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.

So, remember last month when I said that my book would be out by now if there weren’t unforeseen circumstances? Well, sure enough, I did not foresee the number of delays in the printing process. I will say, in my defense, some of the delays were not my fault. For example, an error in the production process at the printing facility. On the other hand, some of the delays were my fault. Such as the fact that I decided to add a table of contents. And a running head*.

But I am really hoping to have the book actually released by the end of the month. (Then again, I was also hoping to have the book released much earlier than this, and that didn’t happen.) On the other hand, the past month or so has been absolutely wonderful for me. The previously mentioned WordXWord Festival in Pittsfield took place, and not only did I get to see a lot of wonderful poetry, but I also won their poetry slam. We’ve been cooking up all sorts of delicious and interesting food, ranging from Thai curry to baba ghannouj, and I have sure enjoyed eating it.

And best of all, September was the month of my annual Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge, an event of absolutely no interest to those of you who are not at least partially obsessed with boardgaming. For my fellow gamers, though, feel free to read through my summaries of the 26 games we played last weekend. For my non-gaming readers, let me hasten to assure you that you will find that link incredibly boring.**

Other than that, things continue apace.***  I’m still writing my column, contributing the occasional book review to the USA Today, have an improv show this weekend, and am eagerly waiting to be able to post my book release announcement. Hopefully next post, although I don’t want to be too expectant*****.

* I am, of course, more of a punning head. To quote the great Samuel Johnson, “I should be punished, for every pun I shed, do not spare a punny shed, of my punnish head.”

** I briefly considered linking you to the Shopping Penguin song instead, but I’d have to go to the page to find the link, and then I’d be singing it all day tomorrow.

*** Which is sort of a weird word, when you think about it. Things could continue at the same pace. But “a” pace? What if they suddenly continue at a really fast pace? Or a really slow pace? I’m practically pacing just going through the paces**** in my head.

**** “Oh, the Paces You’ll Go!”: One of Dr. Seuss’s many rejected titles, along with “Green Eggs and Jam”, “The Cat in the Hut”, and “One Fist, Two Fist, Red Fist, Blue Fist”.

***** One of my favorite ideas for a far-too-convoluted pun involves angry workers on strike outside of a factory, spitting at the factory while lamenting their lack of  hourly pay, yelling, “We expect a rate!”

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?

This book has been in progress for roughly a decade, and as of Fall 2010, is finally available. I hatched the idea during my senior year of college, and began working on it the fall after my graduation. Various interruptions, from full-time employment, to writing the other books below, to home-buying, conspired to keep me from finishing.

Finally, after a decade, I am done

My book, From God To Verse, is a line-by-line translation of the Five Books of Moses into rhyming couplets. Sure, it took me a while to finish and publish, but good things come to those who wait. I haven’t left anything out, not even a single name from the endless genealogies and begats. What I have done is made the language more accessible, added parenthetical explanations in some places, and put in short chapter summaries. Oh, and made the whole thing rhyme. That was the hard part.

It’s a little scary to realize that I’ve spent nearly a third of my life writing this book. I look back at where I was when I started it, both as a person and a writer, and am amazed how much I’ve done in the meantime. But while I have written three other books, this is no doubt my magnum opus (literally, “big penguin”). For anyone who wants to share the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy with others, or rediscover them yourself, I strongly encourage you to try my rhyming translation.

Last week I was a featured reader at a small poetry reading in Pittsfield called “Outspoken!”. They had asked me to come perform to help celebrate National Poetry Month, so I freestyled a few poems and read some of my own work. Some of my poems really work much better spoken than written, but in honor of National Poetry Month, I’d like to share one of my short poems here:

************************

“Land Shark”
by Seth Brown

There is a knock at the door
I look through the keyhole and see your
gleaming white teeth
so shiny and so numerous
“who is it” I ask
and you tell me that you are
an encyclopedia salesman
but
I do not believe you
because encyclopedia salesmen do not have
so many teeth, so pointy and sharp
and where are your encyclopedias
have you already sold them all
or are they held by the arm that I can see in your mouth
opening this door may be a bad idea
but you have offered me a discount encyclopedia
and I cannot resist

***************************************

In other news, my improv troupe has performances on April 24th and May 14th at Main Street Stage in North Adams, so please come see us if you’re in the area and looking for something fun. (Conversely, if you are not in the area and looking for something boring, I recommend this list of the rotation direction of airport luggage carousels around the world.)

Writing a humor column is an interesting thing. It’s tricky to hit the sweet spot. For me, I am most proud of a column when I feel that it provides people with interesting information and educates them, while at the same time making them laugh. And so if you were to ask me what was my favorite column I’d written recently, I’d have to say that it was the one about the Ides of March.* Another decent one which at least touched on the theory of relativity was Einstein Time.

More often though, I find myself oscillating between the overly silly (Candy!) and the overly serious (Roman Conservative Party). And usually these types of columns follow in close succession. If I write something that I deem “not funny enough”, then I often go extra zany in the next week or two. And if I write something that’s pure silliness, I tend to obsess about making one of my next columns really informative or otherwise grounded.

Outside the column front, I’ve been trying to do a bit more musically. The other night I got together with the inimitable Lex Friedman for an online songwriting session, so maybe if he STOPS HAVING BABIES, we’ll co-write some new funny songs this year. I have three other humorous collaborations all on hold because my musicians are too busy to meet with me, one funny collaboration on hold because I was hesitant to start another large project until I’d finished one of the many I have running, and one serious music collaboration on hold because it turns out I have trouble writing serious music.

With silly music, I just have trouble recording it, but I really enjoy coming up with ideas. This is why I may have done a little terrible voice work for this week’s RNZB Songfight.*** And I always like making up instant music as part of my improv troupe, which is especially fun since it seems like our musical games are often the most popular. In fact, we’ve got a show tonight (3/20/10), but the chance of you reading this in time to show up are pretty slim. If you wanted to know about future shows ahead of time, you should probably follow RBIT’s Facebook page.

*I’d wanted to title this post as a pun on “The Ides of March”, and have a list of bullet points to the effect of, “I’d like you to read this column”, and “I’d love to have my improv troupe perform more often”, but how do you pluralize “I’d” in a title with punctuation? I tried to make it, “The “I’d”‘s of March”, which looks completely terrible, and then “The I’ds of March”, which is bad in a different direction, and “The I’d’s of March” splits the difference and is still awful. And thus, I decided to scrap that whole idea and call it, “The Inconvenient Punctuation of March”.** But then I figured, why not flip it around?

**Also, why the hell would punctuation go inside the quotes when it’s not part of what you are quoting? The American system is part of the march of inconvenient punctuation. I consciously choose not to put punctuation inside the quotation when it’s not part of “the thing being quoted”. I’m not bad at writing in AP style, I’m just an Anglophile using superior British punctuation rules.

***I have to admit, it’s still cool to me that I am now entering songs in Songfight, many years after interviewing them for “Think You’re The Only One?“.

So lately I’ve been chatting with my good friend Lex Friedman (who is a very funny fellow right) about writing song parodies. Although you can see he wrote a parody song in his blog just recently in September, the fact is that neither of us are writing as many parodies as we used to. This is a shame, because back in the day we used to be known as “Leth & Sex”, and constantly collaborated on comedy.* We wrote many funny things including a number of songs together, the most popular of which was definitely our Michael Jackson parody: “Just Google”

However, life happens. We were recently lamenting the fact that we haven’t written as many parodies as we used to. But it makes sense because Lex has been very busy with many jobs and raising his kids, just as I’ve been busy with, uh…

Actually, I have no excuse whatsoever for my own lack of song production. Talking with Lex reminded me how much I love writing parody songs, and as he pointed out to me, I have the free time to do it. So today, I wrote a new parody song. I also, against my better judgment, recorded it. I say “against my better judgement” because my microphone has been broken for a bit, and I was too lazy to do production work to make it sound really good, but the thing about song parodies is that they are meant to be heard.

So, if you would like to hear my new song about Tiger Woods, with apologies to 50 Cent, then you should visit Ham-STAR’s MySpace page before I become too embarassed by the production values and take it down like I did with my Dr. Horrible tribute**.

Last week’s improv show was perhaps not my finest performance, but I was proud that I sang a blues song about logorrhea. This weekend’s improv show will be even better. I will make it so, because I’ve been doing some thinking about my duty as a citizen.

*We had a shared blog, a shared podcast, and a shared sense of humor.  We broke up when he tried to share my toothbrush.

**Which was, in fact, horrible.

I promised something awesome in December, right? Well, here it is:

My new music video: “Dump Stat“

This will be of most interest to those of you who enjoy either Dungeons and Dragons, Nerdcore, or watching me rap. My sincere thanks go to the inimitable Don Vito, for the beat and song production, Daniel Beck, for video production, all friends listed in the video, for being in the video, and all my friends not in the video, for generally being supportive.

The board games that I purchased on Black Friday have now all arrived, and we’ve already played five of them. Unlike my most recent batch of discount video games, many of which were sadly unfun, the board games are all fairly entertaining, with a few likely to become fast favorites. Speaking of Black Friday, I wrote last week’s column about it. And hey, I’m posting before the last day of December! I am on the ball this month. Improv shows this weekend (Pittsfield) and next weekend (North Adams).

Unrelated to any of that, I tend to refer to Rabbi Hillel a lot. I’m sure he had many accomplishments, but I mainly think of him as the guy who said “If not now, when?”. So whenever my girlfriend seems unsure about whether to do something, be it in real life or in a board game, I will often advise: “You know what Rabbi Hillel would say.”

So the other week, I’m having some leftover pie from Thanksgiving, and my girlfriend asks, “Should I have a piece too?” I, naturally, reply with, “You know what Rabbi Hillel would say.” There is then a five-second pause, and we both say in our best Rabbi Hillel voice, “Save some for me!”*

*Technically, we don’t have a Rabbi Hillel voice, but I wanted the sentence to make it clear that it was Rabbi Hillel, and not us, who was theoretically asking for pie.*****

**Technically, she said “Save me some!” and I said “Save some for me!”, but that difference is largely inconsequential, and would muddy the story.

***Technically, I didn’t actually say “Save some for me” , because as soon as I heard her start to talk, I stopped, and then was busy laughing. But I was amidst saying it.

****I guess this is how creative non-fiction works. It’s amazing how many footnotes of falsity I need for a dozen word portion of a true sentence.

*****And yes, he might also say, “Help, help, get me out of this box!”

That’s what day today is.

See, I told myself that I’d update this blog at least once a month. And since I’m ostensibly sending people to my website, it would be useful for me to look like I have new material no less frequently than once a month. Only, y’know, I sort of let October slip away from me. Back on my old blog, before I got WordPress, I had to hand-date all of my posts, so when this happened to me, I would simply date the posts like I did the title of this one. Sadly, with WordPress, they do the date for you, so you can see that it wasn’t actually posted on October 39.*

So what happened in October? Well, I played fewer board games than in September**, but I played more Magic, and Tom and I have recently invented a new dynamic format which has a slightly heftier dose of luck than some formats, but is highly entertaining. I also played fewer actual video games, but more flash games. This, I believe, is a trend for the worse***, which I hope to reverse in November. There were a few columns, and I also entered a SongFight contest. The latter I feel is notable if only because I interviewed the fine folks at SongFight a few years back for my first book. This particular SongFight was a non-traditional one, being run as a promotion for the Nerdcore Rising movie, but if you would like to go listen to my song, I will not stop you, even though voting is long since over and I was not anywhere close to victory.

Levi-Strauss***** died recently. And it’s that type of thing where the name is so famous, one forgets that such people are still alive. At least, er, until they aren’t. It reminds me of being back in college and not knowing that friends of mine were dating until they broke up. My finger is in a different county than the pulse of the zeitgeist or the real world in general. People attending my comedic events keep coming up to me afterwards to inform me that they greatly enjoyed my performance (yay!) but that I made a small factual error (boo!). Where by “small”, I mean “singing an entire song about the beautiful island of Peru when Peru is in fact a mountainous South American nation bordering Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile”.******

It has been too long since I have produced something really awesome. Hopefully I will rectify this in the next month or two. Something is in the works.

*Although it totally was. If you just keep counting in October, today would be the 39th. Or okay, technically 40th on the east coast by now, but everyone knows days of the month end somewhere in the 30s.

**Although given that September was Alphabetical Boardgaming Challenge month, that’s hardly surprising.

***Although I’m a sucker for Clockwords, if only because I don’t know any other games you can win by swiftly typing in either the Gettysburg Address or the lyrics to your favorite song.

****Although there’s no fourth footnote, I really ought to learn how to start footnotes with a different word.

*****As you know, Levi-Strauss was the inventor of blue jeans designed specifically for waltzing.

******This is not always the error I make, just an example. It would be sad if my comedic performances were consistantly marred by my insistance on referring to the island of Peru.