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.

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.