Game Night

Last night was the first Grover Family Game Night.¹

The night began with a pre-game night game of Yahtzee, with Liz winning the first game and me winning the second. Yahtzee dances abounded.


After that I put on my Game Night clothes² (including my lucky socks), and we congregated in the kitchen to formally initiate Game Night with a tribute to Sarah and Andrew, the two siblings who couldn't be there: a tap dance. From there it was a furious game of Don't Eat Pete played with peanut butter M&Ms.

Don't Eat Pete

Place an M&M on each of the faces on your Don't-Eat-Pete board. Someone leaves the room and the rest designate one face to be "Pete." Then the person comes back and eats one candy at a time until he or she chooses "Pete," at which moment everyone yells, "don't eat pete!" and the person's turn is over.

When Don't Eat Pete petered out we slumped into the living room to play the Thimble Game (which is extra fun with kids who can't actually count to a hundred.

From small and simple things is great meyhem brought to pass.

The Thimble Game

Everyone sits in a circle and the person who's It fills a thimble full of water and chooses a secret number between 1 and 100. Then each person in turn guesses a number, to which It responds "Higher" or "Lower," narrowing down the range of choices. When someone guesses the secret number, instead of answering, It flings the thimbleful of water on them.

When that ended we decided to have an add-on dance party, in which each person in the group adds a dance move onto the growing chain. When we had gone around the circle two times or so we pumped up the music and put it all together. Here is a video of (most of) us doing the dance—see if you can follow all the moves in order (the video starts on the Harris):

1. the White Boy
2. the Squid³
3. the Batman
4. the Harris
5. the Maracas
6. the Pistol 360°
7. the Crow
8. the Worm (barely)
9. the Magic
10. the Snorkler
11. the Harris II
12. the Brady Bunch
13. the Break Dancer
14. the Sarah and Andrew Million-dollar Move
15. the Ecstatic Chipmunk
16. the Jimmy Stewart
17. the Monkey

(If for some reason the video isn't here or doesn't work,
click right here to see the video.)

The Moore's showed up just as we were finishing our dance-off, which embarrassed them more than us.

The next game was a feat of skill: a blind taste test. We blindfolded three or four people at a time and saw if they could taste the difference between name brand stuff and the generic brands, if they could differentiate between close cousins like Pepsi and Coke or Cheezits and Cheese Nips, and if they could identify candy bars at only a taste (Whatchamacallit and Zero proved difficult). As a tribute to our hometown we even had people try to tell the difference between regular Dr. Pepper and Dr. Pepper made with Sugar Land's own Imperial Pure Cane Sugar.

Everybody did well and felt sugarsick.

From there we split up—some kids ended up watching a movie; some grown-ups attacked the cocktail weenies; Liz and I sampled the Cinnamon Cake with Cinnamon Frosting that was a month in the making.⁴ Pretty soon I got embroiled in a eight player Rummikub game 'round the dining room table. We had to mix both our sets (one old, one new), which resulted in a lot of puzzling over colors.⁵


All in all it was a pretty good night. More dancing than one would expect, but that's the Grovers, I guess.


¹ As opposed to the first Grover Family Luau, which has yet to happen.
² read "clean clothes"
³ This summer's hottest dance move, and my own personal Yahtzee Dance.
⁴ Special thanks to Amy for sharing that post; find the recipe here. I slightly altered it—before step one insert Step 0: "Try to get someone else to make this and otherwise generally procrastinate for four weeks."
⁵ See tomorrow's post.

Two Complaints

1. Google Reader.

Don't get me wrong—I like and use Google Reader, but it has just one major flaw (that I know of): it strips all the formatting out of the websites it displays.

For those of you who don't know what Google Reader is, it's a program that keeps track of all the stuff you regularly read on the internet. Like, say you read a dozen friends' blogs everyday, scan a few webcomics, and maybe like to check to see what's new at apple.com or something. Instead of having to go to each website individually to check if anything's been updated, you can just enter each site into your Google Reader and it will check for you, grab what's new, and show it to you to read. It saves a lot of time and effort (you can check it out by finding the "reader" button on the top of Google's homepage, perhaps under the "more" button).

But what it doesn't do is show you the actual websites themselves. All you get is the text and photos displayed in simple black on white. Which is all well and good, but where's the joy in that? People go to a lot of trouble to make things look nice on their blogs and stuff—they pick nice colors and fonts, interesting layouts, and constantly update endless sidebars—but I'm not getting to appreciate any of that anymore. All I get is the naked text. So democratic. There should be a button on Google Reader to open a tab to each updated page in one click.

2. Local News.

Forget all the hype about a liberal media bias, the true culprits of funky journalism are the local cats. All I see, in no matter which city I live, is an endless war between stations offering the most accurate weather team, the most hard-hitting investigative journalism, and the most local local-interest stories. It's shameless and irrelevant.

Watching them squeeze every possible drop of story out of nothing makes me sick. Seeing them attempt to wield executive powers several steps beyond "investigating" is troubling. Seeing my neighbors actually tape their windows today in anticipation of a tropical storm making landfall today is laughable—and certainly the result of overhyped, quarter-hourly updates by our city's opportunistic news media.

My writer friends and I often talked derisively (and somewhat jealously) about bad literature, bestsellers, tell-all memoirs—stuff we find distasteful or dishonest about our field. I don't know what my journalism friends talk about, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was it.

God's Radio

Ditto everything I said about the radio a few days ago for church.

341 hymns in the book ÷ 52 sundays a year = at least 6 original songs per week. (Can God get tired of "The Spirit of God"?)

Also: I dislike how we all seem to think "We Thank the O God For a Prophet" is a song to the prophet on account of that first line. I get the feeling people think that "his goodness and mercy" is the prophet's, not God's.

Revenge of the Night Person

So I've been making good progress on becoming a morning person. That is, until a few weeks ago.

Sometime after crashing Mary's bike, my old nightself made a comeback I couldn't believe. I went from getting up cheerily(ish) before 8 to stumbling from bed to couch for a nap at around 11. It was weird how quickly it happened.

Then I got sick. I NEVER get sick! Even when I do get sick, it's only barely sick (I barely had a cold), but since I never get sick, getting sick destroys me. I have ultimate respect for those who still manage to do something with themselves through sickness¹, because it only takes a tiny amount to make me completely worthless. As evidence of my inability to do anything at all when incommoded, I offer Exhibit A:

Exhibit A: click to enlarge

Clearly I got sick sometime around weeks 4 and 5 of my 10,000 pages goal. Luckily I had been such an overachiever earlier on.


¹ Before gloating, read The Journal of a Disappointed Man. And I'm not talking about pain; that's different.

Cruel Summer

Being in Houston for the summer, I am with car. Being with car means I am with radio. And here's what I've noticed:

Houston went through a real bad spell a few years ago of having very few good stations. It seemed whenever we got one that was decent, it would soon turn into a tejano station. That's what happened to Rock 101, at least (the only station I've ever heard play Rush without a request). But in the past year or two, things have really turned around. There's an 80s station, a pop top 40, a classic rock, a modern rock, an easy listening, a few dance/hip-hop/rap, and at least two good country stations. To top it off, Houston recently got Jack FM (formatless, DJ-less, requestless radio), a station called Country Legends (which specializes in George and Dolly), and the oldies station has dropped the 50s doo-wop and moved up in time a decade to cover the classic rock station's butt (sorry if that makes you feel old).

This is good. It means that our Accord's 12 FM presets are locked and loaded and that the CDs can stay in the doohickey between the seats, not causing any accidents.¹

However, I can't help but notice one odd thing: with all those stations, I still only hear the same twelve songs over and over. It turns out that "Pour Some Sugar On Me" counts as classic rock, 80s rock, modern rock, pop top 40, and even easy listening. So do all the Boston songs I don't like, and "Electric Avenue" (which I never recall hearing before 2004 but now can identify within 2 bars). Why? Why with all these options, all these stations, can I hear "Tainted Love" or "Land Down Under" at any time of any day?

I did some research, and it turns out that at least three of my most listened to stations are owned by the same company. Would it be so hard to coordinate efforts a little bit so as to prevent the overexposure of the public to REO Speedwagon and Peter Frampton?

I'm not really complaining—I'm sure there's a business model somewhere that explains all this. I'm just curious why, for as long as I can remember, I've never heard more than one Beatles or Michael Jackson song in a week no matter how much time I spend in the car, yet I can hear Lenny Kravitz's pretty-much-terrible cover of "American Woman" any time I like. Why, with 2 full greatest hits albums to choose from (one of which is tied with Thriller as the top selling album of all time), the radio has let me hear "One of These Nights" three times this week but hasn't given me "Peaceful Easy Feeling," "New Kid in Town," or "Tequila Sunrise" once the whole summer?

I don't know anyone with any kind of station loyalty. I don't know anyone who listens through the commercials instead of switching the station. I don't know anyone who listens to exactly one kind of music. I don't know anyone who approves of the way radio is done. (I don't know anyone who likes 3 Doors Down.²)

And I don't know anyone who wants to hear the same 20 songs over and over forever. Even if there was only one radio station, and even if that station played only hits, and even if it only played hits in, say, one genre from, say, one decade, it would have at least 1000 songs to choose from. Fifty minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 4 minutes a song—no song would need to be played more than twice, and the chances of me hearing it both times is slim slim slim.

Classic rock stations boast that they play 3 decades worth of hits, and "rock" is a broad term.


There's one group that I haven't minded (mound?) hearing a little too often, though: Ace of Base.

Good times, E. (I hope I never hear Lifehouse again, no matter how much money a station may be giving away.)


¹ I can't figure out why, but no matter how many other stations crowd the buttons, the one farthest left is always, always the classical station. I keep thinking it's my dad, that he prefers to have that station at his fingertips, if only to feel more classy because of it—but it's my mom's car, not his. I'm changing it tomorrow.
² Don't tell me. It would only harm our relationship.

Counting

Alexander Dumas isn't really seen as a great writer in a literary sense so much as in an action sense. But I found some gems in The Count of Monte Cristo. It was the longest book I've ever read, including the Old Testament (have I read all the pages in the Old Testament? Has anyone?¹)

There are some situations which men instinctively comprehend but are unable to comment on intellectually. In such cases, the greatest poet is the one who emits the most powerful and the most natural cry. The crowd takes this cry for a complete story, and it is right to be satisfied with that, and still more so to find it sublime when it is truthful. (1174)

This next one struck because I often think about this Greek maxim in conjunction with John 17:3 and the MySpace blogospherical age we live in.

...It was, in reality, deliberate arrogance, an extreme example of aristocratic contempt, in short, the application of the maxim: "Admire yourself and others will admire you," a hundred times more useful in our days than the Greek one: "Know thyself," which has now been replaced by the less demanding and more profitable art of knowing others. (548–9)

And this last one is great because it groups Montaigne in with the greatest literature of all time. What, you don't know who Montaigne is? That's okay, I don't know who half the others are. This was said by the old priest in prison, by the way.

In Rome, I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library. By reading and re-reading them, I discovered that one hundred and fifty books, carefully chosen, give you, if not a complete summary of human knowledge, at least everything that it is useful for a man to know. I devoted three years of my life to reading and re-reading these hundred and fifty volumes, so that when I was arrested I knew them more or less by heart. In prison, with a slight effort of memory, I recalled them entirely. So I can recite to you Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus, Strada, Jornadès, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet; I mention only the most important. (156)

I read the Penguin edition, by the way. I love Penguin editions (I don't love penguin movies, though).

¹ I'm looking at you, Deuteronomy.

Bike

Why do we say "drive a car" and "ride a bike"? Shouldn't it be the other way around? I mean, it takes a lot more effort to keep a bike moving on down the road; one's legs are actually driving the cranks round and round. In a car we more or less just sit there and stretch our ankles back and forth. There's no leaning into turns, no ducking into the wind. Cars pretty much drive themselves, and if there is more than just the driver inside, the others are certainly riders.

Anyway, I've been riding around Sugar Land for the past few weeks, and I think it's interesting that I've gone down street after street that I'd never been down before. We moved here when I was six, yet I'd never been in Venetian Estates before this week. I'd never really ridden around the mansion on Lakeview. I don't think I'd even ever been on some of the streets in my own neighborhood that I've found. It's like I'm on a voyage of discovery.

The other day I waited only ten feet away as a train barreled past. I've done that in a car hundreds of times, but standing in the open air on a bike—it was brand new.

I don't know if I mentioned this, but back in Athens I saw a real live fox one day while riding. I also saw a couple dozen chipmunks, a large bird of prey, and a five-foot-long snake that was stretch out width-wise in the middle of the trail. I swerved to avoid running over it, luckily making for the tail side rather than the head side. I also saw a bunch of Indian kids out in a field playing cricket.