In Which the Author Doesn’t Mention the Weather or his Scooter

It’s been all about Wii and lacrosse for me lately.

Right now, I’m watching the NCAA men’s lacrosse championship game, watching my Hopkins Blue Jays taking on Duke. Duke’s been heavily favored going into this, even after they barely pulled out a victory over Cornell on Saturday. I don’t want to take anything away from them…they’re a great team, but I’m a little tired of the press seeming to think that they’re entitled to win. Let’s let the game speak for itself.

My latest game of choice on the Wii is Super Paper Mario. There are too many brilliant elements here for me to really cover, so I’ll hit the highlights. For most of the game, you’re playing a relatively traditional side-scrolling platformer, albeit one that’s beautifully rendered and chock-full of homages to Mario games past. When playing as Mario, though (as opposed to Luigi, Bowser, or Princess Peach) a press of the “A” button flips the perspective to 3-D, revealing hidden doors, routes past obstacles, and all sorts of other goodies. This is actually the first Mario game I’ve played in a while, and the first I’ve played with the combination of platformer and RPG elements, and I have to say that I like it. The Nintendo folks have put together a surprisingly engaging story of revenge and lost love to back up the gameplay. There are a ton of little touches, my favorite of which is invincibility. When you get one of the trademark stars, and enormous (screen-high) NES-style Mario is drawn on the screen, and you can then rampage through the level, smashing anything in your way.

Got the game at Gamestop on an extended lunch trip one day, and got into a conversation with the staff there about Nintendo in general. By agreeing with me that Nintendo was showing the way to the future of gaming, they talked me into reserving copies of the upcoming Mario Party and Metroid titles (lesson learned: I’m easily flattered). I’ll let you know how those go.

Conundrum

So I’m in this middle of nowhere Chicago suburb for business, and in the interest of not starving to death (and since the hotel lacks a restaurant), I ordered a pizza. A small pizza. Since I’m in the vicinity of Chicago, I went for broke and got the deep dish. Now I find myself with half a fucking pizza that I can’t finish, for fear of throwing up and then dying. Not that it’s bad, of course. Just that the small is way too much.

What do I do with half a pizza? Leave it for the maid? FedEx it home for a snack when I get back? I’m at a total loss here.

They Might Be Political

“Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine.
The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of a failed foreign policy, a failed domestic policy, and a failed presidency.”

- John Flansburgh, They Might Be Giants, 5/5/07

The show was great. They rocked out, and I got to embrace my geekdom. As always, “Birdhouse In Your Soul” is pretty much the only think that can bring back my junior high days in a good way.

Lunch Vox

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons depicts a group of men marching along a ruler marked off in 45-minute intervals, bearing a banner marked “Lunch”. To me, it’s the ideal depiction of a phenomenon that many have remarked on before: the centrality of lunchtime to the conceptual framework of the working day.

Things have been slow here at the office lately. Projects are finishing up, or are running along so smoothly that they need just a light push now and then to keep them cruising along on their greased rails. Combined with the increasingly clement weather, that’s led to longer and longer lunch breaks. Most days, I go to lunch with John, and many days, that involves an expedition north from our South End location, up into Chinatown or Downtown Crossing. We’ve both commented at times that it would save us a significant amount of money to bring our lunches rather than go out every day, but we always come around to the conclusion that leaving the office for a while every day is one of the things that keeps us sane. In busy times, it gives us a chance to relax, to vent, and to get away from things. In slack times, it gives us a way to kill some of the afternoon, so we don’t tear our teeth out from boredom.

It also gives us a chance to soak in the city. Downtown Crossing, in particular, is one of my favorite areas of the city. It’s not big on what’s conventionally called charm (although there are architectural details on some of the older office buildings that deserve notice), but it’s long on a sort of pulsing urban life, from the street preachers shouting salvation from the corners to the lunching office workers standing in line for Chilean sandwiches to the carts selling (bootlegged?) videos. It’s got something that places like Beacon Hill and the Back Bay, for all their advantages, lack.

The route north takes us past the musty temptations of used bookstores, the culinary exotica of Chinatown, the misleading incongruity of the western wear store, and the shiny shabby newness of the all-devouring Macy’s. It takes us over the Mass Pike and the commuter rail tracks, past the patients at New England Medical with their wheelchairs, IVs, and cigarettes, and through a noontime throng of our fellow Bostonians, each on their own errand, their own reason for being out on the street at midday. A million stories in the naked city. A thousand wandering lunchers, looking for satiety.