Archive for November 2005

November 22, 2005

Relevance

1:34 pm | Culture | Comments: 16

I thought that I would expand on the subject of Christmas by discussing other pointless holidays. Stuff like Christmas and Easter have their roots in Roman Catholicism and paganism, but that doesn’t matter to most people. It’s an excuse to get together and have a good time, and that’s fine by me.

There are some strange holidays in our great U.S. of A. that literally make no sense. Sweetest Day? What’s that? I don’t even like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day (not arguing against the concept, mind you). Columbus Day is just stupid. Columbus was just a goofball who could sail a boat. He never found what he was looking for, and he wasn’t even the first one to find what he did find and mistakenly thought was something else. Auf jedenfal, there other holidays out there that should be thrown out but never will be because there will never be a shortage of people out there who get warm fuzzies on the days in question and don’t want to break the habit.

I’m not against holidays. I’m against pointless and overhyped holidays. Don’t tell me I have to buy cards for people because it’s a holiday; that’s just feeding the beast (starts with an H for those of you not in the know).

November 15, 2005

Walking In a Winter Wonderland

4:55 pm | Culture | Wisdom | Comments: 32

Normally, I avoid addressing topics that everybody else in the Webrogosphere (and other spheres) is currently addressing. I’m making an exception today because it’s something that must be dealt with. I was nearly beside myself with irritation today when I walked into the 4 Mile Valueland greeted by “Jingle Bells” blaring over the speaker system, followed by a nice female voice announcing the evil intention of the radio station involved to play continuos Christmas music, presumably until immediately after Christmas.

What’s wrong with this picture? It’s only November 15; Thanksgiving is still a full week away. It’s not a Winter Wonderland! It’s rainy, cloudy, cold, and crappy outside! There are no bells to be jingled as only a the most dedicated and hardcore rubes would dare to be out in a freaking sleigh at this time of year. I don’t want to hear that Dean Martin will be home for Christmas. I don’t like chestnuts (certainly not those of the roasted variety). Does anybody care that SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN? OH WOW SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN, GUYS! I have news, clowns. Santa Claus ISN’T coming to town. Maybe if he actually was he could go bar-hopping with Dean Martin on the big day and pick up some chicks, or maybe roast some reindeer over an open hall decked with jingle bells. EVERYBODY KNOWS they’ll both be home for Christmas, if only in the dreams of soul-less hippies that actually like this brand of trash music.

November 5, 2005

Flashback

1:17 pm | Sport | Wisdom | Comments: 19

On this day in 1935, Parker Brothers launched the game of Monopoly. Just about everybody at some stage in their life has played this game. Most people have no clue how to play it, either. I thought I would talk some Monopoly strategy here for you folks who constantly find yourself landing on your buddy’s Hotel-festooned Pennsylvania Avenue with only 150 bucks left to your sorry name.

Monopoly, like other great games such as Risk, is at its core a game of chance. You could be the greatest player in the world’s history and land on nothing but railroads and utilities until all legitimate properties are owned by other players, perhaps managing to scrape together the light blues and maybe Marvin Gardens. The difference between a winner and a loser in Monopoly many times will be how the dice rolls, but often the outcome of the game can be decided by effective decision-making.

The first decision you should make is to buy every property you land on, EXCEPT the railroads and utilities. I should stress this. You will NEVER win the game by owning railroads and utilites. Feel free to pick them up after you’ve made some decent purchases, but remember you’ll only be throwing them around as leverage in deals for real properties later on. Just save your money in case you land on something useful.

Obviously, the idea is to get sets and build on them. At the stage in the game where people are beginning to compile sets, the trade-making process will kick into high gear. Let’s talk about trades for a bit. What makes a valuable trade? Not the original or mortgage cost of the property, nor is it the amount of cash involved; the value of a trade comes in whether or not you or your opponent will achieve a set as a result of the trade. If both of you will benefit in this manner from the trade, you can then start looking at property values and cash. This is a point in the game where everybody will gang up on the perceived leader and chant that nobody should trade with him without such a trade being stacked ridiculously in favor of whoever isn’t the perceived leader. This is not how the game works, people. If you just simply stonewall any attempt to allow the game to progress to the next stage, the game becomes very dull. This is also the part where would-be economists start their mantra about supply-and-demand, a concept which doesn’t rationally apply to Monopoly because there’s only one of everything, which means everything is essentially equally available, in that everything is equally unavailable. But I digress.

The game goes in stages. First stage is buying, second stage is bargaining, third stage is building. The building stage is where you really need to balance your cash on hand and your developments, because what good are 3 hotels on the oranges when you can’t even pay the $50 rent for Boardwalk (not that anybody ever lands on Boardwalk - we’ll talk about that later). Remember that buildings can only be sold back to the bank at half-price, so you will lose 50% of an investment if you carelessly sink all your money into it. That being said, the sooner you can get your properties developed the better.

And that’s it, really. Buy good properties, make good bargains, and build safely and swiftly. So what are good properties? My favorite set is the oranges. I can’t explain why, but they always seem to get me tons of cash. I can also often be found developing the purples (Mediterranean and Baltic), which for $500 will have hotels and will sap opponents of their Go money. Never - unless you find yourself with no alternative, or with an obscene abundance of cash available to you - develop Boardwalk and Parkplace. As for the rest, it all depends on what your savings will allow.

Finally, remember those house rules you always played with? Forget about them. Most notably a Free Parking lottery. I usually play with the Free Parking lottery because everybody else wants to, but it has the potential (which is almost always realized at some point) to completely throw off the balance of the game. Some folks also play with 100% building sell-back return; this encourages rash development decisions as you can always just sell it off if you need the money. For a real game of Monopoly, play the real game. Oh, and don’t cheat.

November 2, 2005

Weblogging Analysis

12:25 pm | Weblogging | Wisdom | Comments: 16

My would-be evil genius of a sister Evie reminded me of one of my father’s most oft-repeated sayings of his father, which goes as follows:

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”

This is a great rule for weblogs. Just replace “minds” in the statement with “weblogs” (and “small” with the word “crappy”), and badda-boom badda-bing betty-boop you have yourself a great way of determining how good a weblog is. You might disagree. And I might want a million bucks. So what?

Here’s why discussing ideas is preferable to discussing people and events. It stretches your mind. A monkey with a typewriter will eventually be able to type the words “Today is Halloween”, but he will not be able to tell you the origin of All Hallows’ Eve and why he thinks that the day we know as Halloween is perfectly ridiculous, and furthermore that he thinks it to be terribly amusing how people go around in silly costumes making fools of themselves (although, if you put enough monkeys in a room with typewriters, eventually they will compose a treatise much to that effect).

This is not to say that it’s wrong or in bad taste to talk about events and people. In fact, a vast amount of intellectual content is based on events and people. The intent of the saying is to relate that it is alway helpful to go beyond events or people and think about the meaning, significance, context, ramifications, and just random ideas relevant to the topic. It’s also alot more interesting.