It'll Never Fly

Burnout 3: Takedown: Best game I’ve played in a long time. It’s simple enough to be one of those pick-up-and-play-any-time-you-want kind of games, but also deep enough for the spend-countless-hours-perfecting-one-race-to-gain-enough-tokens-to-unlock-just-one-more-event type of gamer. There’s also a great sense of speed when you’re boosting through oncoming traffic and every near miss is accompanied by a cool “SWOOSH” sound. You can also get some pretty spectacular crashes.

Super Monkey Ball 2: If you like games like Marble Madness and Labyrinth then you’ll probably like this game. If you’re like me and hate both Marble Madness and Labyrinth, you will hate Super Monkey Ball story mode. This game’s one saving grace is its party mode. I haven’t unlocked any new ones, but all the standard modes (except for Race) are quite good. It’s reminiscent of Crash Bash and Poy Poy in some ways.

I remember when I was a kid and getting a big dump of snow in one day was a good thing. Now that I’m grown up, I see it causes all kinds of problems. Like delaying the shipment of my Kodak camera, as an example.

I gots me a new DVD player. A Polaroid PDV-0700K Portable DVD Player. I even found a way to make it region-free, using a built-in function on the player itself. I’m not going to tell you how, but I will say the number 1379 is important (I’m slightly surprised they didn’t use the number 1337; it means “elite” in hacker terminology). I might have a reason to go to the cottage more often now. My Dad finally received an iPod of his own (40GB version), so in much the same manner as the A&W Burger family, we are the Apple iPod family.

My brother and I gave each other board games. Risk: Lord of the Rings Trilogy for me, and HeroScape for him.

And as a late Christmas present, I bought myself a Kodak EasyShare DX7590 at BestBuy.ca for $570 CAD. Needless to say, I’m not going bargain hunting on Boxing Day today, as I think I found one yesterday.

More to come, time permitting.

In accordance with German tradition, in a few short hours I’ll be sitting in the living room with family and friends and opening my Christmas gifts around the Christmas tree. You might have noticed we have an angel at the top of our tree instead of a star or whatever else people use.

Here’s the story behind that tradition…

When four of Santa’s elves got sick, the trainee elves did not produce toys as fast as the regular ones, and Santa began to feel the pre-Christmas pressure. Then Mrs. Claus told Santa her Mother was coming to visit, which stressed Santa even more. When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were about to give birth and two others had jumped the fence and were out, Heaven knows where. Then when he began to load the sleigh, one of the floorboards cracked, the toy bag fell to the ground and all the toys were scattered. So, frustrated, Santa went in the house for a cup of apple cider and a shot of rum.

When he went to the cupboard, he discovered the elves had drunk all the cider and hidden the liquor. In his frustration, he accidentally dropped the cider jug, and it broke into hundreds of little glass pieces all over the kitchen floor. He went to get the broom and found the mice had eaten all the straw off the end of the broom.

Just then the doorbell rang, and irritated Santa marched to the door, yanked it open, and there stood a little angel with a great big Christmas tree. The angel said very cheerfully, “Merry Christmas, Santa. Isn’t this a lovely day? I have a beautiful tree for you. Where would you like me to stick it?”

And so began the tradition of the little angel on top of the Christmas tree.

By the way, I suck at taking pictures.

Allow me to hijack a line from Season One of Corner Gas:

Audible.com, I have a comment and a question.

1. Your search engine sucks!
2. Why does your search engine suck so much?

Here’s a couple of examples. Make sure you’re logged out. Now search for the keyword “prey.” You get 10 matches, including Michael Crichton’s “Prey” (both the unabridged and abridged version). Now log in. Do the same search for “prey.” You only get 1 match; Michael Crichton’s “Prey,” the abridged version.

Not enough proof? Here’s another example. Once again, log out. Now search for the keyword “thrones.” You get 2 matches; George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” and something called “Thrones of Blood” by Josephus. Okay, log in; same search. You get only 1 match for “Thrones of Blood,” which I’m sure is a fine book, but not what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the book that 225 people gave an average rating of 4.76 out of 5, not the book that 2 people gave an average rating of 3.5 out of 5.

Audible, you provide a great service. I’m a subscriber myself. But you need to fix your search engine. I have better luck finding books at your site using Amazon and Google.