I'm not going to castigate him that fiercely for this sort of thing since after all, if our every statement was recorded and nit picked, we'd all realize that we say a lot of dumb things.  Times you start talking and forget a word, or try to change your point in mid-sentence, or just stumble over your own tongue. Take this listing for the humorous aspects of it, rather than trying to derive some grand "Bush is an idiot" conclusion from it.

Because, after all, there's ample evidence in many other areas that you can use to reach that conclusion.

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