Fable 2
Guitar Hero World Tour
Fallout 3
C&C Red Alert 3
Endwar
Gears of War 2
Far Cry 2
And I’m still trying to finish Dead Space and Lego Batman. I didn’t think this year could beat last year in terms of amazing titles but good lord I’m drowning here. The title I know is going to be sucking up a lot of my time is probably Fallout 3, but I expect the RTS games to give it a run for its money as well.
Truly we live in a golden age of gaming.
I fly a lot. I hate it, but I do. According to my frequent miles thingie I have taken 16 domestic trips and 15 overseas trips since December of 2005.
I have carefully transcribed a series of etiquette rules for airline travel. Here they are.
1. If you are in the Aisle seat you will, without comment or complaint, always get up for the middle and window people to walk around or go to the bathroom, even if you are napping on the flight. This is because you have the best seat. Deal.
2. If you are in the window or aisle seat, you cede your middle armrest to the person in the middle. They have a shitty seat, and you both get more room than them. Deal.
3. If you are in the middle and the aisle seat is occupied, and the window seat is unclaimed upon take off, you move from the middle to the window to give both passengers more room. You also put your below-seat bag in your new window seat so both passengers can stretch their legs into the middle below-seat slot.
4. If you have a screaming newborn, you will look contrite and apologize. You will not glare offensively at all the passengers as if you have the god-given right to bring a creature less than 18 months old on an airplane where it cannot cope with its ears popping without screaming. I’m sorry your family refuses to come to visit you, you have no right to visit your screaming spawn on the rest of us without apologizing.
5. If you have children more than three but less than six you will give them Benadryl or a suitable mild sedative. Six year olds on a plane are cute. three/Four/five year olds still think they are two, and think screaming will get them their way. Like the newborn, this is not our problem so don’t glare at us like we are the assholes here. You are the asshole. I’m sorry but let’s be clear: you are the asshole.
6. I know, deep down, you think the airline rules are stupid regarding cell phone and computer use during the flight. Hell, I tend to agree. However the reality is that the rules are in place and we all have to deal. So if you whip out your cell while we are trying to get off the runway under the guise of "these stupid people don’t understand electronics, and I do not have to obey their rules", don’t complain if I BEAT YOU WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR GOD DAMNED LIFE WITH YOUR OWN CELL PHONE for potentially endangering us all.
7. Do not watch porn on the airplane. Hey I’m a big fan of porn. I have no problem with it in general, but like grooming my privates, everything has a time and a place. I don’t care if you have the porn version of an all you can eat Netflix queue. I do not want to look up from my crappy impulse purchase airport bookstore Dean R. Koontz paperback only to see Jenna Chesty Boobs nom nom nom’ing on Peter McPorkSausage’s magical marble sack on your compensating-for-something-else Gateway 20 inch laptop screen one seat ahead of me.
8. On the order of your fourth alcoholic beverage, when the flight attendant says you can’t have any more, if you still persist in ordering one more, I will pipe up from next to you and say "He told me he had a gun in his cocaine pack strapped near his heroin bags!" Know when to say when.
9. Seriously #6, I will punch your ass in the neck over and over again until you put that god damned device away while we land. Do not tempt me.
I personally feel these are simple rules. Can’t we all follow them?
I think we can!
Kympossible broke down things that are awesome in an easy to read diagram. I find it super helpful when I have to point out that Mississippi Queen is in the exclusion set. DO YOU HEAR ME BAND MATES?
When I was 5, just after my fifth birthday in fact, Stephen Biko was brutally beaten to death by South African police. In an effort to cover up their crime, while he was comatose they kept him alive just long enough to later transfer him to a hospital 700 miles away, by road, where he would die on Sept 12th, 1977.
From summer of 1987 to summer 1988 I lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. Up until that point I had grown up in integrated schools in Dallas, Texas. I was so ignorant of racial tension from my time in the Dallas school district that when we arrived in Little Rock, tearing me away from my lifelong friends, a further insult was that I had to be bussed 20 miles away from where we lived to go to my first year of high school because Little Rock was still under forced integration.
Joe T. Robinson high school. Located in Pulaski county and a bastion of ironic racism. The white kids in my school didn’t hate black people because of their skin color. They hated them because of the bus ride they were forced to take for 50 minutes every single day. Ironic because the bussing had to be done to counter white flight. A lot of the black kids were bussed in too.
I consumed movies when I was in Little Rock. I was too young to even have a learners permit so all I had my Atari 130xe, a book store, and a movie theater a walk away.
There was nascent cable TV too. we had 30 whole channels. It was on MTV, back when they used to have music, that I saw the video for Peter Gabriel’s Biko, re-released interspersed with video clips from Richard Attenburough’s new film, Cry Freedom. I was fascinated.
I’ve grown up in a world of mixed old and new racism. My schools were reflective of the overal demographics of the population. My friend set likewise. The word "nigger" to me was a comical colloquialism. I do not mean by that to dismiss its hurtful intent to those it is used on by white people. I mean to point out when I heard it, my mind didn’t snap to skin color. It snapped to the person using it being out of date. Hey you kids get off of my lawn, type of stuff.
Being red headed and pale skinned, I got used to being called Ghosty, or Whitey by my black friends growing up.
In seventh grade, I once falsely injected race into a schoolyard dispute. Larry Thomas, the African American star athlete of my class, had committed what I thought was a foul during a pretty close volleyball game where he and I were both playing front line center. He’d reached into the net during a set for me to spike the ball, in my opinion. The foul wasn’t called, the coach, Coach Spikes, said we were both going for the ball, no foul. Coach Spikes was African American as well.
I stated, petulantly, that if Larry wasn’t black the foul would have been called, and slapped the net back into Larry’s face.
With a swiftness and power I still remember to this day Larry drove any sense of ever playing the race card right out of my mind by intersecting his fist, through my stomach, into my spinal cord.
Larry didn’t hit me because of my comment. Larry hit me because I slapped the net in his face. It was Coach Spikes who picked my crumpled weeping white ass off the floor and directed me to the showers for disrespecting another player.
I learned a lot about the lessons of race relations in one moment, with no real scars to show for it, on a padded volleyball court in a relatively affluent area of a metropolitan city in the south.
Steve Biko tried to teach it to a nation and they killed him for it.
I watched that music video on MTV video and was physically compelled to understand what I was watching. The clips from the movie made little sense to me. A place where slavery, in effect, still existed? Really?
I saw the movie the day after it opened. Soon after I had bought Biko and Asking for Trouble.
So today, more than three decades later, I wanted to point out the life of an extraordinary man. Someone whose words have impacted me, and made me understand so much more about my fellow humans, and the crimes we, all of us, tend to inflict upon each other when power overrides reason.
From Steve Biko’s trial:
Judge: Why do you people call yourselves black? You look more brown than black.
Steve Biko: Why do you call yourselves white? You look more pink than white.
The judge replied, "Precisely."
There’s a bass note, typical but almost self assured in its beat and the promise to come .
tha-thump thummmm dada thump-dum….tha-thump thummmmm dada THUMP-dum….
The bass continues on as if it’s announced the most important part, and it has. I can see the gold reflection shine as the player steps forward with that horn.
Suddenly it’s early 1994.
My middle brother (I’m the oldest) Joscoto kept harping on this band. This amazing band he liked. Some kind of ensemble band like the guys I was currently into like Widespread Panic or Blues Traveler. "no man" he said, "you gotta get this disc called "Remember Two Things"
The horn, a sax, kicks in. It’s deep throated and bright and clear. Up tempo to the bass, and it’s the shine moment before the violin kicks in. The player is leaning forward, a spotlight on him. His shirt reflects the light, his ear piece visible, cheeks are puffed out with the line notes.
Every up and down in my life has been marked by Pearl Jam, or the Dave Matthews Band. Even my closest friends, the ones I trust the most to make fun of me, are all over My DMB fandom. Their music has been so much a part of my life. Not just Dave’s noodling on the guitar or vocals but every member of the band. I went so quickly into Under the Table and Dreaming to Crash to seeing the band no less than 15 teams over the next 15 years.
The player is Leroi Moore. Leroi is out, in infinite repose. The light’s on him and the band is lining up behind him. He’s laying down that sax line like a prophet leading the worshipers to the land where everything is all right, it’ll be ok.
There’s a point, so the saying goes, where life stops giving you stuff and starts taking it away.
The light on Leroi fades away slowly as the band picks up the main number. It’s "Crush" and Leroi has more to do in the song, but for now he guided the intro in under the fading light of the Columbia River Gorge sunset.
Sometimes there’s words in life. Most times, there’s not.
Life’s been taking a lot of inspirations away from all of us this year.
I can hear the breeze that I can never hear when I’m there. The stars are climbing bright as the light fades across the horizon. Heaven’s amphitheater hushes for a moment.
There’s a clock ticking pause, as Leroi purses his lips and puffs his cheeks for the sax part.
The part doesn’t come this time. There’s silence when the horn blows.
