Accidental Youtube - Bill Cosby Dreams

Ah Jello! Quite possibly the most delicious thing one can make out of ground up horse hooves. Watch this video of jello squares being dropped in slow motion. It's like taking mescaline but without the accompanying paranoid delusions. Or so I'm told...

Acrostic Nature

Hi everybody! Today, I bring you an acrostic I made. It's the first time I've ever made an acrostic and believe it or not, creating these puzzles are HARD. I don't know if I'd say they're harder to make than Crosswords, but it certainly took more time than creating one of my average crosswords. But they're fun puzzles to do. It's a lot like solving a cryptogram and a crossword at the same time. If you've never encountered one before you might find this helpful. Anyway, here it is. Hope you enjoy!

The clues are after the jump:

Question Mark? Period-ical.

So I've got another image puzzle for you folks. Below is a series of twenty covers from contemporary magazines all of which should be able to be picked up at any standard periodical retailer. Of course, just like last time, I've removed the titles to each. How many can you name? I'll give you a hint: Hustler isn't one of them. Neither is The National Review. I didn't want to be offensive.

Je parle en peu l'Francias. Pas bien.

Last night I went to the Old Fashioned Melodrama, here in Cheyenne. I'm actually performing an olio act later this evening. Me and my friend Rory are doing a comedy routine that I wrote and by wrote I mean half the jokes are old vaudeville standbys. Perhaps I'll post the script later, and see what people think.

But this entry is not about Le Melodrama Antique, but is about how ashamed I am by something that happened there. A good friend of mine, who was playing the piano that night, brought a French foreign exchange student with her and insisted that I speak with him. That's partially because I studied French pretty hardcore in highschool to the point where I actually lived with a French family for a bit my senior year in Le Puy. Since then, I haven't really studied french much but I remember at various parties if I got drunk enough and met someone else who studied French, we would have superficial conversations in the language.

But upon meeting this teenager, I was barely able to cobble together a "bonjour". I wanted to say, "It's a pleasure meeting you," but for some stupid reason I couldn't reason out in my brain how to say it. It reminds me how I knew a guy in college from the Philippines who would sometimes forget how to use his native tongue he had been surrounded by English for so long. Nonetheless, I felt like a complete jackass, for being so unable to make conversation with the Frenchman.

For a while, it was a dream of my best friend and I to compete on America's The Amazing Race. Having spent two and a half years in Ukraine she knows her pidgin Russian pretty well. Also, she used to be the president of the Spanish club back in high school. I claimed that I could get us around in Francophones, and I had a somewhat working knowledge of German. But if I can barely make polite conversation with a French highschool student, what does that say about my ability to circumnavigate the globe? 

The lesson I've learned is to bone up on my French. I've discovered a couple of French podcasts that I'll listen to, and perhaps dive back into learning the language. If anyone has tips or pointers, please let me know. Au revoir! 

Cheat Sheet

I hear your tormented cries. "Answers!" you scream through your gritted teeth as you dance in pain and fury, "We demand answers!!" and while I don't have answers for everything, I do have answers for the two puzzles I posted earlier this week. So if you wanna spoil yourself, just continue reading this post!!

Spring Thing - Wetlands

Alright, after some helpful hints by some readers I decided to forge ahead and plow through the first entry early! The first game of the competition is Wetlands by Clara Raubertas. Unlike the IF Comp I'm writing this preliminary passage after playing through the game. I say that I "plowed" through this, but frankly it was more like playing morsel sized bites of it. I'd play it for a while and then put it down and do something else and then wander back to it. I really had to focus and force myself to work on it to completion. Not that it wasn't interesting, per se, but it didn't exactly have what I'd call narrative thrust, and no that's not a special term used by writers of erotica.

Final Verdict : Fun atmosphere and generally pleasant puzzles balance out nebulous storytelling.

But of course you crazy kids want to hear more than that, dotcha! Well you can read spoilers to your hearts content, AFTER THE JUMP!!

Brooks Recommends - Foucault's Pendulum

It can be very easy and tempting and down right fun to spend all one's time criticizing other people and the work they do. After all when people come out with things like this, it's pretty much like they're asking for it. But as much joy as I often get from hearing or reading or doling out, take-downs (thus one of my new favorite podcasts!) I think it's important to take time and revel in what is great and grand and glorious in this universe. Granted, the ratio of great to mediocre is still pretty depressing, but there's still a tremendous amount of great stuff out there.

So today, I'd like to recommend my favorite novel, Foucault's Pendulum by Italian author and linguist Umberto Eco. Now, I don't know if it's great in the same way that Lady Chatterly's Lover is, but I also know that it's a hell of a lot better than those awkwardly written doorstops The Harry Potter books. Frankly, it's intelligentsia pulp, a genre that could claim Eco's first novel The Name of the Rose.

In many respects, Foucault's pendulum has a lot in common with the Dan Brown style genre books. The only book of his I've read is the DaVincci code (which I read on a depressing cross-country bus trip made only more depressing because I was stuck reading that tripe), in that it's about a possible global conspiracy originating with the cult of the Templars and using some pretty broad leaps of historical logic to try to substantiate that claim. But as opposed to Dan Brown's books (I'm presuming (I saw the trailer to the movie Angels and Demons and it looked like more of the same(except without Audrey Tautou and let's face it, why would you want to see anything without Audrey Tautou?))), and others of his ilk, Eco's work is primarily concerned with the validity of those leaps in logic.

 It's a conspiracy thriller which questions the fundamental assumptions of the genre. Without giving too much away, it's a book concerned with the philosophy of history. What does history mean? How does it effect us and vice versa? While there is some clunky stuff involving a computer program which is imbued with unrealistic power (it was published in the late 1980's), it's a relatively minor complaint. This is a book about ideas, and it dances through chapters on medieval history, occultism, and Italian politics with such glee and merriment that I would argue most of the book is comic in nature, despite the way it's bookended in a Kafkaesque nightmare.

What I'm saying is you should read it. I've tried to get many people over the years to read this book, and I've been pretty unsuccessful, but seriously, if you're reading this right now and have been half-heartedly looking for a good book to read, the I implore you, please go and read this. The first fifty pages might be a little rough, and his many tangential threads might seem pointless at first. But please, this master knows what he's doing.