See, I'm Not Cutting My Fingers At All!

Does anyone else find Lisa Kudrow to be remarkably creepy in this commercial?

Thebes: Real Archaeology Version

Last night at Peter's birthday party, it seems Jan, Yar, Varun and I unintentionally invented an interesting variant of the board game Thebes that we have named Real Archaeology. To play this variant, simply extend the game one year beyond what is intended for the number of people you're playing with. This year is then spent doing the following:

• Digging in Egypt for 12 weeks and finding nothing but rubble.
• Digging in Crete for 12 weeks, finding nothing but a single broken plate, and getting unduly excited over it.
  
• Going around Europe competing to give talks.
• Stealing grad students that you don't intend to put to work.
• Sitting around reading a lot of books for no real reason than because you have nothing better to do with your time.

We think this must be what Real Archaeology is like.

More Games!

With the highly anticipated Ghost Patrol coming up this weekend, it was quite a pleasant surprise to get an email for a game being planned for Fall 2009. Orange Snood will be running a Muppet Movie game and will be blogging about it. I'm always interested to see how other GCs work and what their philosophies are on various elements of games. Especially after Red's posts on the NMS Forum, I'm very curious to see Orange Snood's approach to games.

Gotta Keep 'em Separated

Mommy fish and 31 of her babies have now been moved to the 20 gallon tank. This process took quite a while, and talking like Sesame Street's The Count only kept it interesting for so long (31! 31 baby fishies. AH! AH! AH!). The remaining 3 or 4 will have to wait until they're a little bigger and can't hide from my net so well.

Turns out we were lucky. According to the internets, had our female black molly been a little older, she could have had as many as 100 baby fish.

Must Be Something in the Water

I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but all of our fish decided to have babies all at once. Linnsey's tank wound up with 2 batches of whitecloud fry, and my black mollies, whom I've only had for 3 weeks, just had 10 babies while I was at work today. I was quite surprised when I came home today and checked in on my plant growth, to see a bunch of small black fishies hiding in the Riccia and Ambulia.

We've already given a few of the whiteclouds away, but if you like fish, lemme know, because I think we'll be looking for homes some of the mollies, too.

Puzzles to the Rescue

Blocks With Letters On. It's probably the only thing that kept me sane in a week of working til midnight every day. I must say, it's a surprisingly clever combination of word puzzles and spatial puzzles, both of which I really enjoy. Too bad there are only 64 levels.

So thanks, Jan, for pointing it out!

Is it wrong...

... to think "wow, Tina Fey is doing an *amazing* impression!" and then realize that you're watching the actual VP debates?

I think 10:28-10:40 of the following video explains what I wish I had been doing for the entire debate. That so many general and nonspecific comments from both sides could be considered a debate is sad. I don't think I learned anything about either ticket, except that I'm not particularly enthused about their VP picks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj0dqCB6pcI