Linguistic Update IV

To add negative connotations to any word or phrase attach the pejorative suffix "-industrial complex."

For example:

Weddings from now on will be described as marital-industrial complexes.

Alter your speech patterns accordingly.

Bedazzled...

Puzzle Quest is probably the stupidest-sounding game you’ve ever heard of. Bejeweled meets, perhaps, Final Fantasy.

I’ve been struggling to write an entry about Puzzle Quest. And I think I finally figured out why. Because it’s the one of the most original games you’ve even played... that you’ll still feel like you’ve played a 1,000 times.

Yet, it’s the most addicting game I’ve played since Lumines. (At one point, just like with Lumines, I could see the gems when I would close my eyes. Rachel thought I was crazy until it started happening to her too.)

The gample is simple. During battle, you match colored gems to build up your magic. Gold to earn gold. Purple to gain experiences points. And skulls to damage your opponent. And like any RPG, you earn gold and experience points for winning battles, which you use to increase your power, weapons, yada yada yada.

There’s a simple story too. It’s a completely derivative mix of J-RPG fantasy and Tolkein-esque fantasy, and more than a little tongue-in-cheek too. But you probably won’t even need to pay attention to that.

And that’s it. Somehow that equates into a simple, pick-up-and-play game that’s more addictive than it should be. And nearly impossible to find in stores.

I think I recommend it.

Junior Boys, Doug Fir Lounge, 04/24/07

Recapturing the magic.

I had been advised against it. Something about the law of diminishing returns. Told that repeat experiences rarely match the original.

When I spotted Didemus in the parking lot outside the venue, I told him he had a hell of a show to live up to.

Surely I was setting myself up for disappointment: Same city. Same venue. No new material. Who else was possibly going to see this show again?

Apparently everyone. And then some.

I have no idea where half the crowd came from.

When I saw Junior Boys last September, the audience was lively but sparse.

Yesterday the floor was packed. And not with your usual suspects.

The fraternity/sorority couples to the right of me absolutely flipped their shit when they heard the opening chords to Double Shadow. It was surreal.

Everything about the show was better the second time around. The band was tighter, the crowd more energetic -- hell, I even found a better parking spot.

Lesson learned.

[For the sexual act, see Euphemism (sex)]

It started out innocently enough. The last clue to Monday's New York Times Crossword.

5D: The spit in a spit roast.

Normally I would wait until the next day to find the answer, but this proved particularly vexing. There were only two missing letters and I couldn't for the life of me solve it.

Casting aside any semblance of crossword purity, I turned to the internet.

And the internet, once again, blew my mind.

The first line of the Spit Roast/Rotisserie entry in Wikipedia:

Spit Roast redirects here. For the sexual act, see Spit roast (sex)

Say what?

Not only was this a sexual act I had never heard of, but that one sentence opened up the possibility of an entire language floating in a boundless sea of euphemistic signifiers.

Despite what dystopian writers would have you believe, in the future:

language/sex.

Douche Bag of the Month - April

Another reason to watch 30 Rock?

But I always remember it's New York

Whale Dies After a Short Visit to New York

A 12-foot-long whale that had surfaced and frolicked near the mouth of the Gowanus Canal on Tuesday, delighting and surprising even the most hardened of Brooklyn residents, died yesterday, officials said.

The whale — a minke, the second-smallest whale species — had been thought to be in good health because it was not surfacing erratically. Like other ocean mammals, whales must surface to breathe.

Shortly before 5 p.m., during low tide, it was seen churning in the water. Teri Frady, a spokeswoman for the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said, “It swam by a bulkhead” near the canal’s mouth, “thrashed a little, and then expired.” Neither its age nor sex were known.

Earlier in the day, biologists speculated that the whale might have followed krill or another food source into the Gowanus Canal, whose polluted waters have cleared somewhat in recent years.

Kim Durham, the rescue program director for the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, which arranges for rescues of dolphins and other sea animals, said the dying whale apparently beached itself after hitting rocks near a Hess oil refinery.

On optimism.

My mother is a modern day Leibniz.

She is convinced we live in the best of all possible worlds and that everything happens for a reason.

For every struggle in my life - and there have been quite a few nadirs in the past couple of years - she has a rationalization. Most often it involves an implausible scenario in which I "meet someone" -- a not too veiled code for a potential mate. And potential grandkids.

None of it is really all that helpful emotionally or even functionally. I usually just grimace and call her Dr. Pangloss behind her back -- which is to say to my father.

And it is not that she is delusional. She just strongly believes in the power of positive thinking.

At one point she even mentioned The Secret as a valuable fount of worldly wisdom. Unironically.

It was too much for my inner cynic. I vowed to be an unrelenting pessimist to the bitter and terrible end.

Yesterday, a friend was on the phone for hours attempting to resolve a ticketing fiasco with her airline. The situation looked bleak. Her reservation was probably going to be cancelled. She looked exhausted from sheer bureaucracy.

Despite my oath, I couldn't help myself.

Unsolicited and unprovoked, I put my hand on her shoulder and reassuringly (and unironically) suggested:

"Things always work out in the end."

Sometimes I forget I live on an island

Marine biologists were checking reports yesterday that a whale was swimming off the Brooklyn shore of New York Harbor, although it was not known whether the animal was in distress. The police said a police boat was standing by. The whale was reported to be swimming near Pier 22 in Sunset Park. WCBS reported that its helicopter had spotted the 15-foot minke whale and had taped it jumping out of the water several times.

So it goes...

At one point I devised my own alter ego like Kilgore Trout: Kristopher Ratchet. (He may yet show up in one of my own stories.)

At another, I started a fan letter. I never made it further than “Dear Mr. Vonnegut.”

And yet, I don’t believe I ever went though the somewhat common “Kurt Vonnegut” phase where I’d write stories thinking that I could be him.

I think I always knew that there could only ever be one writer that could really write a Vonnegut-esque novel. He developed such a supremely unique and intricate style that any writer can only write a bad knock-off or something complete different. Vonnegut is that singular.

In his final novel, Timequake, Kilgore Trout dies in the end. But only after becoming an expert and a storyteller, and having everyone listen to what he has to say. Kurt Vonnegut did the same, but in real life. And he did it before I ever started reading him. He did it before I was born.

Still, he’s one of the reasons I desire to write fiction. And he always will be.

"The Manatee Has Become the Mento."

Good news for people who love television: despite its anemic Arrested Development-esque ratings, 30 Rock has been picked up for a second season. While both shows share comedic sensibilities (and large chunks of my heart), I have a feeling 30 Rock will be spared the continual stays of execution that plagued Arrested Development every season.

Arrested Development always seemed to bristle under the weight of its corporate tie-ins (ie. Tobias and Carl Weathers at Burger King) or celebrity cameos (ie. every episode in the back-half of the second season). The meta-contextual jokes at the end of the third season about HBO and the desperate measure to salvage ratings painted the show as the recalcitrant martyr slain by network indifference.

In contast, 30 Rock from its very inception has been a reflexive critique of its own corporate parent network (ie. from the Trivection Oven to the more recent GOB sponsored webisodes) that simultaneously mocks yet reaffirms its synergistic means of production. And its this central ambivalence that allows slobs on their couch (ie. Me) to share in the insular comedic jabs at the innocuous flagship figures of NBC (ie. Brian Williams) with the employees working within the network itself.

30 Rock is a structural subversion -- like the jester the king keeps around court to demonstrate a sense of humor and diffuse tension.

To renew 30 Rock is to delay mediated revolution.

Although I am sure Alec Baldwin has something to do with it too.

The Death and Life of the Blog…

Obviously we’re busy people.

I started a new position at work that has made me indispensable and incredibly busy. And it has killed my ability to write for the blog. (I’d love to hear your stories of busy-ness and business.) I’m also a newlywed.

I used to have lots of downtime at work, which meant it was easy to write blog posts. But I have to have to try now.

So here’s my plan. I’m going to write three entries per week and then post them. Perhaps in a timely, schedule-like fashion – i.e. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Perhaps not.

Three a week doesn’t sound like much. But it seems like it may be difficult.

Also, this is post number 385. Seeing as we’re a five person strong blog team, I think we can make 500 by the end of the year. If not by Labor Day. How about it.

On a related note, I’m addicted to Puzzle Quest. More on that soon.

Why I hate Citibank...

It was – and is – a great offer. 0% interest on balance transfers for 12-months.

The catch, apparently, is that Citibank has an arbitrary set of policies that are, seemingly, designed to trick customers into paying fees. Let me give you three examples.

Example 1: The online payment waiting period.

My first payment was due on March 9th. I went to pay online March 5th, but ran into a problem. Citibank requires up to seven days to “verify” your checking or savings account.

To avoid a late payment and the ~30% default APR, that meant making a payment by phone and paying a $14.95 fee. You may be asking yourself why not pay with a check. Well, Citibank takes up to 7 days to be process a check. Hmm… I think I see a pattern.

Although, come to think of it, paying by phone at the last minute didn’t require any verification on my checking account. (PayPal is the only other company that has had to verify my checking account. And that took one business day.)

Example 2: The minimum finance charge.

That $14.95 fee I had to pay for my March 8th payment, my next statement-dated March 15th-included a $0.50 finance charge on that fee. I called to ask why I was being charged interest when I should be under the grace period, and the somewhat-courteous customer service agent tells me that I have to pay off the lower interest balance transfer before I can pay off the fee. I guess they assume that I don’t need that 25-day grace period. But later I figure out why...

A Side Story: When I asked about the finance charge, I was actually calling because they had changed their policy on balance transfer fees. Formerly they had been capped at $75. But starting in May, there will be no cap. (For reference good credit cards, like the VISA cards offered by Zions Bank or Clear from American Express, don’t charge balance transfer fees.) By opting out of the policy change, Citibank granted me a courtesy. They’ll automatically close my account when my card expires. I appreciate that. That will save me a 30-minute phone call in the future.

Example 3: The $1,000 maximum 1st payment.

After these first two strikes, I know that a 0% interest rate isn’t worth a card that may somehow trick me into another fee. So I decide that, after my checking account is verified, I’m going to pay off the card.

But one last problem, Citibank caps your first online payment at $1,000. Why? According to the website it’s because, “If you are using the Click-to-Pay® Program for the first time or have recently changed your bank account information, we may impose limitations on the number of payments accepted, as well as limit the initial payment to a maximum of $1000 per statement period.” Huh. That doesn’t seem to answer my question. Notice the “may.” I guess sometimes the software decides to let it slide. Unfortunately not in my case.

I opened my Citibank card two months ago. And I can honestly see no reason for any of these policies except for tricking customers into paying higher fees or worse higher interest rates.

At least I only have to wait until April 17th to pay off the stupid card before it magically closes in the not-too-distant future.