Well, that’s it. I’ve now summarized in rap the last of the 2008 presidential debates. Like last time, I sat down at my computer with the transcript of the debate, put the beat on repeat, and rapped. For almost a half an hour. You can hear this epic freestyle that covers all the important points of the debate right on my podcast page.

I guess I’ll need a new plan for next week’s podcast…

I don’t know if you saw this story, but a huge study showed that it’s not just women who make less money than men, but men who believe in gender equality make less money than men who don’t. I wrote a column about this because I was very surprised.

I can’t help but be curious as to what other belief sets are associated with higher earnings. Do racists earn more money? Does a belief in Scientology suggest you’ll have a higher income? (If your name is L. Ron Hubbard, yes!) What about people who enjoy Velveeta? With infinite correlated data points, there are probably a whole lot of really fascinating statistics just waiting to be discovered.

I stayed up waaaaaaaaaaay too late (still now) to write a song that summarizes last night’s presidential debate. The text is here.

So, my column last Friday was about current health scares relating to contaminated food. One of these was the big powdered milk scandal in China. And then I realized that the other day, I was wearing a “Got Milk?” shirt. And a very very wrong idea occurred to me, which is something along the lines of a “Got Powdered Milk?” shirt with a little stick figure baby with X’s for eyes lying at the bottom.

Nope, much as I may dislike some politicians, I’ll never be able to run for office.

Writing about writing. Although I suppose this blog post is now meta-meta-writing. And every time I mention it, I add another meta. I never met a meta I didn’t like.

Anyway, yesterday’s column was about J.K. Rowling and her lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. And I just finished next week’s column, which was supposed to be entirely unrelated to writing, but I ended up dropping in a footnote about a famous author… I bet you know who.

I sometimes wonder if our perception of time is based entirely on relative lengths of time experienced now and time already experienced previously. Because waiting ten minutes used to seem like a year, but these days years are going by in a matter of minutes, and I have it on good authority that it just gets worse. Bad authority?

Man, Rodney Dangerfield was crazy, but he had a certain charm about him.

Anyway, it’s around the time of the year when people who aren’t me have to go back to school. To them, in the words of Dave Barry, I would like to say: “Neener, neener.”

If you miss the pointless exams of school, don’t fret. I wrote a fun little Back to School Quiz that you can take.

A little while back, a friend of mine pointed me to a pretty neat Diablo 2 mod, and I started playing again. Now, one of the things about Diablo 2 that makes it so addictive is that your character levels up and gets to pick a set of skills to increase. (This is similar to Blizzard’s other big hit, World of Warcraft.) My problem is, rather than focus on one skill that becomes powerful, my natural instinct is to put one point into everything because I want to try it out. Then later in the game, I realize I don’t have enough points to raise any one skillset high enough to rule the world, because I’ve tried a bit of everything. But in those early levels, with all the potential skills spread out in front of me, I envision all the different paths I could take, becoming a master of one or the other. Inevitably, I dabble here and there and don’t focus enough on one thing because everything seems so fun.

Life is like that.

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.