Wishful Drinking

I’ve always loved a good celebrity biography.  Even better are the autobiographies, in which you not only get the good stuff, you get the good stuff in (mostly) the author’s own words.  I’ve read some good ones and some not-so-good ones.  The best celebrity biography I’ve ever read HANDS DOWN was Anne Murray’s – which is going to get its own blog post some day.  Carrie Fisher’s , sadly, lands in the not-so-good pile.

If someone forced me to say what I liked best about Carrie Fisher’s book of anecdotes from her life, I’d have to say it’s the cover.  A drunk Princess Leia, likely at the poshest gay bar on Alderaan, is the stroke of a genius.  I also think the title is mildly amusing, especially considering Fisher’s well-known battles with substance abuse over the years.  But as they say, you should never judge a book by its cover.  The cover is really as good as it gets.

I think the thing that bugged me most about this book is that it is really a memoir by the very loosest of definitions.  One of my biggest complaints about celebrity bios is that we always have to suffer through the part before they were famous, especially their childhood.  Usually, I’m just there for the good stuff and 99% of the time, the good stuff does not happen in their childhood.  But the thing is, the early years is where the groundwork gets laid, where you start to make a connection to both the celebrity and to their cast of characters.  Fisher eschews this almost completely, jumping right in to the middle of her life and then cherry picking after that.  As a result, I never felt like I formed a connection with her and consequently, I ended up liking her less than I thought I would have.  Before I started reading the book, I really had no opinion of her.  Afterwards, I was kind of backing away slowly.  That being said, I do admire the way that she wears her bipolar diagnosis on her shirt sleeve.  The only way that the stigma of mental illness will ever lessen is by talking about it, and man, does she ever.  She talks about her addictions, her famous parents – Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.  At one point, she talks about how she had a chance to become another Liza Minnelli and in a way, she did because she did marry a gay man.

Another thing I disliked about the book was its writing style.  The book is adapted from Fisher’s one woman show of the same name, and you can tell.  Much like books made from blog posts, Wishful Drinking seems like it completely skipped the editor on its way to the publisher.  She writes in a conversational tone which I suppose since it’s her book she can write it however she wants, but I found it annoying after about 50 pages.  Eventually, I really wanting to tell her to stop talking already.  The good thing is that, at 156 pages with copious amounts of white space on the page, it took all of two and a half minutes to read.

It’s too bad because I really wanted to like this book.  I hoped that it might have some good stories from the set of the Star Wars movies, but alas, it did not.  It did mention a movie she did with Chevy Chase called Under The Rainbow which I hadn’t thought about in 30 years.  Truthfully, I’d rather rewatch that film than reread this book.

I know what you did last night, but not last summer

Not to be confused with the horror film of a very similar name, the Pam Tillis/Lorrie Morgan duet “I Know What You Did Last Night” hit iTunes today. It’s the lead single from their duet album that is out in July.

The pairing of these two grand dames of 90s country is so out of the blue that I just can’t help but be interested.  I listened to my fair share of Pam Tillis back in the day – hell, a line from “Maybe It Was Memphis” made it into Heidi’s Special Delivery just for me.  Lorrie Morgan I know less about.  Virtually my only exposure to her is in Dolly Parton’s 1991 duet “Best Woman Wins” which is one of my cheesy Dolly favorites.  What’s funny is the only reason I know about this album is because of one of those stupid things that are taking over Facebook these days – the “such-and-such page is talking about a page you like.”  There it was, Pam and Lorrie all Thelma & Louise on the cover of Dos Divas.  I preordered the album faster than you could say shake the sugar tree.  For once, one of those things actually worked.

The feel of the song is very 90s, so much so that the song would be at home on one of Pam’s solo albums from that time period.  My soft spot for 90s country is well documented, and I am not one bit ashamed of it.  Naturally, most of the 90s country that I listened to at the time was female country.  Try as I might, I could never get into Garth Brooks.  I still cringe thinking about all the dumb drunk frat boys bellowing “Friends In Low Places” at bars when I was in college.  Still, there’s plenty of space in that soft spot for “Callin’ Baton Rouge” – one of those country songs that I like much more than I really should.

So give ol’ Pam and Lorrie a try.  It’s cheesy country through and through, but I love it in spite of myself.  This trash will be getting plenty of play this summer.

Depends on how you want to kill them

So I am probably terminally late to Xbox 360.  The whole reason we got one was because Heidi had a nice paycheck and she wanted to do something nice for Anna and me for putting up with her marathon writing sessions.  It wasn’t necessary, but I have to admit, it sure is nice.  I worried a little bit because there’s a brand new Xbox coming out (or out? I don’t really keep up with such things) and I wondered if the 360 would be obsolete in 2 and a half minutes.  I’m not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination – most of the time my attention span is extremely limited for a complicated video game that requires a lot of special maneuvers with the controllers.  You gotta remember that I grew up with Atari – joystick, paddle or possibly track ball.  The newer controllers really confuse me.

But anyway, what finally tripped me over into getting behind this whole Xbox 360 idea is the shitload of zombie games that you can get for that console.  There are pitifully few for the Wii – probably because that system is generally more aimed at kids and there’s not much that’s kiddish about zombies.  I remembered a game that got in trouble with the people who own the copyright to Dawn of the Dead because the game took place in a shopping mall.  Turns out that game is Dead Rising, and my memory did serve me correctly – the action takes place in Willamette Shopping Mall in Willamette, Colorado.  It had fair to middling reviews on a lot of the review sites I looked at, so I decided to rent it first.  While it won’t set the world on fire or anything (especially since it’s a 7 year-old game now), it’s more than passable and actually quite a bit of fun to play.  Once I got the hang of the controls, zombie killing commenced.  The zombies in this game are of the slow variety so it’s pretty easy to dart around them in the mall unless there’s just a horde of them, but zipping past them really kind of defeats the point, right?  The best thing about Dead Rising is that just about anything can be a weapon.  Actually, the use of firearms is kind of plebian when things like potted plants, mall benches, chairs, steel shelves, baseball bats, stuffed horse heads, purses, and pretty much anything you can find in a shopping mall.  The sucky part of the game is that it only allows you one save slot and you can only save the game by going to the mall’s public restrooms or back to the security office and let me tell you, sometimes you’re hell and gone from one of those.

Serving as a counterpoint to this game is the other zombie game that really caught my attention – so much so that I purchased it without trying it.  That game is Left 4 Dead.  To be fair, I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the game as I had seen the PC version of it when we visited some friends in California about 4 years ago.  Left 4 Dead is an infected game (which is a distinction that many diehard zombie people insist upon – I’m not so anal) so these are fast zombies.  There’s special types of zombies – the Boomer that vomits all over you, the Smoker that has a tongue Gene Simmons would be proud of that can wrap up players and dangle them from buildings.  There’s also  the Tank which reminds me of the Abomination from The Incredible Hulk not to mention hordes and hordes or regular infecteds that will charge you on site.  Car alarms and gunfire get their attention.  The landscape is appropriately post-apocalyptic – dark, rainy, gray and super creepy.You have all sorts of firearms at your disposal – pistols that never run out of ammo, machine guns, and rifles as well as pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails.  As you can imagine, THIS IS SERIOUS.  This is not the cartoonish violence of Dead Rising.

The ultimate question is “which game is better?”  I guess it all depends on what you want.  If you want to kill zombies with handbags, golf clubs and baby strollers, go with Dead Rising. If you want to use something that sprays bullets all over the place, go for Left 4 Dead.  For me, either one works in a pinch.

Depravity central

I know I haven’t blogged in forever.  My will to blog has been waning of late, but rather than lament it, I have decided to just take it as a sign of how life is right now which is busy and distracting but overall rather satisfying.

But I’ve broken my blog silence to pimp what is surely the best Spotify playlist to ever grace the Internets.  Many moons ago, I made my friend Mary a CD that was called The Totally Inappropriate Mix.  Unlike most of the CDs I’ve made for other people, I don’t have a track listing for this one, although I remember quite a few of what I put on there.  We always joked that the alternate title of the CD could have been “songs that you’ll never hear a church choir sing.”  You can probably see where this is going.

I’ve made this a collaborative playlist which means ANYONE that’s on Spotify can contribute to this playlist.  And it’s only as fun as the songs that get added to it.  So far there are only 3 of us adding songs, so come on over and jump in.

Here’s the link to the playlist.  Click HERE.  You know you want to.

Forced perspective

I am inordinately entertained by forced perspective photos.  You know what I’m talking about, but in case you don’t, check out this page for many examples of what I’m talking about.  Some of them are better than others, but they all made me laugh just a little bit.

Today I found what is perhaps the best forced perspective photo in the history of all mankind.  Behold.

Up until this point, my favorite forced perspective shot was this one.

Proof positive that I will never ever grow up.

As you were.

Last dance

Last night was the final Daddy-Daughter dance that Anna and I will attend.  We’ve been going to these things since she was in the first grade, and I documented our initial experience in this post.  They’re always a good time, always held in the gym at Anna’s elementary school and always remind me what a broad spectrum of dads there are out there.  This year’s was different because Heidi, who is usually around to see us off and take photos and the whole bit, was conspicuously absent as she was off signing books in Kansas City.  Before she left, she had Anna get all the pieces of her outfit together and put in a place where she could find them on Sunday, knowing that I’d be of limited use.  She also made her an appointment to get her hair done up since I would have had to do the vacuum assisted pony-tail otherwise.

My biggest complaint about the dances in the past has always been the music.  Usually, a couple of teachers playing music off an iMac or an iPod was what passed as a DJ and it seemed like year after year, they played the same damn songs over and over again.  Imagine my surprise when we walked in this year and there was an actual DJ service.  A step in the right direction, right?  That’s what I thought.  While they played the standard elementary school girl songs – most notably “Single Ladies” and anything by Taylor Swift – interspersed amongst these songs were random techno songs that I’m pretty sure they didn’t know.  I ended up having to Shazam a lot of the songs because they were so obscure.  As you might imagine, this didn’t encourage people to dance too much.  People want to dance to stuff they know – or at least I do.  Fortunately there was also a healthy swath of 80s material that the fathers probably all knew but were loathe to admit they liked (except for this one.)

They still played the sappy father-daughter songs.  Every year, “Butterfly Kisses” has been played and, sure enough, it made an appearance last night.  I had forewarned Anna about how schmaltzy and sappy it is, and when she heard the words “butterfly kisses” she kind of looked at me disdainfully, but we still danced to it.  Last year they played “I Loved Her First” by country music group Heartland which I had never heard before but I ended up buying in spite of myself after the dance.  This year’s attempt to pull at the heartstrings of all the dads out there was “Cinderella” by Steven Curtis Chapman and I’ll be goddamned but it really worked this time and reading the story about what happened after Chapman wrote the song got me again right now while I’m typing this.  I would go buy that song but I couldn’t even listen to it on Spotify without being all mushy.

I’ve shared before how I am terminally sentimental I am when it comes to my daughter.  I’m not sure what it is, because we don’t have one of those relationships that’s seen me drinking fake tea or dancing with her while she’s dressed up in a Cinderella dress.  We’re a lot more likely to be sitting in the chair together watching a TV show and driving each other crazy.  I will cover her eyes with my hands and say – just like my dad did to me when I was growing up – “NO MORE TV FOR YOU!”  Just tonight, while we were watching Once Upon A Time, the Nespresso commercial came on and we kept saying “nespresso” with fake Italian accents to each other to make the other insane.  I’ll sing the Glee theme song off key and she’ll put her hand over my mouth.  Our relationship is full of inside jokes and the predictable me being dumb-but-not-so-dumb as Bill Cosby would say.

Last night was a little bit tough for me.  She’s off to middle school next year and, as I mentioned, the Daddy-Daughter dances are behind us.  Soon she’ll be going to middle school dances by herself or with friends or with a date.  I’m not going to be one of those dads that wants to keep Rapunzel locked up in the tower to keep her from dating or one that meets every potential date at the door with a shotgun.  What I like to think these dances have taught her over the years is how a boy should treat her.  This is why I get so irritated when I see dads on their phones the whole night, not dancing and spending time with their daughters who, before you know it, will be grown up and less inclined to spend time with them.  I was encouraged by the number of dads their with their kindergarteners or first graders.  It gives me hope for the generation of men coming up behind me that being a man includes dancing with their daughters.  I know I wouldn’t have traded any of those nights over the last five years for anything.

She was so funny last night, both a kid and a young woman all at once.  It always makes me think of that damn Britney song “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” which I’ve never even fucking heard and I really don’t like Britney very much so I’m always kind of mad that it makes me think of that song.  She was obsessed with getting her face painted, yet wouldn’t tell me what was in her purse because “a girl has to have some secrets” – whatever the hell THAT means.  She enjoyed being with her friends, but also wanted to be with me and was oddly concerned with whether or not I was having a good time.  There’s a handful of other fathers that I’ve seen every year that I usually talk to, but last night I was really more about being with Anna.

The dance ended very abruptly, and it really ticked us both off.  They were playing a suite of songs from The Little Mermaid and then the principal announced that had been the last song.  Anna only danced with me for part of it and she felt bad that she had missed most of the last dance of her last Daddy-Daughter dance.  I told her not to blame herself for a minute, because it was the organizers of the dance that screwed that up and really, did that song SOUND like the last dance to anything?  I have always thought they should use Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” for the last dance, but this never happened.  I also always thought I should have been in charge of the music, but then I would have had to choose between the music and my daughter and really, the choice there is obvious.  She told me later that she liked our music better anyway.  Damn straight.

A good time was had, and we went to Dairy Queen afterward, where I was chastised for eating too much dairy that day.

Here we are in 2009 at the first dance and in 2013 at the last dance.  I have 5000% more gray hair in 2013 – it’s like looking at a before and after picture of Obama!  And Anna is 5000% taller.

I couldn’t be prouder of her.  I feel like I’ve done something right somewhere.  And her dad isn’t too hard on the eyes either if I do say so myself.

Mixing it up

I was listening to Spotify radio the other day and the Offer Nissim mix of Madonna’s “Turn Up The Radio” came on, and it just reminded me of how solid that set of remixes was.  As much as I love Madonna, I have to say that her remixes are rather hit and miss, especially recently.  But listening to that remix reminded me of how it seemed to me that many of the “Girl Gone Wild” remixes were pretty top notch as well, so I went and listened to a handful of them on Spotify.  And wouldn’t you know it, I really think the Offer Nissim mix of that song is probably the best of the bunch.  Listen to a snippet of it.

It doesn’t hurt that it is pretty much the version that she used to open the MDNA Tour.  The echoing “OH MY GOD”s really make the song for me, as does the Middle Eastern flavor.  It’s also a remix that is not super bass heavy and is actually a little bit subtle, if such a thing exists.  Much like the Trouser Enthusiasts remix of Gloria Estefan’s “Heaven’s What I Feel”, I can just picture this remix being played in a club.  Perhaps if I went to clubs more often, I’d be in better shape and fit into suit pants that fit me two and a half years ago.  So much for thinking that I was losing weight.  But I guess it is also ammunition I can use against my cancer fears for I’m certainly not losing weight unintentionally.

So much of the time, I feel like I’m the only one in my circle that likes MDNA, which makes me feel like a bit of a Madonna apologist, always trying to defend her most recent work to those that say her best work is in her past.  This is especially ironic since I’ve been trying to force myself to like the new Fleetwood Mac songs which I initially thought were vomit and cringe inducing.  Maybe Offer Nissim should remix them.

Pieces of this and that

Heidi’s out of town at the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention in Kansas City which leaves Anna and me at home alone.  I’ve had the last couple of days off of work which has been nice but I wasn’t able to get PTO tomorrow so it’s back to work for my sorry ass in the morning.  This is probably a good thing as I can tell that I am most likely in need of more structure than wandering around the house for the last three days has provided.  It never fails – whenever Heidi is gone, my presence on social media goes up initially, and then drops way off after I suspect everyone has grown weary of me.  I’m about to that point where I feel like I need to walk slowly away from the internet, but here I am, writing a blog post.  Part of my need to walk away from the internet is that I have been obsessively reloading Reddit as I posted a picture that really caught fire and garnered me over 1,000 points in link karma.  I’m telling you, you just can’t predict what will really take off on Reddit.  But I also have gone back and deleted a lot of Facebook posts and thank God most of my tweets have been @ replies because then at least people don’t think I’ve been haunting Twitter even though I’ve been doing that as well.  I’ve even been tweeting celebrities which, under normal circumstances, is a rare occurrence indeed.

I’ve been drinking too much coffee and too much wine – fortunately more of the former than the latter.  It snowed here today as well which was a morale killer like you wouldn’t believe.  I got out to take Anna to school, go to my chiropractor appointment and pick Anna up from school.  I still have to go put the truck in the garage which I fully intend to do even though technically I’m in pajamas and my friend TKT would have my head for even walking out the front door in pajama pants.  I also managed to get Anna to get her homework done even though all she wants to do is play Minecraft – a game whose appeal is completely lost on me.  The game is even more exciting to her now that I installed a mod called Simply Horses that allows her to merge her love of horses with her love of Minecraft.

The Daddy-Daughter dance is this weekend.  It’s the last one as she officially graduates from elementary school in June and heads to middle school.  Since Heidi is not home, the ever amazing Jill is doing Anna’s hair prior to the dance.  Jill is so awesome that I caught a glimpse of my hair in the rear view mirror of the car today and, even though it’s starting to get long and to the point where it would normally be a bit unruly, it was still amazingly cute.  As long as I have the option of her cutting my hair, I won’t go anywhere else.

But this is the thing about weeks like this – I’m feeling kind of starved for companionship.  Despite my general tendency toward being an introvert, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like to be around people.  And I’m seriously to the point where it’s a good thing I’m working tomorrow because, if nothing else, it’ll feed my need to talk to people.  It’s easy to say “I just want the world to turn off!” until it does and then I’m left wondering what the hell to do with myself.   Such is the nature of our modern life, I guess.  It still makes me kind of sad though.  If it were up to me, all the people I care about would live in a 10 block radius and we’d all see each other a hell of a lot more often than life seems to allow us to now.

My first reaction to this kind of thing has always been to say to myself, “Dan, grow the hell up.  Don’t be such a douchebag.”  But as I know, that’s not a very nice way to talk to myself and it doesn’t respect the part of me that honestly feels that way, douchey or not.  Like I said, just because I’m introverted doesn’t mean I don’t like other people.  For those of you that have been seeing me all over the place on social media, that’s kind of where I am these days.

So I’ll leave you with this.  I rewatched Reservoir Dogs the other day and I really had forgotten how good it is.  Tim Roth was pretty amazing in that film.  And how can anyone feel sad when Tim Roth is super cool?  Because by extension, I’m super cool too.  Or something like that.

Respectfully I say to thee

I have been on a huge Diana Ross kick this week.  It was prompted by a friend comparing the new Daft Punk song “Get Lucky” to Chic.  Chic members Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers produced Diana Ross’ 1980 album diana, which my friend said was a “flawless LP.”  I knew of the album and of its most well known tracks – those being “Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out” – but had never listened to the whole thing.  I’ve never been a huge Diana Ross fan.  I do like her singles and I have a soft spot for the 1995 Take Me Higher album, but I also don’t dislike her to any great degree either.

“Upside Down” has been one of those songs that has been in my life for just about as long as I can remember.  My parents had it on a K-Tel compilation (this one) and I remember really loving it.  It’s no surprise as it is really right up my alley music wise.  It was on the radio constantly at the time.  I remember being younger than Anna and riding over with a friend and his parents to an Iowa State football game and “Upside Down” came on the radio.  I couldn’t help but sing along softly to myself.  This was also the trip when, after we got home, my friends parents told my parents that “I studied the game so intently.”  Probably not – I was probably thinking of pop songs – and “Upside Down” is one of the best pop songs of the last 40 years.

Not surprisingly, I can pinpoint what really appeals to me about “Upside Down.”  It’s the adverbs.  When I looked at the lyrics, I was surprised to find that only two are used – “instinctively” and “respectfully” – and they aren’t even used in rhymes, but I really love how they’re used in the song.  I also love how it’s kind of a song in which Diana knows she’s getting played (“I know you got charm and appeal/You always play the field/I’m crazy to think you’re all mine”) but she doesn’t really care.  Perhaps it’s because she’s upside down.  And I don’t think it was until well into my adult life that I learned the lyrics were “Upside down/boy, you turn me” and not “Upside down/the more you turn me.”  The joys of misheard lyrics.

“Upside Down” falls into the category of songs that are so perfect in their original incarnation that any attempt to remix them is probably going to fall flat.  Fortunately, I know of only one official remix which was released in 1993 and predictably, it pales in comparison to the original.  I’ve been listening to the diana album on Spotify this week and then eventually and inevitably ended up buying the album on eMusic with $10 of credit I got for tweeting a picture of my Record Store Day receipt to them.  Reissued in 2003, it contains the original mix of the album as Rodgers and Edwards intended, as Ross had the entire album remixed without their knowledge prior to its release.  To my amazement, the original mix of “Upside Down” is superior to the one we’ve known all these years.  It’s subtly different, but the differences are there.  I have a hard time articulating the differences, so I’ll just let you listen for yourself.

But from the “you can’t win ‘em all” file, the original mix of “I’m Coming Out” eliminates the last “I’m coming …..OUT!” which in my mind, is a travesty.  Although now, when I listen to “I’m Coming Out” I can’t help but hear it as “I’m eating out/I’m going to Perkins/Or maybe Village Inn” thanks to Jeff and our 3 hours of standing in the Golden Triangle waiting for Madonna to appear.

I can tell I’ll be picking diana up on vinyl someday.

Sweeping for mines

Everyone has their go-to game for when you want to turn your brain off a little bit.  For my wife, it’s solitaire.  For others, it’s something like Tetris or Bubble Galaxy.  For me, it was always Minesweeper.

Back in my college days, before I would “one more song” myself until 2AM like I do now, I would “one more game” myself with Minesweeper.  It shipped standard with all copies of Windows and at first, I didn’t bother to try to figure it out.  It didn’t seem like it would be my cup of tea at all and it sat unplayed  for quite some time before I finally started playing it in the fall of 1992.  The idea behind the game is to flag all the mines hidden on the board, using only numbers to guide you.  The numbers indicate how many mines there are in the squares surrounding the numbers.  So many nights I would sit there and mindlessly try to find the mines hidden beneath those gray squares, usually failing to flag them all before accidentally clicking on one.  I got really good at the beginner level, took a little longer on the intermediate level but eventually beat it.

Then I got to the expert level.  With 99 bombs in a 30 x 16 playing field, it took weeks, if not months, for me to beat this level.  And even after I beat it, doing so was pretty much the exception to the rule.  Forget about trying to beat the clock – just trying to clear the board was a tall order without trying to beat your last time.  Even though only 20% of the board contains a bomb, it seemed like no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find all 99 without inadvertently uncovering one.

The thing about Minesweeper is that it really is all about maintaining your concentration, with a little bit of lucky guessing thrown in just for the hell of it.  It seems like every time I played, I would be down to having to guess between one of two squares, one containing a mine and the other not.  Invariably, I would always choose poorly.  I think that at least part of that boils down to the fact that by the time you have found 90 mines, your brain is starting to unravel a little bit.  It’s easy to make a mistake as it is, but never so much as when you have 10% of the bombs left to find and you have to try to guess where they are.  Early in the game, a blind click can lead to a huge opening up of the board, but at the end, most of those outs have been used.

Zombie Minesweeper – inferior to the original version in almost every way.

I hadn’t played Minesweeper for years, and then when I traded in PC for Mac last year, I figured my days of Minesweeper were behind me.  I found a game called Zombie Minesweeper for the iPad a while back, but it didn’t have the same experience as the original did (not sure why I expected it to, the gameplay was totally different.)  But a few weeks ago, I got curious and looked in the App Store and there it was.  So now, when I’m supposed to be reading or doing something productive right before bed, I can be found “one more game”-ing myself once again.  I haven’t sprung for the 2 bucks it costs for the full app because I’m cheap that way, so I can’t play the expert level yet, but one of these days I’ll do it.  For now, I’m content to play the intermediate level with 40 bombs, because 90% of the time I lose anyway.

It must be something about insisting on playing games that I keep losing because it seems to be a common thread with me as far as iPhone games go.  My friend Matt kicks my ass at virtually every iPhone game there is, yet I keep playing.  I guess I’m a glutton for punishment.  But I think part of it, too, is that when I play Minesweeper, I commune with the 20 year-old version of me that played it so feverishly and constantly.  I’ve discovered over the last few months that talking to that part of myself (which started with my birthday letter) and hearing him out goes a long way toward quieting my anxiety.  It helps me to be in touch with the part of me that just wants a friend so he doesn’t have to sweep for mines on a Friday night alone in a dorm room.

Good thing I still like to play Minesweeper and, much like the Atari games of my youth, I still kind of suck at it.