Everything But The Girl has been one of my favorite bands ever since high school. Ben Watt is such a fantastic musician and Tracey Thorn’s voice is amazing. I think I’ve seen them live a few times, but that was in the late 80’s/early 90’s… so long ago. These versions of Each and Every One and Rollercoaster are fantastic.
I had the pleasure of seeing the Skatalites way back around ‘91 at the Palace in Hollyweird and it was probably the most fun I’ve had at a show. I think it was because it was nonstop ska and dancing. By the time we left the show, we were all drenched with sweat and I was so sore the next day. The Skatalites are just super. If you can catch one of their shows, definitely recommended!
Hot on the heels of my last revelation, this morning I figured out that Gnip Gnop’s name is Ping Pong spelled backwards. It only took 30 years to come to that realization. Another step closer to enlightenment, I guess.
I was just checking my twiiter feed and banannie had a post that said “I can’t remember the last time I swept the floor”. I mistakenly read that as “slept on the floor” and got to thinking about the last time I actually did that. Not like taking a nap, but actually spending the night on the floor. I guess the last time I did that was in 1997 at an acquaintance’s house in Saitama prefecture in Japan. We went over for dinner, and had tons of good food and drink. Mariko’s friend’s husband was Tunisian and cooked an awesome beef stew, which we all enjoyed. It got late and we decided to sleep there, on the tatami, in our street clothes. It was summer and so hot and there was no A/C in their place, so it was a pretty damn uncomfortable night. But what was worse was traveling home the next morning on the train, wearing the same old, semi-sweaty clothes. Still, it was pretty fun, and a good memory to stow away!
I was just chatting with my pal Mikey about the martini he recently enjoyed in Hollywood, and it occured to me that I don’t know what a martini tastes like. But I know for a fact that I have had one before. It was a super-long time ago when my brother and I were coming back from Hawaii and had gotten upgraded to first-class. The flight attendant came by and asked what we’d like to drink. I said “I’ll have a vodka martini.” She said, “Would you like an olive or twist?”. My brother leaned over to me and asked, “What the hell is an Oliver Twist?!”
Next time I’m out, I gotta get a martini. With an olive.
I’ve been exploring Google Maps a lot lately, since it is so integrated with my G1 phone, and I created a few map sets, just to record different places (like the fishing spot my cousin took us to last weekend). I was adding some other locations to the map, and decided to share a little personal history of landmark places that have been part of my life. I doubt anyone will find it super-interesting, but it’s pretty fun to put stuff on the map, and a lot of good memories have resurfaced. It’s still a work in progress, but go ahead and take a look, why don’t you?
Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons died this week at the age of 69. I’ve read a few obits and tributes, and I thought I would reminisce a bit about my D&D experiences. Probably won’t be very interesting to anyone, but whatever… you’ve been warned.
Probably around 6th grade, my friend C’s mom got the D&D Basic game, and we all played at their house one afternoon. I believe the module was “Keep on the Borderlands”. It was pretty awesome. The whole experience was new. The cool dice, the character sheets, the little figurines. And of course C’s mom was a great DM (Dungeon Master). I think I had a magic-user back then. I remember I only had 4 HP, which was just crazy! Magic-users were such wimps! But magic missile and sleep were such great spells. There was something else, something like a floating torch. A spell like that can only be fun when playing a real table-top game. I can’t imagine how it would be fun on a computer screen. One thing I remember about that adventure was that our group was exploring some caves, and there was an ogre living in one part of it and he had a big hunk of cheese. I found that peculiar.
Later on, my friends and I really got into D&D. We had most of the books, and started playing on weekends. Our regular group included P, D, my bro, BL and I think TB. We’d go over to one of our houses on Friday nights and sit around the table drinking sodas and eating popcorn, and have a blast playing! P was the DM for most all of the sessions, and he was great. I really liked the games at BL’s house, because we would ride bikes across the neighborhood which was fun, and the popcorn at BL’s house was so tasty. It was the first time I had popcorn that was NOT Jiffy-pop, and it tasted so much better!
Besides playing the game, I was into the books. Not novels or anything, but the actual rule books. I’d pore over the Players Handbook and study all the races, classes, spells, alignments, etc. The Monster Manual was excellent as well. So many neat creatures in there. Most of them were really cool, like ochre jelly, gelatinous cube, rust monster, mind flayer, etc. But there were some lame ones too. Like dinosaurs. There should not be dinos in D&D. The Demon section was particularly interesting because of the boss monsters Orcus and Demogorgon. Those looked so bad-ass, and they had massive amounts of HP. And I have to mention that the drawing of the succubus was so hot, especially for adolescent boys like us. Speaking of that, when Deities & Demigods came out, it was like a Playboy magazine! Wowza.
One aspect which was fun was collecting the little lead figures. I had so many of them, and they were really fun to play with and paint. We didn’t really use them so much in-game, but they were still fun to collect. I remember going to the Paul Freiler’s Hobby Shop in Old Towne Mall (Torrance) and looking at all the D&D loot, and then later to the new Paul Freiler’s location farther down on Hawthorne Blvd. to read some Dragon magazine. The adventure modules were also a lot of fun, not only to play thru, but read on your own. My favorite module to play through was White Plume Mountain. That was so cool because it had a frictionless floor at one point, then the “Inverted ziggurat” and a vampire at the end. There were also some manticores and phat lewt as well! I believe it was a trident of some sort. Anyways, that was a great module to play through. The next module in the series was kind of futuristic: “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks”, in which you find a spaceship in the mountains and explore. My bro and I had a couple modules that we would just read thru: he had something about Hill Giants, and I had the other one, “Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl” or something like that. They had fun maps and traps etc etc.
Speaking of maps, one of the coolest things about playing the game was mapping out the dungeon on graph paper. It was neat to go back and look at the map and recount the adventure. I also used to make my own dungeons using graph paper. I was crazy about putting pits everywhere, for some reason. I also enjoyed taking it a bit further, and drawing out world maps. I used to have this huge world imagined, with capital cities, rivers, mountains, deserts. All that kind of thing!
Eventually, we lost interest in D&D. High School and other activities (girls!) were at the top of the list, and we stopped playing. But my interest in the Fantasy genre never died, and I continued to read Fantasy books, like the Thieves’ World series and Elric series. To this day, I still enjoy playing RPG’s on the computer and will occasionally pick up a Fantasy novel.
It’s sad that Gary Gygax is gone, but he leaves us with a huge legacy in the gaming and Fantasy world. RIP, Gary Gygax.
In ‘95, after I visited Tokyo with my parents, I decided I wanted to live in Japan. So the next year, I moved there and started living my dream. I also met my dream girl there and we got married. However, her longtime dream was to live in the States, and a couple years later when the opportunity arose to move back, we decided to take it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel any regret, however, meeting new friends and having two wonderful kids in Texas has been pretty damn awesome!
Our recent trip back to Japan reminded me of just how great it was when we lived there, and Mariko and I have talked about about moving back when the kids leave the nest. This got me really excited, and actually every time I think about moving back there (even if it will be 15 long years down the road) I get butterflies in my stomach.
It’s funny how my attitude has changed. It used to be that when I thought about Japan, I felt melancholy from the memories of the life we had there in the past. But now when I think about Japan, I am thinking about the life we will have there in the future. Lots of butterlies right now!
