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Sunday, September 25, 2005

Coincidences

When I was ten or so, my dad once gave me a lecture about the inner workings of a toilet. Nevertheless he claims he loves me, and so does my mom, so once or twice a semester they visit me at college. They bring me food and take me out to eat and listen to me gripe about the cafeteria. (Try subsisting on a quasi-digestible mixture of grease and salt for a while and see how it affects YOUR conversation habits.) Then they weep mournfully as they come to terms, yet again, with what a bore their son has turned out to be, and thus a Saturday is lost to them forever. My mom is wonderful because I tell her to bring a few choice culinary items (Pringles, Easy Mac) and she brings me the Snack aisle of the supermarket stuffed in a suitcase. My parents are great. Without them, I would starve.

Coincidence #1: My parents visited me yesterday. So did Regina’s.

Coincidence #2: Walking down the street after lunch, my parents and I ran into Regina and her parents. We were killing time before our play began, and so were they.

My parents and Regina’s had never been formally introduced, but they’re all Russian so they got along famously. We chatted for a while and parted ways. I convinced my parents to go to the mall, where my dad, still probably suffering a little guilt over the toilet lecture, bought me a board game. My mom bought ridiculously expensive and unnecessary crap, but my dad and I know better than to challenge the utility of her purchases. Men fly like leaves in the wind before the awesome might of a woman’s iron logic. (“Ilana, you have sixteen pairs of pants. Why did you buy another?” “DUUUUHHHHH! Look at the TAG! They normally cost seventy-eight dollars, but I got them on sale for seventy!”)

In retrospect, one might have predicted that something titled “Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure” would be pretty awful. It wasn’t even a play: it was Dave Gorman himself, talking about an unusual eight weeks of his life. He was British and his story had some amusing parts, but unfortunately the parts that weren’t amusing were serious, and it was during these that Dave often chose to forgo speaking for yelling, and the sound system was set up such that his yelling had the effect on me as though a 322-pound lumberjack named Huey was attempting to reorganize the molecules of my eardrums with an ice pick.

A “Googlewhack” is when you type two words into Google — no quotes — and only one hit shows up. Dave’s story begins when he is procrastinating on a novel. Someone sends him an email informing him that he is a Googlewhack (that is, someone found a Googlewhack and his website was the one hit), whereupon Dave finds a Googlewhack himself and emails that person, and that person finds the next Googlewhack, and so on; and then Dave ends up flying all over the world in an effort to meet ten Googlewhacks. It’s a lot more complicated than that, as you will see if ever you hate yourself enough to watch this woeful “play,” but that’s the gist, and if nothing else it’s a remarkable story about the dangers of procrastination. From what I could tell, Dave never did get started on that novel, and instead wrote a book about this Googlewhacking shit.

Just a tip: if you ever meet a bearded British fellow named Dave Gorman, forget about tact and rudeness for a moment and run away immediately. He is not stable. When he said at the end of the “play” that he’d be hanging out at the bar if anybody wanted to chat, I fled the theater on legs that could have overrun a cheetah.

And yes, it is possible to find Googlewhacks. I could give you some examples from the “play,” but unfortunately they aren’t Googlewhacks anymore, because of Dave’s book and the mysterious popularity of his show. My favorite is one that Dave found himself, and the one that got him started on his quest: dork turnspit. If you try to find any Googlewhacks yourself, you will quickly realize how remarkable it is that two such ordinary words could be a winner. I ultimately had to resort to intersexed fascinum. See if you can find one that makes do with simpler vocabulary.

Of course, I can’t complain too much about the Googlewhacking, because the alternative, which Regina saw, was “Menopause: the Musical.” As a male, I can imagine nothing more terrible than sitting in a theater for two hours and watching a production that concerns itself entirely with music. I hate musicals. Every musical ever made, however good, would have been better without music and should have been written as a play, except for Gigi, which was just so awful it should never have been made into anything, and we ought to exhume the corpse of its creator and burn it to ensure she doesn’t inflict any more harm upon the universe, as well as the corpses of all the actors who played on opening night (just to be safe).

If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. Try tacking on “the Musical” to any random movie you can think of — say, The Terminator, so now we have, “Terminator: the Musical” — and observe what happens:

Someday, I’ll be back, maybe.
Until then, Hasta la Vista, Baby.

It just doesn’t work.

If it was “Menopause: the Play,” I might have actually wanted to go see it. My mom — who is young, beautiful, wise, intelligent, and also might be reading this — has not had menopause yet, and I happily won’t be anywhere near her when she does; I can only suppose its effects on her will be staggeringly frightful. Yesterday, for instance, there was loud music playing in the theater, and five minutes before the play was due to start, my mom complained to the house manager that she didn’t like the music. Instead of, you know, moving a few rows back. Throw in menopause, and I conjecture she would have burst into tears before ripping the speakers out of the wall with her teeth. A play about such women, I think, would have been delightfully amusing.

Coincidence #3: We had a 7:30 reservation at a Japanese restaurant for dinner, and when we walked in, we saw, for the second time that day, Herman Melville. Who had been reincarnated and come back to life in the form of Regina and her parents.

My parents and I had been to this restaurant several times before, but we went again because 1) it’s good, and 2) there aren’t many restaurants you can go to in Cleveland. I mean, you can go to them, but you won’t be able to get back. For those of you who are from Columbus and erroneously believe that Cleveland is approximately the same thing, let me clear things up.

In Columbus, roads generally follow what are termed “straight lines,” and intersect each other at so-called “ninety-degree angles.” In Cleveland, however, almost all the roads are arcs, and the typical intersection consists of eight or nine of them. This setup makes following even Mapquest directions difficult, because in addition to ordinary commands like “left” and “right,” you must deal with gradations: slight left, gradual left, middling left, Post-Modern left, and so on. Mess one up and you’re in Iowa. But even worse than the confusing directions is the gap between directions. In Columbus, you just “go straight” until the next instruction. In Cleveland, you “stay on the same road,” which may seem like just another synonym of “go straight” until you realize that “staying on the same road” in Cleveland for as little as a hundred feet can involve any number of U-turns, 180s, gradual lefts, tangential lefts, Neo-Classical rights, and so on. The arcing roads intersect at such small angles that going straight at any intersection is almost guaranteed to get you off your current road and into Iowa.

Let me illustrate. A typical driving scenario in Columbus might be, “Turn right on Barkley, 2.0 miles,” and so you turn right on Barkley and go straight for two miles and then follow the next instruction. A typical driving scenario in Cleveland might be, “Turn slight right on Oatfield, 2.0 miles,” and so you turn what you hope is a slight right onto what you hope is Oatfield, but you’re not sure if it was slight enough (or too slight), but you don’t have time to think about that now because here all of a sudden is a six-street intersection and you can go ten different directions, “straight” being none of them, and is the road curving left or right, and is it fifteen degrees or twenty, or dang, 17.5 is also looking like it might be the one, and you’re driving thirty-five miles an hour so you have maybe half a second to decide. Boom, Iowa.

It goes without saying that in Cleveland there are no street signs. Anywhere. You never even realize that you’re lost until you are in Iowa. Basically, do any substantial driving in Cleveland, and you’re in Iowa. My parents and I have been to Iowa many times, and never on purpose. The only way to avoid this problem is to not drive very far, but unfortunately, that means the only dining option we have is Coventry, a rather seedy shopping district full of cramped shops that sell used videogames and miscellaneous odds and ends like books titled Everybody Poops. Pacific East, amazingly, is a great restaurant and I don’t know what the hell it’s doing in that area, and so I guess it isn’t too surprising that two sushi-loving families would both select it.

The point being, we got a big table together and made fun of Regina for being the only person who ate chicken instead of sushi. Chicken! At a Japanese restaurant! And this coming from the big Japanese buff, who likes Anime and video games and…uh, what else are the Japanese good for? Well, watching Anime in the original Japanese (with subtitles) is enough to label someone a Japanese culture buff in my book, so I was nothing short of appalled when Regina ordered chicken. Yes, I learned a very important lesson that day, as I dipped my yellowtail roll into the soy sauce and Regina futzed with her pathetic chicken, and that was this: although some people may appear to be one thing and you think of them in a certain way, when you really get down to it, when you start to think a little deeper about the things that truly count, you realize that despite all outward appearances, I still hadn’t asked Regina about

Coincidence #4: Matt my suitemate, who plays D&D on Saturdays, and Matt the guy who is the DM (Dungeon Master) for Regina’s Saturday D&D sessions, are in fact the same person. And don’t ask me how I know what DM stands for. It’s common knowledge, all right!

Regina first proposed the idea in an email that morning, but I wrote it off as impossible because I knew that Matt was merely a player in his group, not the DM. Nevertheless, curiosity prevailed and Regina and I attempted to discern over dinner whether my Matt and her Matt were one person. I plied Regina with details about my Matt’s personality, but she told me that she didn’t actually know very much about her Matt — apparently, the bonds between D&D players are not as deep as I had thought. (Regina explained to me that she didn’t necessarily know any of her fellow players very well, but that she knew their characters intimately. I pounded my forehead with my palm and cried a little bit before continuing with the conversation.)

Next we tried to give each other a detailed physical description of our Matts. It turned out we were both incompetent. All I could say about my Matt was that he was roughly six feet tall, shaven, and round-faced. Regina said that she was 5’1” and therefore everybody looked six feet to her, but that her Matt was shaven and had blondish hair. Even though I lived with Matt for two years, I have no idea what his hair color is. When it comes to hair color, I won’t remember it unless it’s green or on fire. So all we had to go on was that Matt was shaven and didn’t wear glasses — which actually rules out a lot more men at this school than you might think — but we still weren’t absolutely sure.

Next I asked Regina if there was a guy named Ethan in her group, because Ethan is the DM for Matt’s games. She said, “Well, we were supposed to have an Ethan — we’re actually playing Ethan’s world — but he got really addicted to World of Warcraft…” and I knew it couldn’t be anybody else.

Incidentally, there was a D&D session that very evening, so after my parents drove away I dropped by Clarke to pay Matt a visit on the tenth floor, which the D&D gaming group unofficially takes over every Saturday. Ten or so people sat around a big square table, dice and character sheets at the ready. Matt was surprised to see me, so I filled him in on the amazing coincidence and chatted with him about Ethan’s recent gaming addiction.

The guy sitting on Matt’s right, a somewhat chubby fellow with a round, stubbly face, had just completed a Mayan-style step pyramid out of dice. Sporting a 4x4 base, it was a fairly impressive structure. The kid to Matt’s left was enjoying the company of his gaming friends by sitting with his eyeballs buried in a laptop. He turned his head just long enough to see that the Builder had recently finished a monster project, and congratulated his friend on this remarkable achievement by chucking a fancy many-sided die at it. The athletic throw belied his pale skin and hefty glasses, and a delicious *KRAK!* sent a mountain of brown dice raining to the floor, where they blended nicely with the dark threads of the carpet.

“Find ALL of them.” Apparently they were Matt’s dice. “Or you’re going to pay for it.”

“But it wasn’t my fault,” the Builder whimpered.

“Pick them up. You’re the one who built the pyramid,” Matt said.

“My building it is not to blame for its subsequent destruction,” the Builder said, but he bent down anyway and started looking for the dice. After some time and much grumbling, he found most of the dice and heaped them in a gigantic pile on the table. There were enough dice in that pile to power every single one of my board games and still have enough left over to erect a small igloo.

Matt looked up from his pages and glanced at the heaping mound of dice. It took him a quarter of a second to note, “You’re missing one.” The last die, it turned out, was buried in a dark crevice under a propped-up organic chemistry textbook lying on the ground. Fishing out the die, the Builder said, “I hate O-chem,” and I wasn’t sure if that was because it was a hard subject, or because its textbook had hidden one of the precious dice. The villain was absorbed once more in his computer. Matt seemed ready to start the session, so I bade him goodbye and wished him luck on his campaign.

Dungeons & Dragons, for all its weirdness and creepiness, is a game I’ve always had a dark craving to try. It IS a board game, after all, and I like board games, and D&D is supposed to be pretty good. Sure, sometimes people use D&D to hold satanic rituals or dress up like vampires, but the game itself is supposed to just be about going around and killing stuff, which sounds like nothing if not the perfect game. I thought about asking Matt if I could join, but his group already had a lot of people in it, and they were in the middle of a scenario, and if I joined I would be new and they’d have to explain stuff to me, and I didn’t see any extra chairs, and the table space was kind of limited too, and I didn’t know if they could spare any character sheets, and my horoscope said not to try anything new that day, and many other reasons, so I couldn’t ask. Earlier, Regina had essentially made it painfully clear that my request would be well received if I would only make it, but when the big moment came, doubt seeped into my mind and my tongue suddenly failed to work itself up to the challenge. Playing D&D is kind of like eating food at somebody else’s house: you really want to do it, but you don’t feel comfortable unless the host practically forces you.

So I didn’t ask if I could play, and I guess that means the coincidences didn’t amount to much. My mouth was already open, though, so I said goodbye again and walked back to the elevator.

.: posted by Boris 11:07 PM


Friday, September 09, 2005

Another Blog Poll

Another petty argument, this time with Andy. So leave chessmen15 a message and tell me: which video is more idiotic, this one or this one?

I must admit that the humor content in both of them is rather lacking. It is clear, however, that whoever made the hobbit video actually has TALENT. Taking dialogue clips from an actual movie and fitting them to music like that is no simple task. Whereas the Kenya thing is just plain garbage.

Remember, you're voting on which one is MORE idiotic!

.: posted by Boris 9:45 PM


Friday, September 02, 2005

On the Way to a Game of Foursquare

Matt: "I'm really glad you got a new ball; the old one was lopsided."
Kevin: "What are you talking about? The other ball was fine."
Matt: "It was lopsided."
Kevin: "Matt, balls can't be lopsided. They're full of air, and there's no such thing as lopsided air."
Matt: "The ball can still be lopsided if the outside of it caves in."
Kevin: "No it can't! If the skin caves in, the ball will simply shrink. A ball can get bigger or smaller, but the air is evenly distributed and so it can never get lopsided."

[argument continues in this vein until Matt gets tired of arguing and says:]
Matt: "The fact is, I've seen lopsided balls and I played with them!"

Matt initially responded to our uproarious laughter by kicking Kevin repeatedly in the shins. When he realized that this course of action wasn't stopping us from giggling like hyperactive schoolgirls, Matt stalked off to his room and locked the door behind him. We never did play foursquare.

.: posted by Boris 11:31 PM