Well, okay, maybe today isn’t very exciting. But we’ve had some exciting Tuesdays recently. Last Tuesday was Groundhog Day, and the Tuesday before that was the State of the Union. I talk about them both in my Groundhog Day Column, although if you really want to read about my political views, they’re all laid out in my column about same-sex marriage.

As long as I’m throwing you links to my writing, I should probably mention that my latest book review is up over at USA Today. This was another book someone has written about the modern workplace, called The Future of Work, and like many other books on the subject, confirms (or, okay, at least agrees with) my suspicions that the corporate taskmaster overlord structure is increasingly ill-suited for the modern world. Whether workers are increasingly becoming better at working away from rigid cubicle structures, or whether we’re just increasingly becoming better at noticing how awful the current standard setup is, it seems more freedom and flexibility in the workplace should become more standard.

I think my favorite quote on the subject comes from a book I recently read by Malcolm Gladwell, who said something to the effect of, “If so many people feel compelled to think outside the box (and tell others to do the same), perhaps it’s time that we build a better box.” This is a mangled paraphrase, but I don’t feel like re-reading the whole book to find the quote right now.

It’s been a pretty good month for my songwriting.

Last weekend I was invited to WordCamp Boston to rap at the conference (along with my friend 3rr0r). While pre-written songs were going to be fine for the lunch hour, the conference organizers wanted something special with which to end the opening remarks. And so, I wrote a custom rap about WordPress specifically for the conference. Said rap was performed the morning of the conference, but sadly due to some technical difficulties, the simulcast was not very clear. For that reason, I have now posted my WordPress Rap.

Speaking of new rap songs, this month also marked the release of Rhyme Torrents 9, the latest installment of new nerdcore music from the Rhyme Torrents community. The good news is that like all Rhyme Torrents releases, these albums are completely free and available for download in mp3 form. The bad news is that like all Rhyme Torrents releases, the songs vary wildly in quality. The good news is that because it’s all a free download, you’ll find it very easy to grab the full album, toss what you don’t like, and end up with some new, free, catchy mp3s for your audio collection. I hope that one of the ones you keep will be my contribution to this volume, “The Big Cheese”, which is where I profess my love for cheese in rap form. It’s on disc 2.

And just in case you thought that the only songs I write are raps, I’m still working on parody songs as well. Our recent senate special election in Massachusetts seemed to attract a national audience. And while I went out and voted against Scott Brown (for the reason I explain in this column), that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to celebrate his victory. Naturally, I figured the best way to do this would be by submitting a song in his honor to the Providence Journal, so regardless of whether you like or dislike Scott Brown, I think you will enjoy singing along with “Voted for a Centerfold”.

Why can’t you use an 11″ box for that game?

Anyway, I’m a lifelong gamer. I grew up playing many of the same traditional games everyone plays, such as Monopoly, Checkers, Cribbage, and so forth. Then I got a Nintendo and suddenly I realized I was a video gamer too. My enjoyment of console role-playing games has continued to this day, over many different systems. In college I played a lot of Magic: The Gathering, and in the past few years I’ve found and nurtured a board gaming addiction (mostly Euro-style games, but a smattering of other types as well). But I guess my point is, I think of myself as a gamer, to the point where I identify much more with gamers as a community than I do with… well, many other nebulous ideas that people form self-identities around.

And so I can’t help but be pleased when gamers do good. And I don’t mean well (although that’s nice too), I mean good. With all the destruction in Haiti, it makes me feel good to see various online gaming communities coming together to try to help. BoardGameGeek, where I spend far too much time reading about new board games that I have no space or money for and totally want, is offering incentives to all site members who donate. A link there pointed me to DriveThruRPG, where well over $1,000 worth of downloadable RPG content from various vendors of goodwill has all been made available in one giant package for the price of a $20 donation to Haiti.

I think that some people look down on the gaming community, because as with most matters of taste, people who enjoy different things than you must be ignorant benighted heathens. I don’t really feel like spending pages here detailing the many benefits of gaming (from social interaction, to improving analysis skills, to staving off Alzheimer’s, to every little kid’s favorite example in the 80s of hand-eye coordination), but the larger fact is that people who have different recreational preferences sometimes seem to acquire a holier-than-thou attitude.*

And thus although gaming and gaming communities need no other justification, I can’t help but feel good when I see things like this. It makes me want to say, “See this? My people, the gaming people, these are good people.” Am I overly defensive? Maybe. It’s not as if there aren’t countless other examples of gamers doing good, from various BGG board game drives for charity, to Child’s Play which has given millions of dollars to children’s hospitals.

Of course, another important thing to remember is that lots of gamers do good without some sort of large announced structure, as do lots of knitters, truckers, sports fans, writers, farmers, waiters, and so forth. We just don’t hear about things as much when individuals do them without P.R.. The result is that a few affiliations who often institutionalize the goode workes (such as churches) get much more positive press, which somehow leads some people to believe that certain affiliations are inherently much more generous.

Which is not to belittle the donations made with good PR. Sure, Maimonides may have pegged fully anonymous giving as the highest form of charity, but if PR is what inspires people to give, you won’t find me gainsaying it. The example that always comes to mind for me is Alan Shawn Feinstein, a Rhode Island philanthropist who is a veritable charitable typhoon**, and whose name is consequently on a lot of things. So is Carnegie’s. I think if you donate millions of dollars to good causes, you should get to enjoy some fame from it. And churches should be lauded for encouraging charity, because I’m all for encouraging goodwill in the public eye. So there’s nothing wrong with recognizing the publicized donations, so long as we also remember the many good people who donate quietly and anonymously, interested only in doing good and not even in getting any credit (individual, group, or otherwise) for it.

Anyway, if I had a point in all of this***, it was that I like seeing gamers taking collective charitable action, because it might make some people stop and say, “Hey, gamers are awesome,” and it’s a truth I’m always happy to have more people see.

*Perhaps unsurprisingly, some organized religious groups oft seem to have said holier-than-thou attitude, which is why I was also glad to see Non-Believers Giving Aid help raise lots of money for Haiti. Charitable giving is not restricted to any race, religion, or recreational preference.

**Yes, I just wanted an excuse to write veritable charitable.

***Which I may have when I started, but that sure seems a long way off now. And highly unlikely. Actually, if I don’t have a point, I may as well share my column written the night before the election of Scott Brown.

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!”

Last week I was pretending to do some shopping, and was comparing prices between various stores. While walking through the parking lot, I was mumbling to myself, “Alright, so that one costs twenty. Twenty dollars.” And I passed another man who happened to be mumbling to himself, and just as I was mumbling “twenty,” I overheard him mumbling “Twenty-four,” and I thought to myself, gee, he’s off by four.

I really enjoy Thanksgiving leftovers. Turkey/stuffing/cranberry/sweet potato sandwiches are quite tasty, because the bucket of food theory still holds. My post-Thanksgiving column is also leftover food.

BestDangGames seems to have changed hands while I wasn’t looking. No matter; I was doing my Black Friday shopping at Fantasy Flight regardless, since they had a crazy discount sale. Although I really need to stop buying board games now. That, or acquire another room in my house that consists mainly of shelves.

Anyone local can catch my improv troupe in Pittsfield or North Adams in December. But I’ll have another more exciting post in December too. Just you wait.

Also, this cool lady that does make cool book also made this cool blog post with game with four. Read that post. Then, your next move? Seek that book. Some good read!

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.

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.

Not that it went anywhere. But I use “returns” in the noun form above, meaning that I have recently gotten some lovely* returns from my work for RI.

First of all, two weeks ago there was an article in the Projo about a new Rhode Island book, and the author was kind enough to give my book a positive mention. And speaking of the Projo, it’s been a while since I had any poems there. But I got word that the people in charge might not be averse to a verse, so I sent them a song parody about the recent Disney buyout of Marvel. If you’re familiar with “Under the Sea”, then you should definitely read “Bought by Disney”.

A while back someone who read my RI book asked me to do some work on a tourism guide for part of the state. I did, and it was a fun project. Well, she sent me an email last week to inform me that she submitted the tourism guide to a national competition and it won Best Tourism Guide. So that’s sort of cool. Incidentally, you should all visit Rhode Island, because it’s great.

Those of you who know me know that I tend to accumulate free T-shirts. Those of you who don’t know me, first of all I’m surprised you’re reading my blog, and secondly even you might appreciate my School Survival Guide.

Finally, as I mentioned in my previous post, last weekend was the Second Annual Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge, so if you’re a gamer and want to read about how I spent my weekend**, you should definitely click through for the full report.

*albeit, alas, non-lucrative

**if you are not a gamer, and you believe that you want to read about how I spent my weekend, it is probable that you are mistaken.

…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.