Ah… The Simpsons.  Bart’s periodic calls to Moe’s Tavern never get old. In one of the episodes from this its 20th season, the never aging 10 year old finds Denis Leary‘s cell phone and hilarity insues. Today while at work, I received a telephone call that is very similar to the prankster’s antics.  I answered the phone and the jokester asked: “Do you have Orville Reddenbacher in a jar?”  Knowing who was on the other end, I decided to play along and went to look.  After replying that we did not I said: “If we had him in a jar, he would be rather well preserved; freeze dried and all.”  The popcorn baron passed away in 1995.  Oddly enough, I thought he had been popping corn in the great beyond longer than that.  At least the customer did not ask if we had Prince Albert in the can.  HAHA.    Who amongst us has never endulged in performing this harmless little prank?  HAHA

I was given a challenge. To come up with an simple Dungeons and Dragons adventure that could be finished by novice players in one evening (around 2-3 hours).

There are a few ways to go about that.

1) Make it so simple, it will not give a good indication of how the game works
2) Make the area to be explored very small — again lose some of the way the game works
3) Heavy Non-Player (game master run) character guidance — See above.
4) Come up with something where the primary objective is straight forward, but allow some side paths that will allow players to make their own choice. But the path to the true objective is easily found if looked for. Do this to make sure as many aspects of game play are introduced. Fights, parleys, retreats, find paths, avoid pitfalls, ect.

And of course don’t start with, you all meet in a tavern…

Guess which one I chose?

To make it easier, I also generated some characters with survivable statistics. I know more people who dropped the game just because their character didn’t survive the first attack. No overpowering characters, but they aren’t slouches either. Given a good selection, they should survive the first adventure (unless they try to combat the dragon).

Those that decide the game is worth playing could continue with the characters they are given for many further games. Those who want to give up the game, can. If they don’t like the type of character they have, they can change after the first game.

It has been fun getting back into the swing of running even a game. I was hoping to run a tournament module for some more experienced players in the future, so this should give me a bit of practice to get back into the swing of things.

I do have a tournament module that I designed years and years ago for low level characters
, but that is/was an experience in survival. It ran under 3 hours most of the time, but it was because the characters were all killed. Survival to the furthest point in the game was the object. I was told is was a lot of fun for players used to running high level characters to step back and see how well they can survive with the low level again. All the playing experience, with a rookie character for backup…

The next adventure shouldn’t be an experience in survival, but it could turn out that way. Make an incorrect decision and oops.

Wow – what happened here?  Due to a props department mix-up, an actor was doing a suicide scene with a real knife instead of a fake one.  Luckily, he wasn’t killed, but this qualifies as a bit more than a simple mistake, wouldn’t you say?  Perhaps I’ll think twice about offering to stage manage anything in the future – apparently there’s a lot at stake.  And for you actors who read this, how much trust do you have in your props people?  And how much will you trust them after reading something like this?

From Time.com
by Adam Smith
Try this for an Agatha Christie plotline: performing on stage inside Vienna’s Burgtheater, one of Europe’s oldest and grandest, an actor takes a knife to his throat in his character’s desperate attempt at suicide. As audience applause fills the opulent theater, blood pours from the actor’s neck. But something’s not right. Buckling and staggering his way off stage, the actor collapses to the floor. That’s because the knife, and the harm that it’s done, are both tragically real.
Unfortunately for Daniel Hoevels, a 30-year-old actor from Hamburg, those pages from a murder-mystery came to life last Saturday night during a performance at the Burgtheater of Mary Stuart, Friedrich Schiller’s play about the wretched life of Mary Queen of Scots. Rushed to the nearby Lorenz Bohler hospital having sliced through skin and fat tissue but thankfully not his main artery, Hoevels was fortunate to survive. “Just a little deeper,” said Wolfgang Lenz, a doctor who treated him, “and he would have been drowning in his own blood.”
The police investigation into the calamity points more to a foul-up than foul play. Viennese police say they’re not probing the possibility of attempted murder; press reports had speculated a “jealous rival” could have had a hand in Hoevels’ injury. Instead, investigators are focusing on possible negligence within the props department of Hoevels’ Thalia Theater ensemble. According to local media, the company picked up the knife in Vienna to replace one brought from their Hamburg base that was then found to be defective. One possibility: that props staff forgot to blunt that new blade, which, police say, still had the price tag on it.
Hoevels himself seems to have put the snafu behind him. “I am now absolutely fine again,” he told local media, “but I will always for the rest of my working life have a strange feeling about this scene.” After reprising the role Sunday, albeit with neck bandaged, Hoevels headed back to Hamburg Monday in preparation for his role in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. In that play, the long-suffering title character winds up shooting himself in the head. Someone might want to double-check the gun.

I’m not entirely sure if I have posted on this event that happened about 25 years ago, but it stands out as one of those unforgettable experiences that will stay with my family forever.  It will definitely be passed on to at least the next generation.  It just happened to come up at work today as we were unloading a truck, but it made the manager shake her head in disgust and hide.  Ironically, right after relaying the tale, I pulled a case of cat litter off the track.

Anyway, for those not in the know, when I was younger I had a snow white cat named Snowball.  It was my cat and I was in charge of feeding, cleaning the litter box, etc.  I came across the kitten while outside playing and she came upon me and I had to go pet it.  Then, she followed me home much to my mother’s chagrin… she wanted NO MORE CATS in the house.  We had already had two that used all of their nine lives.  One used to enjoy leaping into the washer and going for a spin; however, this one later tried to cross the street at the wrong time.

Snowball’s demise was far more gruesome.  One summer evening, my siblings and I were home while the parents were away.  My oldest brother was doing a load of laundry.  Unbeknownst (says he) to him, the cat hopped into the dryer.  The clothes must have smothered the pleas for help or else she was ko’d shortly after start up.

My parents arrived home early the next morning and immediately called the 4 of us downstairs.  They had discovered the most awful smell anyone should ever have to experience of which we were about to be introduced.  My mother, armed with a trash bag, rubber gloves, clothes pin over her nose, handkerchief over her mouth, and shovel, opened the dryer door and started scooping it out.  This was after the idea of calling the fire department was abandoned.  The entire bag of clothes, and remains was buried in the back yard.  The next day, we went shopping for a new dryer.  Years later, we still like to bring that skeleton out of the closet 😉

I just remembered what prompted the story.  The truck driver used a power pallet jack to move the pallets around.  Everytime he used it, it sounded like a dying cat and I mentioned that I know a thing or two about dying cats.  My helper said that she knew the tale; however, the boss (who is the owner of two cats) did not.  So surprised by that, I told her the macabre tragedy.

animals.  Animals are my favorite things.  If I’m bored – yeah, right, with 4 kids, when does that happen?  Ok, if I were ever bored, my activity of choice would be to visit a zoo, wildlife park, pet store, or anyplace I could see animals.  Without leaving the house, I can also research animals on the internet.  One of my favorite animal sites is the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web.  It’s amazing how much they’ve changed the taxonomy (classification of animals) from when I first started doing research on the subject not more than 10 years ago, but it’s true – this field is one that’s ever-changing.

Every now and then, I think I’ll choose an animal to share on my blog.  Today’s animal is the pangolin.  What is a pangolin, you ask?  Well, it’s a mammal, and it’s not a marsupial, a group which contains some of the lesser known species.  See, in the classification of mammals, you begin by separating them into placental mammals (live birth) and marsupials (young live in the mother’s pouch – all but one type live in Australia).  Of course, there is also a third category – egg-laying mammals, but we won’t go there because I don’t want to lose people’s interest by getting too complicated.

So anyway, the pangolin is a placental mammal, yet it’s scaly.  The scales are actually made of a hair-like material, thereby preserving its status as mammal.  Check this out – does this thing look prehistoric or what?

But they’re not prehistoric; they still exist today – I wonder how come I’ve never seen one at a zoo?  I guess it’s because some animals do better in captivity than others, and I applaud the zoo community for recognizing this.

Interesting tidbits about pangolins, as stated on the Animal Diversity Web:

Pangolins are a small group (seven living species placed in one genus and one family, Manidae) of mammals that feed mostly on ants. They are found in the tropical regions of Africa and Asia.  Pangolins are conspicuous and remarkable because their backs are covered with large, overlapping scales made up of agglutinated hairs. But they are strange in other ways as well. Their tongue is extraordinarily long and muscular, arising from the pelvis and the last pair of ribs deep in the animal’s chest. As a result, the tongue and associated muscles are longer than the animal’s head and body, allowing the tongue to be extruded to an astonishing degree. Pangolins lack teeth. Instead, the the pyloric part of their stomach is thickened and muscular, with odd keratinous spines projecting into its interior. It usually contains pebbles and seems to be used for “chewing” in much the same way as a bird’s gizzard. Pangolins have the ability to close their ears and nostrils as well as eyes, presumably to keep ants out.

In short, pangolins are fascinating animals that are closer to you and me on the taxonomy tree than most people would guess – they are mammals, after all.  Yet they are a mammal that most people have not heard of, and surprisingly, there are more than a few mammalian species that have this in common – I will try to share little known facts about little known mammals in my blog.

And oh yeah, since there was a complaint in the comments of another tangents.org blog about this – the song I quoted in my title is “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.

I’ve been having a bit of fun writing up an Dungeons and Dragons adventure journal. It is something I wanted to share, but I didn’t want them to get lost or take over the main part of my blog. So I put them into different pages. Because I wanted easy access to my posts, I decided to change my blog theme too. This new theme allowed me to post the page links in a side bar and allow easy access. so far so good.

But the one thing i did notice is that the new pages were not included in links to new posts… Hmm, no easy way to indicate a new story line was added. I thought about writing an intro post for each new chapter or page. That seemed to be a bit too much. One or two lines are all that are needed anyway. Since I have a post that starts the adventure, I’m thinking that I will add a comment for each new page. The comments are listed as recent events, so people who are interested can see the new additions easily.

Lost a few on my post count, but who’s counting anyway?

What follows is an insignificant blog post about nothing of particular importance – pure fluff!  And this post is for Office fans only!  Have you noticed that Pam Beesly has changed her look?  When you watch episodes of The Office from Seasons 1, 2 or even 3, you’ll notice that Pam used to be frumpy.  Her hair was blah, and she wore the ugliest shirts, sometimes two at a time!  But nowadays, she has a nice chic hairdo and dresses less like a 60-year-old libarian and more like a young woman in her late 20’s or early 30’s.  At first, I was wondering if the popularity of the show and the character was the inspiration for the change in her character – you know, make her more appealling to her adoring fans.  But The Office is my favorite show, and I don’t like to think that it’s sinking to that level – I prefer to attribute the change in Pam to her finally being happily in true love.  In the first few seasons, she wasn’t yet in love with Jim (that she was consciously aware of, anyway), and she was unhappy being a receptionist because that’s a far cry from her calling in life – art and illustration.  Now she is truly happy, she is in love, and her looks-update reflects this.  Ironic that as the character Pam Beesly finds love, the actress who plays her, Jenna Fischer,  is in the process of a real-life divorce from her husband, James Gunn.  I don’t know, what do you think?

All I know for sure is that I am happy to see Pam’s old wardrobe go by the wayside.  It was truly hideous and sometimes even difficult to watch – as you can see by watching some of the older episodes!

I have heard of two possible heirs to the seat about to be vacated by New York Senator Hilary Clinton, one that sounds at least plausible, the other laughable at best.  Fran Drescher that nasally toned actress who graced television screens a few years back as a domestic goddess has announced that she has her eye on the prize.  One would hope that her political saavy is better than the one she exhibited as The Nanny.  By the way, did you know that she was in the cast of the motion picture Saturday Night Fever?  She played the role of “Connie”.  Sorry I don’t know anymore beyond that.  For all of you This Is Spinal Tap fans, Ms. Drescher played Bobbi Flekman.  Of course, she could be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger and be the next politician whose voice you cannot stand. Although she could take her aspirations beyond the governator.  I’m glad I do not live in New York.  By the way, another possible candidate is the totally unknown Caroline Kennedy.

Due to the many technological advances that have been made in the world since we were kids, I think today’s youth have somewhat of a different perspective on Santa.

First of all, on Christmas Eve, they can track Santa’s travels on the internet.  When we were young, it was “get to bed, and if you’re not sleeping by the time Santa gets here, he’s going to skip our house!”  And in 2008, you can forget about needing the zip code for the North Pole so that your kids can use the post office to snail-mail their lists to Santa.  In today’s world, kids communicate with Santa via email.  Also, the lines “He sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake… etc.”  have a whole new meaning with the modern-day concept of Big Brother.  I reminded my 4-year-old daughter the other day that Santa is always watching her and can see when she’s not behaving.  Her reply is what led me to wonder about the perception kids in 2008 have of Santa:  “Mom, do you have blue lights on the Christmas tree cuz they have cameras and Santa can see.”  So somewhere my daughter had gotten the idea that Santa uses cameras to watch kids, and the cameras are inside the blue Christmas lights!  I wonder, if I invest in some blue Christmas lights, will that make her behavior impove any?

5 years ago at this time, my wife was spending her time at her parents. This is 1 hour away from our home, her husband and 3 of her daughters. On the nights we couldn’t visit, we had to make do with phone calls.

It was also at this time that I took one of the afghans she made to provide a bit more warmth while sleeping. I woke up early this morning under that same afghan. My early morning mind was thinking of how it was like being wrapped in a hug. I guess in a way it was.