Well, we’re past the Ides of March. But I still had three or four Caesar salads* in the past two weeks, which were delicious. And unlike most other delicious things I’ve made of late (such as greek meatloaf), with the salads I even feel like I’m eating something healthy.**

Anyway, I have to say, this March has been a fairly eventful month for me. First, I mean that literally — March has been full of events. I did another presentation at a temple for God To Verse, attended a few different birthday parties for good friends, had the usual bunch of gaming events and random gathers. And I also had an enjoyably busy weekend where each day, I was quickly trying to create something to perform that night. Third Fridays of each month are now Comedy Night at Main Street Stage, and March’s edition saw me in the role of both stand-up comedian and improv comedy performer. I love improv because it’s made up on the spot, but I was still honing my stand-up act right before the show.

The next day was a poetry slam, and even though I was only going to be reading two poems, I always feel I should perform at least one new piece whenever I attend a slam. I’d had a vague idea for a while, but hadn’t managed to write anything new. But right before the event was scheduled to start, a bolt of inspiration suddenly struck me, and I realized what I wanted to do with my poem. Sure, I couldn’t figure out how to do it, but I could at least write about what I wanted to do, and thus managed to finish and print my poem and still arrive in time to enter the slam.

Sunday after some logistical snafus, I was slated to attend a friend’s birthday party, and suddenly had the idea that I should bake and bring something interesting. So once again, although it made me late, I did arrive bearing freshly-baked wasabi-sesame-ginger cookies.***

March has just been filled with things. I traveled to Boston and then Rhode Island, doing some research for another RI book. I decided that I have too much stuff, and need to stop acquiring random stuff. Then I ordered another box of board games, because they were on sale, and I’d wanted At the Gates of Loyang for a long time. (Perhaps I can justify that as research too, as I may soon be writing About Boardgames.) Before the month is out, I may go see a poetry reading by Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Taylor Mali, or even go on a bizarre expedition that combines RPGs with speed dating.

Suffice to say, March may only be three days longer than February, but it has certainly felt very full.

*Oddly, the only popular dictator food. Nobody ever orders a Hitler sandwich. I suppose you could argue that the Earl of Sandwich should count, but he wasn’t really a dictator. Although now that I’m thinking about it, perhaps they should make dictator tots.

**Which of course isn’t entirely the case given the copious dressing and cheese. But I guess since there’s some lettuce, I am technically eating something healthy.

***My own recipe, of course. Where by “recipe” I mean “vague idea of three ingredients I wanted together in cookies”.

I just drank some wasabi dust.

You might be wondering why I would do such a thing, and the answer is, it was in my cocktail glass.

Then you might still be wondering why I am drinking wasabi, and additionally wondering why I have a cocktail glass given how infrequently I drink alcohol.* Well, I’ve decided that wasabi peas, sesame sticks, and bits of crystallized ginger make a lovely snack mix, so I had a cocktail glass full of it. But I kept shaking it to mix it up, so a lot of the wasabi coating on the peas all sunk to the bottom. Which meant that after I was done eating everything, there was a bunch of wasabi dust still in the bottom of the glass. Which, since it technically qualifies as food, means I am not allowed to throw it away.**

Anyway, it’s been a good run of wasabi. Previous to the wasabi peas, I had some delicious wasabi peanuts, sent by a kind fellow from BGG.*** And I also acquired the game Wasabi!, which is fairly simple in terms of mechanics, but has lovely art. Where by “lovely”, I mean, “likely to make me hungry because it looks like sushi”.

Had a few good improv performances this month, which is a fine way to start a year. My columns seem to be taken down as fast as I can share them, but at least temporarily you can read my column about Facebook — or as I like to call it, VisageTome.

* I did almost have a drink last week, when I ordered some mead at The Olde Forge. Sadly, they were all out of mead, and so I had water. Apparently the honeymoon is over.

** I operate under a very strict moral code. If perfectly good food is left on the plate, it should either be saved for leftovers or consumed. Yes, I will ask to eat the food left on your plate. I am a delightful companion for dining out.

*** Yes, by now I expect I can just abbreviate BoardGameGeek.com as BGG and you’ll know what I’m talking about. I spend a lot of time there. At this point, when I type “www.” into my browser, it autocompletes with BGG.

For those of us with logistical difficulties, there’s always plenty of worries to go around before any large-scale event. The annual New Years Bash* is as always one of the events I most look forward to each year**, but as usual, roughly nothing seems to be going as planned in terms of who will be where when. I just hope my friend who is supposed to arrive in 12 hours or so still manages to show up then with no difficulty.

But I am skipping over too much. Perhaps I should mention things that have occurred between my previous post and now. For example, I wrote a column about how I’m trying to overcome my addiction to the bottle. And speaking of addictions, I bought some board games from Fantasy Flight during their annual Holiday sale. They are all currently sitting on my couch, as I was already out of shelf space before this purchase. But so far we’ve played Age of Conan (decent), Atlanteon (constant ties are lame), and the World of Warcraft Adventure Game (fun, if more simplistic than WOW:TBG)

Then it was Christmastime, and so it was off to the local Oriental Buffet for my traditional meal. I also wrote some new TSA Christmas songs which you might enjoy. And then the holidays were mostly over, although you should still feel free to peruse my previous post for potential presents to proffer your preferred people.

Of course, chief among said potential presents is From God To Verse, about which I was recently interviewed. There were more things I wanted to say, I am sure, but I am off to prepare to revel in some New Years revelry***, so I hope you all enjoy the dwindling remainder of 2010.

*Hit 2011 with a stick! HIT IT!

**The other being the Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge.

***“Revel Revel!” (said in Hamburglar voice)

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.

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.

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”.

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.