The Same Guy Packed My Trivia Whiz

Jack Baruth has a photo of a guitar he bought on eBay in its shipping container, which is a box with some peanuts that could not accommodate the guitar properly.

About fifteen years ago, I was embarking on my video game collecting bit (and by video games, I mean the full size arcade games, not just consoles and electronic games). I got my first two from eBay: A Thunderblade (which featured a suicide battery that has committed seppuku in the intervening fifteen years) and a bartop Trivia Whiz IV.

The Thunderblade came crated and strapped down, shipped via a freight service that required me to get a friend with a pickup truck and a strong back to pick it up at the airport. It was a professional job.

The Trivia Whiz, on the other hand….

It was shipped UPS heavyweight. In a cardboard box. With some bubblewrap pressed against the glass and wrapped with pallet wrap and a half box full of peanuts that had settled, of course.

It arrived with the whole heavy wood case akilter, especially the glass and framed front with the controls and glass that covered the monitor. I complained to the seller, who suggested that I take it up with UPS. I didn’t bother because the fault lie not in the shipping but the packing.

I did my best to straighten the case out, but it’s still a little wonky.

And it’s still cluttering one of my desks in my office. I should try it out one of these days to see if it still works.

Those were the only two games I bought off of eBay; the others I got at in person auctions. Video games are one of those things I’m wary of ordering online.

(Not that I’m planning to do that any time soon, honey. Although our youngest son has informed me there’s a spot of room in the office in front of the filing cabinet. I don’t need to open those drawers as much as I need another video game in my office.)

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Book Report: Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold by Richard Marcinkco and John Weisman (1997)

Book coverThis book, strangely enough, is the first one I tried to read after I read the purportedly nonfictional Rogue Warrior, and I was immediately bogged down in the very opening of it. So I set it aside and later realized it was not the first of the fiction (Rogue Warrior II: Red Cell was, and I’ve since read that).

However, on my second go-round, I was more into it.

Within the story, Marcinko goes to Russia (ca 1997) to investigate the killing of one of his “shipmates” and his family, including Marcinko’s godson. He finds Russian gangsters, a multinational fixer, and ultimately a plot for the Syrians to build a nuclear weapon for it–or be framed for the effort in order to draw an Israeli strike. Marcinko investigates, does some action stuff, leads some set piece raids, gets thwarted by the brass, overcomes obstacles, meets some kindred spirits, and triumphs.

It’s a decent thriller, thicker than a men’s adventure novel and written with a little more depth. Many of the non-Marcinko characters do come off a bit like non-player characters where they’re only distinguished by their nickname. But the voice of the narrator is distinct and brash and, if you’re in the mood for it, a bit of fun. The definite, conscious asides about exposition, equipment, tactics, or whatever the narrator is going on about now contrasts with Clancy-esque attempts to just fit it into the narrative where it can be tedious and jarring. The voice also contrasts a bit with the first person narrator of the Odd Thomas novels, wherein Odd goes into deep musings of philosophical questions in between action bits. In these books, the narrator is briefing you, often at the presumed annoyance of his editor. It works pretty well.

Secondly, these books are coming on twenty years old, and the world has moved from a place of turmoil in the shadows to a place of overt turmoil. The plot described in the book isn’t imaginative or speculative since the Israelis have hit a Syrian site thought to be preparing nuclear materials. Twenty years ago, this stuff might have been just outside the realm of what we thought was really possible. Imaginative. Now, it seems a little more true-to-life. Sadly, it’s aging too well.

So I’m looking forward to reading the others I have (but that doesn’t mean I’ll rush right into them), and I’ll probably fill in the gaps such as I can. I have to wonder, though, if they suffer from the same eventual fate of these kinds of thrillers when they transition authorship that they will lose that which makes them special. Probably, but I have a ways to go until I get there with the series.

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My Lack of Memory Is A Sign Of Sophistication, Not Aging

So as I was organizing my comic book collection (finally, at the age of forty-something), I came across a couple of sixteen year old playbills from a performance of David Hare’s Skylight at the St. Louis Reperatory Theater:

Playbill for Skylight at the St. Louis Rep

I have no recollection of this play.

The fact that I have two programs indicates I took my beautiful girlfriend to the play. Perhaps that’s why I don’t remember; the play was overshadowed by the woman with me.

I went to a lot of plays in the 1990s, first at college and then a few after I returned from college to Missouri. I saw the Norman Conquests five times: Round and Round the Garden, Living Together, and Table Manners (2x) in Milwaukee (with three different young ladies, I add) and once at the Chesterfield Community Theatre at the YMCA out in St. Louis County. I saw Sight Unseen and The Visit in Milwaukee during college along with some collegiate productions like The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I saw The Ghetto at the backdoor theater of the St. Louis Rep because I was kinda interested in the one young lady in it. I saw a play at St. Louis Community College-Meramec because I was dating a girl in the theatre program there. I saw Dancing at Lughnasa at the St. Louis Rep. Was that the winter one, where I took Amy on college break? I saw Picasso at Lapin Agile and some other oddity at the Clayton Community Theatre because my beautiful by then wife knew someone in the troupe. I also saw an awful lot of Ragged Blade Productions because I volunteered with that group. Well, I was at a lot of Ragged Blade Productions or rehearsals. Maybe I didn’t see that many plays there.

But Skylight? Even reviewing the rep’s production notes or the Wikipedia entry leaves me no closer to a memory.

I prefer to see this as a mark of my sophistication: That I have forgotten more play performances than most modern people can remember.

But it is probably more the case that I’m getting old and/or that I’m overwriting previously used blocks of memory with Imagine Dragons lyrics.

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I Got 0 Out Of 50 On This Quiz, And I Consider It A Perfect Score

The 50 Weirdest Movies Ever Made

As a matter of fact, I’d only heard of two of them: Boxing Helena because it came out while I was in college and I remember seeing the ad for it in the Milwaukee Journal at about the same time I saw Sands in Warlock late at night on cable. And I’d heard of Zardoz because Sean Connery.

Most of the items on the list are brutal-looking slasher/horror bits from the 1970s directed by Europeans, it looks like. The sort of films I never thought were worthwhile.

So I guess I don’t like artistic weird movies. My guilty pleasures tend to run to dumb movies. For instance, I’ve seen 9 1/2 Ninjas! more than 9 1/2 times. And I’m adding Dead Men Don’t Die to my watching list.

So take my anti-film snobbery for what it is.

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Book Report: What Makes a Picasso a Picasso? by Richard Muhlberger (1994)

Book coverThis book proves me a hypocrite. I’ve dodged cultural sensations like Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games because, I’ve ::sniffed::, they’re children’s books. But put a discarded library children’s book about an artist in front of me, and I’m all over it.

Because, let’s face it, my knowledge of Picasso is precursory. I know his era, his acquaintence with Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation, and he did La Guernica which I did a paper on in college, although I’m not entirely sure what I had to say about it. Probably that it fought the norms of the day in which I wrote the paper, which strangely enough were sort of still norms instead of the anachronisms they are now. Everything else I got from Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which is why I’m prone to answer at trivia nights that Picasso knew Elvis.

This book is a simple little book from the Museum of Modern Art and takes a brief, high-level overview of Picasso and his work and its phases. So I learned a bit about his Blue Period and what he was trying to do with Cubism. Basically, it’s a painted collage of different views of the same image. Okay, I get it, but I don’t think it’s any less stupid.

So I got something out of this book, and it didn’t take too long to read. Best of all, there are others in the series with other artists, so I’ll definitely keep my eyes open for others in the line. Because I like to know a little bit about a lot of things, even though I have to go to children’s books to learn them. And it didn’t take a million words to get to the end and think it was stupid that Picasso and Hermione weren’t together.

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