fine whine

Today I was flipping through No one you know by New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan, and coincidence struck.

It hit my foot.

The book fell from my hands and the corner hit my toe. It's not a big book, but it's not small either and as it is hardcover, the edges are a bit sharp. So it stung a little. I reached down to pick it up and noticed the cartoon shown on the back, captioned "If I can hurt just one person with this book, then it will all have been worth it."

So I haven't updated this blog or ketchup for three days. I have prepared a number of excuses to explain this horrible horrible tragedy.

First of all, the keyboard on my laptop (which is my main connection to the internet) has been quitting on me lately after a randomly determined time. All of a sudden I'll just be down to my trackball, since the touchpad gave out long ago, and though I may be relatively proficient in the use of the On-Screen Keyboard, I'm not a fan of typing sentences with it, let alone whole blog entries.

Also, I've been busy. The center stickers on my cheap wheels fell off, and I had to pick up replacement ones. I've got a bigger-than-usual backlog of library books to deal with. My VCR's not working right, and I'm not yet willing to take it apart.

Most recently, though, I've had other things to do. Today and yesterday I was involved in a LAN party, which was quite fun. We mainly played EA's Battlefield 1942 with the Desert Combat mod. So basically it was a bunch of geeks playing soldier in the first Gulf conflict.

It was a lot more fun than I had expected. I'm not a big first-person shooter fan, and BF1942 is, at its core, a FPS. Yes, tanks can be driven and planes flown, but there is still an inordinate amount of running and crawling to be done. It's not going to replace GTA3 anytime soon on my system (particularly since I don't have a good enough system to run it) but I'd definitely play it again.

Anyway, part of the fun was coming up with intriguing nicknames. At times the server was filled with sophomoric anatomical taunting, childish name calling, and worse. For my part, I tried to be clever, striking gold with a one-two punch of "BugblatterBeastOfTraal" (which surprisingly few 'got') and its followup "TraalThePrettyHorseshit" (which was timed precisely to when my team was complaining). Another nerdy reference was "Set Me Up The Bomb". Better, and less geeky than those, was my apt description of my gaming skills and a play on words: "an army of one half".

That said, I'm catching myself back up. You have been warned.