At the monthly local creatively-aligned potluck I attend, there are always interesting people. There are various artists of all types, including our frequent host, the inimitable Howard Cruse. There was once even a witch. But there are also two people who really, really care about the welfare of dogs, and vehemently oppose anything that might make canines suffer in the slightest bit. They should not read today’s column. The rest of you, though, should go right ahead.

Acquired some new board games yesterday, among them Power Grid and Caylus, both longish brain-busting sorts of games produced by the fine people at Rio Grande, and both currently on BoardGameGeek’s top ten list. We’ve already played three games, and are looking forward to more. While playing this game, it occured to me that some games are less suited for certain modifications than others. For example, in spite of how many people seem to enjoy it with poker, I imagine that Strip Caylus or Strip Power Grid (a.k.a. “Power Strip”) just wouldn’t be the same.

And no, I don’t plan to test this empirically, so if you want to find out, you’ll have to test it yourself. But if you do, let me know how it goes.

As promised, here’s my column to chronicle my trip to Maine last weekend. But since you read this, you get an additional story. I save the best story for you because I care. Read the column first.

Back? Okay. So, when the car died and we got it towed back to the farm, we convinced our host to take his truck out and run a chain from the back of the truck to the front of the car. Tom sat in the driver’s seat of the car, our host sat in the driver’s seat of his truck, and I stood off to the side of the road to get a full view so I could warn people if disaster was imminent.

Tom was convinced disaster was imminent because his car was being towed forward but he had no brakes, so as soon as the truck stopped, he might rear-end the truck. Our host was not concerned about this, but given that our host was one of the most easy-going people I’ve ever met, that didn’t comfort Tom overmuch. In retrospect, my ability to avert disaster by shouting “Look out! Imminent disaster!” was probably fairly limited.

What happened, though, was that they started towing, and Tom started shouting out “I have no brakes!”, and our host yelled “Alright,” and just kept driving, and I was walking along to keep up with them, and then running along to keep up with them, and soon I was alone on a dark Maine road (read: no streetlights) in the middle of the night.

Thankfully, I knew the farm was only a two minute drive up the road, so I was able to walk back with no difficulty.

Well, I’m back from my weekend in Maine attending a wedding. The first of four for the year, albeit the only one likely to be held on a family farm while various people gleefully drive a rented golf cart all over the property. These kids were clearly abusing a vehicle meant for transporting deck chairs across the fields and doing other serious work. Personally, I would never condone frivolous use of such a vehicle, especially since I almost fell off while joyriding on the back as we went over some hills at top speed. I may have to write my upcoming column about my trip.

Meanwhilst, last Friday’s column was about the Fourth of July in general, although I couldn’t post it because I was on the road. Fireworks are apparently illegal in the entire state of Maine, so I won’t confirm or deny rumors that there were fireworks at said wedding. It does seem odd, though, that celebrating patriotism is illegal. Then again, rebelling against unjust governance is patriotic too.

I’ve developed an addiction to board games.

Perhaps that’s not quite right. More accurate would be to say, I’ve nurtured an addiction to board games. Because I’ve always loved board games, as far back as I can remember. And not those endless games like Monopoly, or lame games of chance like War or Life, but board games that tend to fall in the “euro” style. Games that involve lots of strategy without involving six hour wargaming sessions. (If I wanted to spend six hours repeatedly adding things up in the hopes of figuring out the best way not to be killed by my opponent, I’d do my taxes.)

Anyway, the point is, I like my board games. And so I’ve bought a fair number of them (or, some might say, an unfair number) in the past few months. I’ve gotten in a few shipments of multiple games, and another is on the way. Unfortunately, it’s somewhat rare that I have more than one person around to play with. So I’ve now stocked my shelves with games which, for the most part, sit unplayed.

And it was still a much better use of money than the dollar I spent on the Ace Ventura video in the bargain bin.

I spent last weekend (extending halfway into this week) with my family in Tennessee. This surprised some friends of mine, who know that I don’t tend to enjoy hot weather. Or travel. Or… well, I’ll just let you read today’s column. To be fair, there were some advantages of being in Nashville, such as plentiful fried okra. But I’m very glad to be back home.

Although I could be biased because I’m about to go have some tasty, tasty squid for dinner.

I may receive some flak for saying this, but I don’t necessarily think George Carlin was one of the funniest comedians the world has ever seen. I do, however, think that he may have been one of the most important.

The way he delved into words — both vulgar and otherwise — was unmatched. He went beyond mere observational humor and seriously examined the way we use words, what we mean by them, what they mean, and the gap in between. Where many comedians use profanity as filler when they have nothing funny to say, Carlin examined the very nature of profanity, and language itself. If I could put three people in a room with me to discuss the nature of language (presuming resurrection and Babel Fish insta-translation was available), they would probably be Wittgenstein, Carlin, and some other guy*. There’s no denying that more than any other big-name comedian, George Carlin took great pains to unpack the language we use every day.

And he didn’t just do it as shtick, to mock a phrase like “Nothing’s wrong, do whatever you think is right,” when coming from a wife or girlfriend. He really dove into each word in much more depth than anyone who has come before, or since. There are other comedians who have picked a particular word to unpack (Chris Rock with “nigger”, or Jeff Foxworthy with “redneck”), but George Carlin covered a wide range of words while still giving each one its due. And neither Rock nor Foxworthy ever got into the word itself in the way that Carlin did, discussing things like soft sounds of letters like F, and harsh sounds of phonemes like CK. George Carlin wasn’t just a comedian, he was a linguist.

Anyway, I mention him in this week’s limerick on BBspot.

*Hard to choose that third guy. I considered various people from Douglas Adams to Taylor Mali, but couldn’t quite find the right third person. Although really, either of those two would do just fine.

Yes, I know Father’s Day already happened, but it’s only today that my column about it appears in the paper. I’ll actually see my father later today. Hopefully he doesn’t find the column. If you have, let me assure you, I mean nothing further, father. Or is that father further? If you ate lots of beans, would you be the farther father farter?

This is why I should not write posts just before running out the door.

Those responsible have been sacked.

No llamas were harmed in the making of this post.

So, I just realized that my previous post, which I edited yesterday, seems to imply that I wrote about my book review on June 10th. This is, in fact, not the case. But I’m going to leave that there because I don’t feel like editing it any more. Eddie edited it*.

I feel confident that I will be able to keep up some weekly blogging here. If nothing else, I’ll be able to give you a new link to my most recent column every week. And in this particular case, the most recent one is about Microsoft, John McCain, and the terrible secret of space**. Now that I’m linking to new columns every week in this here blog, I’ll feel less bad about not updating my giant online archive in my column section. Actually, I may take down the archive and just leave up a “Best Of”, so if you’ve been waiting to squander a few hours reading through my entire column archive, June is a good month in which to do it.

Finally, I’ve noticed that I’ve suddenly fallen in the Google rankings. Searching for Seth Brown no longer returns this page in the top ten results, whereas I used to be first. I coulda been a contenda! I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am. Sitting on. Anyway, I’m Jonesing*** for a return to the top of the rankings mainly so I can tell people, “I’m online, just google for Seth Brown.” I’d tell them to search for Rising Pun, but I just noted some upstart House of the Rising Pun humor page seems to have sprung into existence. It’s almost as if other people are on the same Internet as I am. Preposterous!

*okay, he didn’t, but it’s a fun tongue-twister.

**where by “space”, I mean “McCain”.

***See post title.

Well, thanks to the technological efforts of Lex Friedman, RisingPun.com is back on the air. Now that I can update my blog without having to hand-code four different pages, maybe I’ll update my blog more often. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I’ll tell you that my book review* was in the USA Today. Yesterday.
*(me reviewing someone else’s book, not vice versa.)