It’s a shame I was out of town for Spring. See, I’d gone to visit some friends on Friday, and it was suddenly a beautiful Spring day, after many months of winter and then a week of rain. And then when we returned two days later, it was 86 degrees outside and blazing hot summer sun. Basically, the Berkshires only gets a few days of Spring each year, and I’m sorry to have missed them. But no matter; enjoying the month anyway.

So tonight we’re sitting on the couch watching an action-packed movie with various things exploding and heavy gunfire in the middle of what is supposed to be a tense action sequence, and I realize that my partner and I are having a conversation about Spanish etymology.* This is indicative of something, which I had initially suspected might be the lack of acting talent** in the film we were watching, but which I eventually decided was simply the fact that my life is awesome.

Case in point: I’m now officially a Board Game Reviewer for About.com. For those of you keeping track, that means I now am a professional reviewer of board games, books, and restaurants. All I have to do is wait for someone to pay me to review my friends, and I will officially be a professional reviewer of everything I love.

Sure, it may not pay very well, but there’s something to be said for job satisfaction. I enjoy having a humor column where I can write about Tolstoy and truth if I feel like it. Or, if I’m feeling sillier, I can write about my propensity to consume questionable food. I’m pretty much living the dream***.

When I was young, I told myself one day I’d be fabulously wealthy and live in a house with a big room filled with food, and a big room filled with games. Well, here I am in a tiny victorian house, but it does have a pantry filled with food, and I do have a room filled with many, many boardgames. And heck, if one considers my friends rather than my finances, I would even account myself wealthy.

Of course, that kind of wealth doesn’t pay the bills, so don’t forget to buy my books.

****

*”Fuego” meaning fire, not only as in the sense of burning flame, but also in the sense of “to fire a gun”. This seemed like an odd coincidence to us. But the word “droit” in French means not only “right” as in the opposite of left, but also human rights. So maybe these bizarre connections are the same between languages sometimes. Then again, “watch” in French is “montre”, which means “show”, which is the opposite. So who knows. I suppose it’s possible the movie just used a crappy not-in-context translation. Or maybe fuego is like droit. I don’t know.

**Sylvester Stallone is probably not someone who springs to mind as a good actor. But then again, he did a quite decent job in comparison to Arnold Schwarzenegger. I guess when you’re making a film where the budget all went towards explosions and car chases, acting talent and non-sucky endings fall in the category of the Expendables.

***And not that one where you’re late for your final exam and also you forgot your pants.

****This footnote isn’t related to the entry, just closes it, but I wonder if all blogs have to either end up self-absorbed or talking about politics. Maybe next month I’ll write about politics. I suppose I could share rejected jokes with you, like my friend who talks about anime all the time who I call “The Last Earbender”.

Well, we’re past the Ides of March. But I still had three or four Caesar salads* in the past two weeks, which were delicious. And unlike most other delicious things I’ve made of late (such as greek meatloaf), with the salads I even feel like I’m eating something healthy.**

Anyway, I have to say, this March has been a fairly eventful month for me. First, I mean that literally — March has been full of events. I did another presentation at a temple for God To Verse, attended a few different birthday parties for good friends, had the usual bunch of gaming events and random gathers. And I also had an enjoyably busy weekend where each day, I was quickly trying to create something to perform that night. Third Fridays of each month are now Comedy Night at Main Street Stage, and March’s edition saw me in the role of both stand-up comedian and improv comedy performer. I love improv because it’s made up on the spot, but I was still honing my stand-up act right before the show.

The next day was a poetry slam, and even though I was only going to be reading two poems, I always feel I should perform at least one new piece whenever I attend a slam. I’d had a vague idea for a while, but hadn’t managed to write anything new. But right before the event was scheduled to start, a bolt of inspiration suddenly struck me, and I realized what I wanted to do with my poem. Sure, I couldn’t figure out how to do it, but I could at least write about what I wanted to do, and thus managed to finish and print my poem and still arrive in time to enter the slam.

Sunday after some logistical snafus, I was slated to attend a friend’s birthday party, and suddenly had the idea that I should bake and bring something interesting. So once again, although it made me late, I did arrive bearing freshly-baked wasabi-sesame-ginger cookies.***

March has just been filled with things. I traveled to Boston and then Rhode Island, doing some research for another RI book. I decided that I have too much stuff, and need to stop acquiring random stuff. Then I ordered another box of board games, because they were on sale, and I’d wanted At the Gates of Loyang for a long time. (Perhaps I can justify that as research too, as I may soon be writing About Boardgames.) Before the month is out, I may go see a poetry reading by Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Taylor Mali, or even go on a bizarre expedition that combines RPGs with speed dating.

Suffice to say, March may only be three days longer than February, but it has certainly felt very full.

*Oddly, the only popular dictator food. Nobody ever orders a Hitler sandwich. I suppose you could argue that the Earl of Sandwich should count, but he wasn’t really a dictator. Although now that I’m thinking about it, perhaps they should make dictator tots.

**Which of course isn’t entirely the case given the copious dressing and cheese. But I guess since there’s some lettuce, I am technically eating something healthy.

***My own recipe, of course. Where by “recipe” I mean “vague idea of three ingredients I wanted together in cookies”.

For those of us with logistical difficulties, there’s always plenty of worries to go around before any large-scale event. The annual New Years Bash* is as always one of the events I most look forward to each year**, but as usual, roughly nothing seems to be going as planned in terms of who will be where when. I just hope my friend who is supposed to arrive in 12 hours or so still manages to show up then with no difficulty.

But I am skipping over too much. Perhaps I should mention things that have occurred between my previous post and now. For example, I wrote a column about how I’m trying to overcome my addiction to the bottle. And speaking of addictions, I bought some board games from Fantasy Flight during their annual Holiday sale. They are all currently sitting on my couch, as I was already out of shelf space before this purchase. But so far we’ve played Age of Conan (decent), Atlanteon (constant ties are lame), and the World of Warcraft Adventure Game (fun, if more simplistic than WOW:TBG)

Then it was Christmastime, and so it was off to the local Oriental Buffet for my traditional meal. I also wrote some new TSA Christmas songs which you might enjoy. And then the holidays were mostly over, although you should still feel free to peruse my previous post for potential presents to proffer your preferred people.

Of course, chief among said potential presents is From God To Verse, about which I was recently interviewed. There were more things I wanted to say, I am sure, but I am off to prepare to revel in some New Years revelry***, so I hope you all enjoy the dwindling remainder of 2010.

*Hit 2011 with a stick! HIT IT!

**The other being the Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge.

***“Revel Revel!” (said in Hamburglar voice)

I am, generally speaking, not a vulgar person. However.

Longtime readers or even those just familiar with the tale of my disastrous email application know that when I start getting behind on my to-do list, the amount of self-directed vulgarity in my life increases proportionately. Well, since it’s now a week into November, and I haven’t posted here since September, you might guess that I’ve been a little busy. And indeed, I’ve noted that various creatively vulgar epithets have begun creeping onto my to-do list.

Sadly, every vulgarity accompanies a task, which means that until the tasks are completed, the vulgarity must also remain. Writing this blog post will, once it is done, allow me to remove a line from my to-do list, but it is not a vulgarity-laden line. Only certain tasks merit such treatment. Currently, the highest priority self-directed vulgarity* accompanies an all-caps admonition to pay the bills. Thankfully, this is a simple enough task, so that self-directed vulgarity can be disappeared** in short order.

Unintelligible vulgarity has also been on the rise for me in the past month, quietly mumbled in a half-asleep state as I stumble out the door to whatever event I’ve foolishly agreed to attend hours before I normally wake up. Last month, this was a poetry presentation for a National Day on Writing at a local school, where I got to open for the esteemed Taylor Mali****. This month, I’ve already been up slightly early to spend time with old college friends in from out of town, and will have to wake up obscenely early***** this Saturday, when I’ll be selling and signing copies of my new book in Pittsfield at Chin Bo Jok’s annual one-day holiday sale.

And, naturally, there is vulgarity in gaming. For me, this is largely confined to video gaming, as naturally one swears whenever one is killed.****** Conversely, in spite of always playing to win, I do not take my board gaming too seriously. So while I may be an addict who has already acquired another half-dozen new games in the past two months (Favorite so far: Louis XIV), I rarely swear at a board game. Even if I may utter a vulgarity when I see how much I’ve spent on shipping.

Speaking of shipping and shopping, within the next few weeks I hope to post a Holiday Gift Guide here for you all. And no, it will not just be a plug for my books*******. It will have a slightly larger variety of interesting items that make wonderful gifts. In fact, I should go add that to my to-do list right now. But I’m going to leave off the vulgarity.

* An insult that states that I have a tendency to copulate with certain non-human members of the animal kingdom

** I recently was linked to this lovely Stephen Fry speech on language that talked about the love of language as appreciation of the living nature of language, and especially in support of the verbing of nouns. I enjoy new permutations of words when their meaning is instantly clear, and I think using “disappeared” in the object-taking form falls into that category for me. It’s succinct***, and clear.

*** I mean, obviously not when I use it in this blog, which is rarely what would be called succinct. But it could be, is my point.

**** A fine fellow who is also quite interested in language, as you might expect.

***** By which I mean, more vulgarity is almost assured.

****** Those “Famous Last Words” books are probably wildly inaccurate, as I imagine a high percentage of people’s last words would be unprintable.

******* Although “From God To Verse” is pretty much the perfect Chanukah or Christmas present.

Yes, after only a decade or so in the making, I have finally released From God To Verse:

This is the first book I started writing, almost immediately after college. I don’t even know why; I just had the idea and decided to go with it, as explained here. Sometimes I get ideas for something I have to write, and then I do it. That’s why I’ve previously pulled all-nighters writing rhyming summaries of presidential debates. This book was a somewhat larger commitment, but if nothing else it stands as proof that you can accomplish big things if you are sufficiently stubborn. Besides, now if I attend a highschool reunion and someone asks me, “So, what were your 20s like?”, I can just hand them this book*.

But in case nobody hands you this book, and you want to know a little more about it, let me tell you: It’s a line-by-line translation of the Torah into verse. The whole thing, from the first chapter of Genesis to the final chapter of Deuteronomy. Every person who begat someone else, every cubit and measurement of the ark, everything. Nothing has been left out.

In fact, a few small things have been added for your convenience. First and foremost, the whole thing rhymes, and is written in a manner that will hopefully be easier and more fun to read than any previous translation. Secondly, in service to this goal, I’ve added a number of parenthetical explanations of things, because many of the names in the Torah make more sense if you understand their Hebrew translation. And finally, I’ve added a short, large-print rhyming summary of each chapter, perfect for parents or educators who would like to share a rhyming version of the Torah with children who will not yet appreciate the full text.**

So that’s what it is. You probably have a pretty good idea if it’s the kind of book that would appeal to you. If so, fantastic, you can buy it right here:

If you are not of a Judeo-Christian persuasion, it might well not appeal to you, but you probably know people who would appreciate it. I would be most grateful if you would send those people here***. Because From God To Verse is not on any store bookshelves to catch people’s eye, so the only way anyone will know about it is if someone tells them.

I was going to say “in other news”, but really, this is big enough news to be my whole post. This is the culmination of a whole lot of work over a whole lot of time, and I am excited about it. I hope people will enjoy it.

* And hopefully they will understand that I spent my 20s writing the book, as opposed to building an ark, murdering my brother, and wandering in the desert. Ah, ambiguity.

*** By which I mean, this blog entry, as opposed to my house. I’m not at all opposed to meeting new people, but having many random people show up at my house unannounced might be less convenient for me, especially if they showed up before noon.

No, not a reference to my music video for Dump Stat, delightful though it is. Of course, I believe there is a magic to rhyme itself, but in this case the two topics are separate.

On the Magic front, recently I’ve been wondering if the way I think about money is related to the way I think about Magic. For example, it’s so easy to make my money disappear; it practically happens without any effort on my part.* But what I was actually thinking about was Magic: The Gathering. See, I’ve always felt that any serious gamers can’t help but look at the world sometimes through the lenses of the games they play the most. And while Magic has roughly a bajillion rules**, the one that has always stuck with me is upkeep.

In the game of Magic, upkeep is something you have to pay at the beginning of each of your turns, and it sucks. It can be anything from life to cards, but is most often mana. Mana that you have to keep paying each turn, and thus can’t spend to cast the really cool cards in your hand. And sometimes there’s even cumulative upkeep, which just gets worse every turn, until attempting to pay for that spell makes it impossible to do anything else.

This is how I view credit card debt. I have avoided getting a credit card largely out of fear of this kind of upkeep, and a supreme dread of credit card debt. And I found myself wondering whether as a group, those who had played Magic seriously were less likely to find themselves in credit card debt that those who had not.*** I don’t think anyone’s going to commission a serious study, but it is something I’m curious about.

Enough of that! Let’s talk about rhyme. Rhyming is fun, that’s why I do it all the time. And just last week, about an hour away, I was performing at the BTF’s Cabaret. There was magic and rhyme, in the form of MacBeth, interspersed with a few bits of rap from Seth. And you might think, “Why tell me about that show? It already happened, so it’s too late to go!” And that’s technically true, but if you haven’t heard, this week Pittsfield is hosting WordXWord. And on Tuesday the 24th at this spoken word festival, you could go and see poetry from the best of fools****.

And speaking of***** rhyme, the book I’ve been working on since 2001 is FINALLY almost ready to release. Yes, God To Verse will, barring unforseen circumstances, be available for purchase on Amazon within a few weeks. Expect a post early in September with lots more details and exhortations for purchase. Meanwhile, please ignore any rumors you may hear about my sub-standard nutrition being again the subject of a column in the Washington Post, and trust my humor column to provide you with accurate information on my commitment to nutrition.

* More accurately, without sufficient effort on my part, it disappears right quick.

** Creature: Serrated Bajillion. 2/2. Tap to cause Wizards of the Coast to drastically revise combat rules yet again.

*** People who foolishly went into debt to feed their Magic addiction notwithstanding.

**** By which of course I mean yours truly, though I don’t mean to praise myself unduly.

***** But no longer in. Because it’s a sin. Damn, I can’t win, I really mean it. Anybody want a peanut?

You’d think I would be. After all, I’m nothing if not a gourmet, or at least a gourmand. We’ve acquired a rice cooker and make our own Sushi, cook greek food like Moussaka and Pastitsio, Thai food like Pad Thai and Red Mango Curry, and pretty much anything else I could want to eat. Life is good, especially culinarily speaking. But old habits die hard*. And that pretty much explains why I was ill last weekend. Confused? You won’t be, after you read my most recent humor column.

Speaking of unwell Feds, Ron Paul doesn’t like the Federal Reserve. If you’d like to know why, you should read my book review of “End the Fed” in the USA Today.

“Not Well Fed”  is an anagram of “Letdown Elf”, which is inaccurate if it refers to the Elf in Scepter of Zavandor, a boardgame where the Elf character has propelled me to victory in my past two games. It is perhaps more accurate if it refers to my failure to play many RPGs lately, because I’ve been busy with other work. And, okay, boardgaming.

“Not Well Fed” is also an anagram of “Deft? Well, no.”  And this describes how I feel much of the time, especially recently with my failure to create any new raps in the past few months. I have ideas for another rap song or two, and I’ve got some lyrics written, but these things take time, and the goodwill of busy unpaid collaborators. Still, I hope to have at least something new in the rap arena before the end of the year.

Also, God to Verse online is now done. Over the course of a year, I posted all of Genesis, so it’s all there for you to read if you’re interested. The full five books will likely be published in print form at a future point in time, but that’s all that’s going up online. Meanwhilst, if you’re around North Adams on October 17th, you could see my improv comedy troupe perform at the Main Street Stage, where I “Often Dwell”.

*Thankfully, so far, so do I.

…but summer seems to have come and gone almost instantaneously, regardless. At least I don’t have to go back to school now.* Still, I’m sorry to have the summer so swiftly ended. It seemed short, perhaps because it rained almost every day and never really felt like summer except for a week or two. But we quickly go from being over-heated to being freezing cold, and again I wish for some method to send heat into the future.**

Still, at least I have something to look forward to in September. For this coming weekend is the Second Annual Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge, a momentous occasion on which I compete with my girlfriend in 26 boardgames (one for each letter) over the course of a single weekend. Last year the first day tally was 11 to 8 in my favor, but the second day was marred by a lack of boardgames for letters like X and Z. This year’s acquisitions have filled those gaps***, so we’ll be playing 26 games and keeping score. I’ll post again in a week and let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, I recently learned that a book review I wrote a while back is up on the USA Today website, so if you want to read about how discount culture is ruining America, feel free. At least this time, nobody seems to have confused my summary of the book’s points with my personal views, as has happened to me before.  Last week I got to read an advance copy of Ron Paul’s upcoming book railing against the Fed, so when that review runs, we’ll see what happens. I still really enjoy reviewing things, and I feel I’m getting pretty good at it.

While I could never professionally review a book where the author is a friend of mine, Stick Figure Hamlet is finally available in (comic) book form, and a must-read for any Shakespeare fan. And as long as we’re linking, there are only two more weeks left in God To Verse before Genesis is done.

*I could, mind you. But I don’t have to. Volition is my favorite thing.

**Aside from a really inefficient heater. Although if a useful method actually existed, the resulting entropy would probably screw up the planet significantly anyway.

***Although due to bad planning, I traded away my only E-game because we didn’t like it****. So we technically will play 25 of our boardgames, and then an E-game which will either be a) borrowed from a friend, b) a print-and-play game I found online today, or c) Elbow Hockey.

****It’s surprisingly hard to find good 2-player boardgames that begin with E. For the most common letter in the English language, there are very few games beginning with E. And the ones that look most interesting (El Grande, E.V.O.) all seem like they want more people from the reviews. We also only have a single game beginning with X, which I acquired mainly because it began with X. This leads me to believe that at some point, I should invent a good game and market it by giving it a name beginning with X, just to appeal to obsessive gamers like myself.

Okay, no it isn’t.*  But I totally want you to look on my works, ye mighty.**  Of course, there’s the usual weekly updates for News in Rap and God To Verse. But I’ve also got a new book review up at USA Today, about a new book discussing the pleasures and sorrows of work. It’s a view of the workplace through fresh eyes, and I fear my mental desire to compare it to a foreigner like de Tocqueville looking at American democracy through fresh eyes may just be rooted in the fact that this author also has a French de-noted name (de Botton). Still, it was a neat read.

(Also, I got the manuscript version rather than the book version, which was weird for me as I hadn’t had a big packet-format object like that to read since college. I think I prefer actual pre-publication books to review, although reading a manuscript does remind one that the book doesn’t really exist yet.)

But most importantly, of course, is board games. My latest shipment arrived (using up the last of the credit I’d accumulated selling my Magic cards), filled with wondrous games like Small World, Yspahan, and possibly my new favorite, Le Havre. Le Havre is the sequel to Agricola, and while the play time is a bit longer than ideal, there’s a lot to tinker with, and I’m looking forward to tinkering with it more.

Speaking of board games, I have a new article up on the Best Dang Games Blog about Luck in Board Games. If that sort of thing interests you, or indeed if you play board games at all, it’s a very short read and something I think is worth considering. But then again, I’m probably biased.

Our improv show in Great Barrington last weekend went very well, which was nice because my family had driven up from RI to be in the audience, so I’m glad they could see me at my best. Our next show is at the Majestic in West Springfield on Wednesday August 12, and then we’ll finally be back in North Adams on August 22nd. Come watch!

* Although if my first name had been Robert, I’d totally want my middle name to be Ozymandias. Because then my name would be Rob, and my initials would be Rob. Also, Ozymandias is a pretty cool middle name, if a bit unwieldy for a first name.***

** Despairing is optional.

*** Or, I guess, an only name.

If you were to travel back in time and ask my highschool self what career I would have in the future, “Underpaid Rapper” probably would not have been in my first hundred answers. But sure enough, here I am, frequently rapping for insufficient remuneration. I suppose between my epic* limericks and my songs with Lex, the fact that I kept rhyming makes sense.

As with most things I do, it started largely as a joke.  I wrote an email to my favorite rap group at the time (Blackalicious), and ended up making a silly rap to send them. But then I ended up joining an online nerdy rapping community, and started rapping a lot more. I put up a myspace page and began writing raps for posterity. I started freestyling everywhere I went, from a humor conference in Ohio to the streets of San Francisco. The rap video I posted two months ago ended up winning a little contest. Last weekend my improv troupe was performing in Providence, and our most popular game is one I invented where we do the whole scene in rap form. Tomorrow I’m doing stand-up comedy at a local bar, and I generally end my set with a freestyle rap.

I’m still trying to freestyle about the news every week on my rap podcast, News In Rap. And later this month I’ll be heading out to a national nerdy hip-hop festival, to meet other nerdy rappers from that aforementioned online community and around the world. Somehow, rapping has become a large part of my life. It’s perhaps an odd place for me to end up, but I have to admit, I’m enjoying it.

(this column has nothing to do with rap. God to Verse, on the other hand, could certainly be performed over a rap beat if someone wanted to.)

* by which I mean many stanzas in length like an epic poem, rather than epic in the modern internet parlance that means full of win**

** although they were also full of win