tmcay

In this post, I want to address the contributions of Team Conorado.

( Ladybug Picnic )

( Diorama Flats )

( Saturday Lunch )

All this being said, I could not have asked for a more hardworking and pleasant convention team to work with. I acknowledged Team Conorado twice during the Con, but I have much more to do to show them my appreciation.

In time, I will have a lot to say about the recent NPL convention in Colorado. I’ll start with some liner notes on two games I co-wrote for the nonofficial program.

( Kul-Len )

( Touch-and-Go )

Conorado, which officially starts next Thursday, will be my 11th NPL convention. I've been thinking about the highlights of my first ten conventions and compiled a list of the top ten Con games. These are the puzzles and games, both official and nonofficial, that I played/solved during an NPL convention and especially enjoyed. My rankings reflect the base quality of the games as well as many subjective factors (who I played with, whether I played well, etc.)

( Top 10 Con Games )

From Derek Stone, a longtime friend who celebrates a birthday today and marked the occasion with a list of observations on his MySpace page...

For the most part monkeys are cooler than dogs but a really cool dog is cooler than even the coolest monkey!! Monkeys can be dicks, a cool dog is ALWAYS cool.

The Sporcle George Carlin quiz is worth a look, particularly for the display answers.

I saw Pauline last night. She's attending Conorado, but has come to Denver early to take care of some family business. She needed to drop off a rental car, so I picked her up at Budget and then we went to my place to hang out.

Most of our conversation was fluff -- TV, movies, and a bit about the presidential race -- but I've felt socially isolated lately so I enjoyed having a friend to talk with no matter what the subject. I got the impression Pauline felt the same way.

So, the first quasi-Conorado event was a success. I hope I'm on a roll.

Sporcle has a "Mutliple Cy Young Winners" quiz today. I got 1 out of 14.

acroarcs, I really need that Staples-esque "I Suck" button.

I saw "Mamma Mia!" at DPAC last night. It wasn't my top choice for an evening of theater, but Tommy really wanted to see it and cajoled me and a few other coworkers into making it a group outing. The show was pretty much what I expected — good songs (I'm an ABBA fan) sung by fair to middling vocalists; a thin, contrived plot that was occasionally appreciable on an ironic level; stale dialogue; and uneven staging. The five-piece orchestra was very strong, and the all-cast musical numbers, especially the ones involving gaudy disco suits, were generally successful.

When I got home, I watched the premiere episode of "Million Dollar Password" I taped. It's fun to see a celebrity-civilian-partnership game show return to primetime. My main disappointment with this iteration of Password is that it has no playing round in which teams go back and forth to guess the same word. The two-team back-and-forth rounds hold the competitive strategy that is the most appealing thing about the game. I'll keep watching and see if the production makes any tweaks.

From a conversation with my writer Teresa (roseonne) about the Community Pages for Pocatello, Idaho...

Me: The research for Red Rock Pass contains the sentence, "Approximately 15,000 years ago, Lake Bonneville suddenly flooded a huge amount water through Red Rock Pass and to the north." If it was 15,000 years ago, I wonder how they knew that the flooding was sudden.

Teresa: Maybe they found some really surprised looking fossils.

This morning I was at my desk and needed to blow my nose. A coworker in a neighboring office came over and asked, "Gosh, Todd, what are you doing over here? Blowing reverie? Er, I mean relev... uh... what's the word I mean?"

So I got to add a new dimension to my social handicap with small talk. Light-hearted jibes and teasing are common forms of endearment in my office, and I have always struggled to react appropriately. Sometimes I can muster up a convincing fake laugh, but more often take things too seriously and ruin the moment. I don't want to offend coworkers, but how can I appreciate a good-natured insult at my expense when I HAVE TO PROVIDE THE INSULT'S KEY WORD?

Just a couple of weekend notes.

I went to a Television Preview on Saturday night. A coworker had given me a ticket and I thought it might be interesting to see what one of these marketing survey events was like. About 150 of us sat in ballroom at a Marriott hotel in the Tech Center and watched two pilots. "Soulmates" was a drama in which Kim Raver plays a psychiatrist who starts recognizing people from past lives. "Dads" was a sitcom about three men with children attending the same private elementary school in Chicago. Neither show is the type of thing that I would watch regularly, and the general consensus of the group appeared to be negative for both shows. I didn't win any of the participation prize drawings, but most of the prizes were feminine products that I wouldn't have a use for. The experience was interesting, but one I doubt I'll repeat.

I noticed a new liquor store near the Tech Center Marriott and decided to check it out before the Preview. They had a few vodkas I hadn't tried before so I picked up a bottle of Yazi – a ginger-flavored vodka made in Oregon. I'm not a huge fan of flavored vodkas, but this one has potential. It made a very nice martini with Noilly Pratt and a twist.

I often note little coincidences associated with multimedia multitasking, e.g., typing a word on the computer at the same time that someone says that word on the radio or seeing an picture of a person in a magazine while the a picture of the same person is shown on the television screen across the room. Most of these multimedia coincidences are unremarkable, but I experienced one this morning that made me smile. I was in my office reading a blog entry by toonhead_npl when Pam, one of the supervisors, poked her head in my door and asked, "Who is Schleprock?"

The Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown was held this weekend and I spent the day at the Jeffco Fairgrounds to see Brian (oddchange) and indulge in a little arcade nostalgia.

( Details )

I've been watching the first season of "Friday Night Lights" on Netflix Instant Browser. I finished the season yesterday and my reaction to the series is generally positive. One thing made an unsettling impression however — the fact that almost all of the parent characters in the series are portrayed as absent, neglectful, or destructive. Negative parenting is a common device for creating dramatic conflict, but in Dillon, Texas, it's off the scale. I think "Friday Night Lights" could give "Lost" — a series with a well-established and highly-discussed negative parenting subtheme — a run for its money.

After seeing the comparison between "Friday Night Lights" and "Lost," I thought of several other current TV dramas I watch that have inordinately more negative parenting characters than positive parenting characters. It was harder to think of similarly lopsided TV dramas from my youth — the age of "The Waltons," "Little House," and "Eight is Enough." Has anyone else a negative-parenting trend in recent television and does anyone else find it a bit disturbing?

My coworker Tommy (a nickname for Tamar) hosted a party on Sunday where she and her boyfriend Wayne served barbecue and put the college basketball games on their large-screen TV. After we ate, Tommy asked if anyone wanted dessert. "I have some lemunshna," she said.

None of the guests were familiar with the dessert. Tommy explained that several years ago she was in Israel visiting her family. She celebrated a birthday during the trip and her mother and sisters offered to mark the occasion by serving lemunshna for dessert. Tommy had never heard that word, but parsed out some possibly Arabic roots for "lemon" and "cheese" in the pronunciation. She figured it must be some sort of Middle Eastern pastry that she had never come across. The dessert turned out to be a lemon cake — in fact, a simple, unremarkable, store-bought lemon cake. Tommy was curious about the origin of the word, if it was indeed Arabic. Her family said that "lemunshna" was actually a word used by the characters in the computer game The Sims, i.e., a Simlish word. They just liked the way the word sounded and elected to use it to mean store-bought lemon cake (probably inspired by the fact that the first part of the word sounds like "lemon").

The lemunshna, courtesy of CostCo, rounded off the meal nicely, and I took an extra piece home.

Just a reminder that "Company," taped from a 2007 performance of the John Doyle Broadway production starring Raul Esparza, is airing on PBS's "Great Performances" tomorrow night.