No, not a reference to my music video for Dump Stat, delightful though it is. Of course, I believe there is a magic to rhyme itself, but in this case the two topics are separate.

On the Magic front, recently I’ve been wondering if the way I think about money is related to the way I think about Magic. For example, it’s so easy to make my money disappear; it practically happens without any effort on my part.* But what I was actually thinking about was Magic: The Gathering. See, I’ve always felt that any serious gamers can’t help but look at the world sometimes through the lenses of the games they play the most. And while Magic has roughly a bajillion rules**, the one that has always stuck with me is upkeep.

In the game of Magic, upkeep is something you have to pay at the beginning of each of your turns, and it sucks. It can be anything from life to cards, but is most often mana. Mana that you have to keep paying each turn, and thus can’t spend to cast the really cool cards in your hand. And sometimes there’s even cumulative upkeep, which just gets worse every turn, until attempting to pay for that spell makes it impossible to do anything else.

This is how I view credit card debt. I have avoided getting a credit card largely out of fear of this kind of upkeep, and a supreme dread of credit card debt. And I found myself wondering whether as a group, those who had played Magic seriously were less likely to find themselves in credit card debt that those who had not.*** I don’t think anyone’s going to commission a serious study, but it is something I’m curious about.

Enough of that! Let’s talk about rhyme. Rhyming is fun, that’s why I do it all the time. And just last week, about an hour away, I was performing at the BTF’s Cabaret. There was magic and rhyme, in the form of MacBeth, interspersed with a few bits of rap from Seth. And you might think, “Why tell me about that show? It already happened, so it’s too late to go!” And that’s technically true, but if you haven’t heard, this week Pittsfield is hosting WordXWord. And on Tuesday the 24th at this spoken word festival, you could go and see poetry from the best of fools****.

And speaking of***** rhyme, the book I’ve been working on since 2001 is FINALLY almost ready to release. Yes, God To Verse will, barring unforseen circumstances, be available for purchase on Amazon within a few weeks. Expect a post early in September with lots more details and exhortations for purchase. Meanwhile, please ignore any rumors you may hear about my sub-standard nutrition being again the subject of a column in the Washington Post, and trust my humor column to provide you with accurate information on my commitment to nutrition.

* More accurately, without sufficient effort on my part, it disappears right quick.

** Creature: Serrated Bajillion. 2/2. Tap to cause Wizards of the Coast to drastically revise combat rules yet again.

*** People who foolishly went into debt to feed their Magic addiction notwithstanding.

**** By which of course I mean yours truly, though I don’t mean to praise myself unduly.

***** But no longer in. Because it’s a sin. Damn, I can’t win, I really mean it. Anybody want a peanut?

I guess because I try to write something here once a month, it’s fair to say I post periodically*. But perhaps that is insufficient. I was reading Greta Christina’s blog, and she mentions that if a blog doesn’t post every week or two, she won’t bother following it.** Sadly, I have enough difficulty just working up an interesting post once a month. And I really have no desire to turn this blog into a Twitter/Facebook realm where I update you about what I’m eating (grapes), what movie I just watched (Funny People), and what I’m doing right now (praeteritio).

What’s worse, when I do have an idea worth writing about, I often turn it into a column instead. Whether I am thinking about politics, sex, or religion, if those thoughts manage to get beyond the obvious*** or the simple one-liner observation**** to the point where I feel my ideas are worth sharing publicly, I will probably try to make them at least slightly humorous and then work them into a column. And while my more political columns like the three I just linked may not be as laugh-out-loud funny as my more zany columns, I still feel they are important and worth sharing, and enjoy having them appear in my local newspaper. Which I guess is another periodical posting.

That’s two guesses in as many paragraphs, leading me to believe… that I’m not quite sure of myself.*****  Perhaps it’s the stupefying humidity; there’s nothing else that quite gives you that feeling of having your wisdom drained.******  But I wanted to read some philosophy tonight, so I sat down to look at a bit of Kant… and found that my brain was completely unwilling to parse it. I’ve written numerous papers about the categorical imperative, but right now, I can’t even read about it. I can’t even summon up the energy to make a Kant/can’t joke. But there are so many ellipses that you could say… I’m posting periodically.

* Although it’d be even more fair if I were writing articles about the table of the elements.

** On the bright side, this means I could insult her here and she’d never read it. “Hey Greta: your blog may be incredibly well-written, often insightful, and filled with thought-provoking posts, but the blog title isn’t terribly creative. Take that!”

*** Sex is fun!

**** People end up getting screwed in all three!

***** At least, I think that’s what it means.

****** Although an encounter with a Lamia can be very similar. Pretty sure that humidity can do more wisdom damage than 1d4, though.

I tend to dislike Facebook, but I’m on there nonetheless to avoid missing out on local parties only invited online, so I try to post something occasionally. Unlike working up a blog post here, which at least ostensibly ought to contain some sort of actual content, Facebook posts are tiny and so call for people to be pithy*.

I was thinking above love recently, I think because I had written a poem or two about it for a poetry reading the other week. The poetry reading itself was great fun, both because the featured reader was Taylor Mali (who is always a delight), and because my poems were generally well-received.**

Anyway, while thinking about love, I came to a conclusion about myself which I felt was an solid little Facebook update status. “Seth Brown loves very wisely, but not well enough.” And then I realized that while some people would understand my intent to present a reversal of Othello’s quote as an explanation that I feel I have chosen very excellent friends indeed even if I sometimes do not show my appreciation sufficiently, on Facebook it would probably sound to most people like, “Seth Brown likes awesome girls but is bad in bed.”***

I didn’t actually have anything to say about a marrier, but I wanted a double pun post title and now feel compelled to follow through with it, so I will do something unusual for this blog and dip briefly into the realm of the political. I saw talk of the 2010 Texas GOP platform on other blogs, presumed it must be either exaggeration or a fringe group. But no, I went to the official Texas GOP site, and indeed along with the expected mix of ideas I find supportable, ideas about which I am apathetic, and ideas with which I disagree, lie some truly horrible ideas, many of which could be eliminated from the platform and simply condensed into, “Gay people are illegal,” which would save lots of time rather than having individual laws that ban sodomy, ban partner benefits, ban restrictions on discrimination, and make it a felony to perform same-sex marriage.

I think every half-century or so, there’s a group we treat like dirt in this country and then eventually America slaps its collective forehead and says, “Oh, they’re people too, so I guess treating them like sub-humans should probably stop and we should give them the same rights as people.” And then we pass some laws, and while we don’t eliminate discrimination entirely, we at least give it a good kick by removing it from our laws, and then decades later we look back with shame at how we treated that group of people… all while mistreating the next group.

If you think about it, it was almost a century ago (give or take a decade or so) that we gave women the vote. Women! They don’t even have a penis! How will they push the levers? Alright, fine, women are people, but what about them black folk?**** You wouldn’t want to drink from the same water fountain, would you? What? They’re people too? Okay, sure, but these gays, you can’t let them visit each other in the hospital or fall in love and have families like humans, right? Are you kidding me THEY’RE PEOPLE TOO?!?

It’s a slow and painful process, but I try to remain optimistic. I have little doubt that in 50 years, we’ll have accepted gay people as people, and look back with shame as we always do on the attempts of so many to legislate discrimination. I don’t know what new group we’ll be dehumanizing then; I only know I’ll be in favor of their rights too. I hope by then I’ll be funnier about it.******

*”Girl, you are theriouthly pithy.”

**As usual, the painstakingly pre-written poems were met with mild approval, while the instantaneously composed freestyle poetry received a much more hearty ovation. I realize that many people can write poetry and fewer people can freestyle poetry, so the latter is more impressive, and I’m always glad that people appreciate my work in that area. But there’s still something weird about the poems you spent a long time working on getting quiet polite applause, and the poem you didn’t bother working on at all but just made up on the spot getting much more thunderous applause.*****

***Cause of death: Suicide. Reason: Top Google result for own name.

****The history of anti-black discrimination in this country is perhaps slightly more beset, because first the country had to be convinced that blacks should be free rather than slaves, and then they had to be convinced again later that they should be people and not just free.

*****I always accidentally read that phrase as “Thunderous Applesauce”, which would be a great name for a rock band.

******I’m reminded of one of my favorite old tales about discrimination. A very bigoted (let’s say, Texas GOP) family offers in patriotism to host some soldiers for a dinner, but writes in the letter to the Captain “No Jews, please.” On the appointed night, there is a knock at the door, and 8 black soldiers are there. “Oh no,” says the matron anxiously, “there must be some mistake!”  ”Not at all, ma’am,” says one of the soldiers with a smile. “Captain Goldberg never makes mistakes.”

May 42 be the answer to life, the universe, and everything? It sure might. May 42 is also today’s date, as I once again slide past my goal to post one blog update per month. In my defense, I’ve been slightly busy. I tried to solve this by reading productivity tips, but my most recent humor column will show you how well that went.

I attended a nearly week-long family reunion, where I was reminded that parts of my crazy are very clearly inherited, even if other parts of my crazy are obviously my own creation. I had another book review in the USA Today, about a book called Merchants of Doubt. It’s about those scientists who say that things like smoking, acid rain, and global warming aren’t health hazards. A dense read, but interesting, if depressing. I’ve also recently done a number of restaurant reviews for the Berkshire Eagle. Now I just need someone to hire me to review board games and comedy, and my life will be complete.*

Meanwhile, my board game playing certainly has not slowed down in any way. I got to try two Vlaada Chvatil games, Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert, both of which were wacky fun. Space Alert was also wacky stressful trying to coordinate with 5 people in real-time, making it both a perfect teambuilding game, and something I enjoyed less than I could. I really want to try his new game, Dungeon Lords. Meanwhile, I’ve recently acquired La Citta and Notre Dame, the latter being a game we played at a friend’s wedding last year and has been on my want list for a while.

In other news, I’m in hot water. Or rather, my hot water was in hot water, as both my water heater and washing machine ceased to function. I wonder, if I could only replace one, would it be better to wash clothes in the machine with cold water only, or with hot water in the sink? Since I can’t shower in the sink**, I decided to replace the water heater first.

*Although hopefully not in the same sense that I complete the books and games I review. That’s the trouble with certain words, you could look at a dead person*** and say, “Well, his life is complete.”

**At least, according to the management at Applebee’s.

***Technically this is easier at some jobs than others.

Last week I was a featured reader at a small poetry reading in Pittsfield called “Outspoken!”. They had asked me to come perform to help celebrate National Poetry Month, so I freestyled a few poems and read some of my own work. Some of my poems really work much better spoken than written, but in honor of National Poetry Month, I’d like to share one of my short poems here:

************************

“Land Shark”
by Seth Brown

There is a knock at the door
I look through the keyhole and see your
gleaming white teeth
so shiny and so numerous
“who is it” I ask
and you tell me that you are
an encyclopedia salesman
but
I do not believe you
because encyclopedia salesmen do not have
so many teeth, so pointy and sharp
and where are your encyclopedias
have you already sold them all
or are they held by the arm that I can see in your mouth
opening this door may be a bad idea
but you have offered me a discount encyclopedia
and I cannot resist

***************************************

In other news, my improv troupe has performances on April 24th and May 14th at Main Street Stage in North Adams, so please come see us if you’re in the area and looking for something fun. (Conversely, if you are not in the area and looking for something boring, I recommend this list of the rotation direction of airport luggage carousels around the world.)

Writing a humor column is an interesting thing. It’s tricky to hit the sweet spot. For me, I am most proud of a column when I feel that it provides people with interesting information and educates them, while at the same time making them laugh. And so if you were to ask me what was my favorite column I’d written recently, I’d have to say that it was the one about the Ides of March.* Another decent one which at least touched on the theory of relativity was Einstein Time.

More often though, I find myself oscillating between the overly silly (Candy!) and the overly serious (Roman Conservative Party). And usually these types of columns follow in close succession. If I write something that I deem “not funny enough”, then I often go extra zany in the next week or two. And if I write something that’s pure silliness, I tend to obsess about making one of my next columns really informative or otherwise grounded.

Outside the column front, I’ve been trying to do a bit more musically. The other night I got together with the inimitable Lex Friedman for an online songwriting session, so maybe if he STOPS HAVING BABIES, we’ll co-write some new funny songs this year. I have three other humorous collaborations all on hold because my musicians are too busy to meet with me, one funny collaboration on hold because I was hesitant to start another large project until I’d finished one of the many I have running, and one serious music collaboration on hold because it turns out I have trouble writing serious music.

With silly music, I just have trouble recording it, but I really enjoy coming up with ideas. This is why I may have done a little terrible voice work for this week’s RNZB Songfight.*** And I always like making up instant music as part of my improv troupe, which is especially fun since it seems like our musical games are often the most popular. In fact, we’ve got a show tonight (3/20/10), but the chance of you reading this in time to show up are pretty slim. If you wanted to know about future shows ahead of time, you should probably follow RBIT’s Facebook page.

*I’d wanted to title this post as a pun on “The Ides of March”, and have a list of bullet points to the effect of, “I’d like you to read this column”, and “I’d love to have my improv troupe perform more often”, but how do you pluralize “I’d” in a title with punctuation? I tried to make it, “The “I’d”’s of March”, which looks completely terrible, and then “The I’ds of March”, which is bad in a different direction, and “The I’d’s of March” splits the difference and is still awful. And thus, I decided to scrap that whole idea and call it, “The Inconvenient Punctuation of March”.** But then I figured, why not flip it around?

**Also, why the hell would punctuation go inside the quotes when it’s not part of what you are quoting? The American system is part of the march of inconvenient punctuation. I consciously choose not to put punctuation inside the quotation when it’s not part of “the thing being quoted”. I’m not bad at writing in AP style, I’m just an Anglophile using superior British punctuation rules.

***I have to admit, it’s still cool to me that I am now entering songs in Songfight, many years after interviewing them for “Think You’re The Only One?“.

Well, okay, maybe today isn’t very exciting. But we’ve had some exciting Tuesdays recently. Last Tuesday was Groundhog Day, and the Tuesday before that was the State of the Union. I talk about them both in my Groundhog Day Column, although if you really want to read about my political views, they’re all laid out in my column about same-sex marriage.

As long as I’m throwing you links to my writing, I should probably mention that my latest book review is up over at USA Today. This was another book someone has written about the modern workplace, called The Future of Work, and like many other books on the subject, confirms (or, okay, at least agrees with) my suspicions that the corporate taskmaster overlord structure is increasingly ill-suited for the modern world. Whether workers are increasingly becoming better at working away from rigid cubicle structures, or whether we’re just increasingly becoming better at noticing how awful the current standard setup is, it seems more freedom and flexibility in the workplace should become more standard.

I think my favorite quote on the subject comes from a book I recently read by Malcolm Gladwell, who said something to the effect of, “If so many people feel compelled to think outside the box (and tell others to do the same), perhaps it’s time that we build a better box.” This is a mangled paraphrase, but I don’t feel like re-reading the whole book to find the quote right now.

It’s been a pretty good month for my songwriting.

Last weekend I was invited to WordCamp Boston to rap at the conference (along with my friend 3rr0r). While pre-written songs were going to be fine for the lunch hour, the conference organizers wanted something special with which to end the opening remarks. And so, I wrote a custom rap about WordPress specifically for the conference. Said rap was performed the morning of the conference, but sadly due to some technical difficulties, the simulcast was not very clear. For that reason, I have now posted my WordPress Rap.

Speaking of new rap songs, this month also marked the release of Rhyme Torrents 9, the latest installment of new nerdcore music from the Rhyme Torrents community. The good news is that like all Rhyme Torrents releases, these albums are completely free and available for download in mp3 form. The bad news is that like all Rhyme Torrents releases, the songs vary wildly in quality. The good news is that because it’s all a free download, you’ll find it very easy to grab the full album, toss what you don’t like, and end up with some new, free, catchy mp3s for your audio collection. I hope that one of the ones you keep will be my contribution to this volume, “The Big Cheese”, which is where I profess my love for cheese in rap form. It’s on disc 2.

And just in case you thought that the only songs I write are raps, I’m still working on parody songs as well. Our recent senate special election in Massachusetts seemed to attract a national audience. And while I went out and voted against Scott Brown (for the reason I explain in this column), that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to celebrate his victory. Naturally, I figured the best way to do this would be by submitting a song in his honor to the Providence Journal, so regardless of whether you like or dislike Scott Brown, I think you will enjoy singing along with “Voted for a Centerfold”.

Why can’t you use an 11″ box for that game?

Anyway, I’m a lifelong gamer. I grew up playing many of the same traditional games everyone plays, such as Monopoly, Checkers, Cribbage, and so forth. Then I got a Nintendo and suddenly I realized I was a video gamer too. My enjoyment of console role-playing games has continued to this day, over many different systems. In college I played a lot of Magic: The Gathering, and in the past few years I’ve found and nurtured a board gaming addiction (mostly Euro-style games, but a smattering of other types as well). But I guess my point is, I think of myself as a gamer, to the point where I identify much more with gamers as a community than I do with… well, many other nebulous ideas that people form self-identities around.

And so I can’t help but be pleased when gamers do good. And I don’t mean well (although that’s nice too), I mean good. With all the destruction in Haiti, it makes me feel good to see various online gaming communities coming together to try to help. BoardGameGeek, where I spend far too much time reading about new board games that I have no space or money for and totally want, is offering incentives to all site members who donate. A link there pointed me to DriveThruRPG, where well over $1,000 worth of downloadable RPG content from various vendors of goodwill has all been made available in one giant package for the price of a $20 donation to Haiti.

I think that some people look down on the gaming community, because as with most matters of taste, people who enjoy different things than you must be ignorant benighted heathens. I don’t really feel like spending pages here detailing the many benefits of gaming (from social interaction, to improving analysis skills, to staving off Alzheimer’s, to every little kid’s favorite example in the 80s of hand-eye coordination), but the larger fact is that people who have different recreational preferences sometimes seem to acquire a holier-than-thou attitude.*

And thus although gaming and gaming communities need no other justification, I can’t help but feel good when I see things like this. It makes me want to say, “See this? My people, the gaming people, these are good people.” Am I overly defensive? Maybe. It’s not as if there aren’t countless other examples of gamers doing good, from various BGG board game drives for charity, to Child’s Play which has given millions of dollars to children’s hospitals.

Of course, another important thing to remember is that lots of gamers do good without some sort of large announced structure, as do lots of knitters, truckers, sports fans, writers, farmers, waiters, and so forth. We just don’t hear about things as much when individuals do them without P.R.. The result is that a few affiliations who often institutionalize the goode workes (such as churches) get much more positive press, which somehow leads some people to believe that certain affiliations are inherently much more generous.

Which is not to belittle the donations made with good PR. Sure, Maimonides may have pegged fully anonymous giving as the highest form of charity, but if PR is what inspires people to give, you won’t find me gainsaying it. The example that always comes to mind for me is Alan Shawn Feinstein, a Rhode Island philanthropist who is a veritable charitable typhoon**, and whose name is consequently on a lot of things. So is Carnegie’s. I think if you donate millions of dollars to good causes, you should get to enjoy some fame from it. And churches should be lauded for encouraging charity, because I’m all for encouraging goodwill in the public eye. So there’s nothing wrong with recognizing the publicized donations, so long as we also remember the many good people who donate quietly and anonymously, interested only in doing good and not even in getting any credit (individual, group, or otherwise) for it.

Anyway, if I had a point in all of this***, it was that I like seeing gamers taking collective charitable action, because it might make some people stop and say, “Hey, gamers are awesome,” and it’s a truth I’m always happy to have more people see.

*Perhaps unsurprisingly, some organized religious groups oft seem to have said holier-than-thou attitude, which is why I was also glad to see Non-Believers Giving Aid help raise lots of money for Haiti. Charitable giving is not restricted to any race, religion, or recreational preference.

**Yes, I just wanted an excuse to write veritable charitable.

***Which I may have when I started, but that sure seems a long way off now. And highly unlikely. Actually, if I don’t have a point, I may as well share my column written the night before the election of Scott Brown.

So lately I’ve been chatting with my good friend Lex Friedman (who is a very funny fellow right) about writing song parodies. Although you can see he wrote a parody song in his blog just recently in September, the fact is that neither of us are writing as many parodies as we used to. This is a shame, because back in the day we used to be known as “Leth & Sex”, and constantly collaborated on comedy.* We wrote many funny things including a number of songs together, the most popular of which was definitely our Michael Jackson parody: “Just Google”

However, life happens. We were recently lamenting the fact that we haven’t written as many parodies as we used to. But it makes sense because Lex has been very busy with many jobs and raising his kids, just as I’ve been busy with, uh…

Actually, I have no excuse whatsoever for my own lack of song production. Talking with Lex reminded me how much I love writing parody songs, and as he pointed out to me, I have the free time to do it. So today, I wrote a new parody song. I also, against my better judgment, recorded it. I say “against my better judgement” because my microphone has been broken for a bit, and I was too lazy to do production work to make it sound really good, but the thing about song parodies is that they are meant to be heard.

So, if you would like to hear my new song about Tiger Woods, with apologies to 50 Cent, then you should visit Ham-STAR’s MySpace page before I become too embarassed by the production values and take it down like I did with my Dr. Horrible tribute**.

Last week’s improv show was perhaps not my finest performance, but I was proud that I sang a blues song about logorrhea. This weekend’s improv show will be even better. I will make it so, because I’ve been doing some thinking about my duty as a citizen.

*We had a shared blog, a shared podcast, and a shared sense of humor.  We broke up when he tried to share my toothbrush.

**Which was, in fact, horrible.