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.”

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?“.

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.

I promised something awesome in December, right? Well, here it is:

My new music video: “Dump Stat“

This will be of most interest to those of you who enjoy either Dungeons and Dragons, Nerdcore, or watching me rap. My sincere thanks go to the inimitable Don Vito, for the beat and song production, Daniel Beck, for video production, all friends listed in the video, for being in the video, and all my friends not in the video, for generally being supportive.

The board games that I purchased on Black Friday have now all arrived, and we’ve already played five of them. Unlike my most recent batch of discount video games, many of which were sadly unfun, the board games are all fairly entertaining, with a few likely to become fast favorites. Speaking of Black Friday, I wrote last week’s column about it. And hey, I’m posting before the last day of December! I am on the ball this month. Improv shows this weekend (Pittsfield) and next weekend (North Adams).

Unrelated to any of that, I tend to refer to Rabbi Hillel a lot. I’m sure he had many accomplishments, but I mainly think of him as the guy who said “If not now, when?”. So whenever my girlfriend seems unsure about whether to do something, be it in real life or in a board game, I will often advise: “You know what Rabbi Hillel would say.”

So the other week, I’m having some leftover pie from Thanksgiving, and my girlfriend asks, “Should I have a piece too?” I, naturally, reply with, “You know what Rabbi Hillel would say.” There is then a five-second pause, and we both say in our best Rabbi Hillel voice, “Save some for me!”*

*Technically, we don’t have a Rabbi Hillel voice, but I wanted the sentence to make it clear that it was Rabbi Hillel, and not us, who was theoretically asking for pie.*****

**Technically, she said “Save me some!” and I said “Save some for me!”, but that difference is largely inconsequential, and would muddy the story.

***Technically, I didn’t actually say “Save some for me” , because as soon as I heard her start to talk, I stopped, and then was busy laughing. But I was amidst saying it.

****I guess this is how creative non-fiction works. It’s amazing how many footnotes of falsity I need for a dozen word portion of a true sentence.

*****And yes, he might also say, “Help, help, get me out of this box!”

Last week I was pretending to do some shopping, and was comparing prices between various stores. While walking through the parking lot, I was mumbling to myself, “Alright, so that one costs twenty. Twenty dollars.” And I passed another man who happened to be mumbling to himself, and just as I was mumbling “twenty,” I overheard him mumbling “Twenty-four,” and I thought to myself, gee, he’s off by four.

I really enjoy Thanksgiving leftovers. Turkey/stuffing/cranberry/sweet potato sandwiches are quite tasty, because the bucket of food theory still holds. My post-Thanksgiving column is also leftover food.

BestDangGames seems to have changed hands while I wasn’t looking. No matter; I was doing my Black Friday shopping at Fantasy Flight regardless, since they had a crazy discount sale. Although I really need to stop buying board games now. That, or acquire another room in my house that consists mainly of shelves.

Anyone local can catch my improv troupe in Pittsfield or North Adams in December. But I’ll have another more exciting post in December too. Just you wait.

Also, this cool lady that does make cool book also made this cool blog post with game with four. Read that post. Then, your next move? Seek that book. Some good read!

That’s what day today is.

See, I told myself that I’d update this blog at least once a month. And since I’m ostensibly sending people to my website, it would be useful for me to look like I have new material no less frequently than once a month. Only, y’know, I sort of let October slip away from me. Back on my old blog, before I got WordPress, I had to hand-date all of my posts, so when this happened to me, I would simply date the posts like I did the title of this one. Sadly, with Wordpress, they do the date for you, so you can see that it wasn’t actually posted on October 39.*

So what happened in October? Well, I played fewer board games than in September**, but I played more Magic, and Tom and I have recently invented a new dynamic format which has a slightly heftier dose of luck than some formats, but is highly entertaining. I also played fewer actual video games, but more flash games. This, I believe, is a trend for the worse***, which I hope to reverse in November. There were a few columns, and I also entered a SongFight contest. The latter I feel is notable if only because I interviewed the fine folks at SongFight a few years back for my first book. This particular SongFight was a non-traditional one, being run as a promotion for the Nerdcore Rising movie, but if you would like to go listen to my song, I will not stop you, even though voting is long since over and I was not anywhere close to victory.

Levi-Strauss***** died recently. And it’s that type of thing where the name is so famous, one forgets that such people are still alive. At least, er, until they aren’t. It reminds me of being back in college and not knowing that friends of mine were dating until they broke up. My finger is in a different county than the pulse of the zeitgeist or the real world in general. People attending my comedic events keep coming up to me afterwards to inform me that they greatly enjoyed my performance (yay!) but that I made a small factual error (boo!). Where by “small”, I mean “singing an entire song about the beautiful island of Peru when Peru is in fact a mountainous South American nation bordering Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile”.******

It has been too long since I have produced something really awesome. Hopefully I will rectify this in the next month or two. Something is in the works.

*Although it totally was. If you just keep counting in October, today would be the 39th. Or okay, technically 40th on the east coast by now, but everyone knows days of the month end somewhere in the 30s.

**Although given that September was Alphabetical Boardgaming Challenge month, that’s hardly surprising.

***Although I’m a sucker for Clockwords, if only because I don’t know any other games you can win by swiftly typing in either the Gettysburg Address or the lyrics to your favorite song.

****Although there’s no fourth footnote, I really ought to learn how to start footnotes with a different word.

*****As you know, Levi-Strauss was the inventor of blue jeans designed specifically for waltzing.

******This is not always the error I make, just an example. It would be sad if my comedic performances were consistantly marred by my insistance on referring to the island of Peru.

People always talk about Good Friday, but most people prefer Saturday. My Saturday was particularly good, because we discovered that you could make bibimbap* in the rice cooker, and then my improv troupe had a show which was probably one of the best we’ve ever done. This is probably unrelated to the fact that I half-mooned the audience as a plumber, served as another member’s parachute and binoculars, and sang about having ice cream and sex.

I’ve gotten too lazy** to post all my columns to this site, and the Transcript site hasn’t been posting all the recent ones, but you can still read my column about clouds. Aristophanes had nothing to do with it. An observation that reminds me that sometimes, I am too educated for my own good. Last week I was asked to do a user review of a site where people keep an online tally of what places they’ve visited. Asked for how I’d describe it, I said it was the apotheosis of conspicuous consumption, and then I realized that I am a giant egghead and people asking for site feedback don’t want to hear about the sociological theories of Thorstein Veblen***.

Having used up all my online boardgaming credit on my last order, I knew it was time to stop buying board games. But it wasn’t time to stop trading for board games, and so for the past week and a half, I’ve been eagerly awaiting a package from Canada containing a number**** of games. I’ve been checking the tracking number every day, and the blasted thing is still in Montreal. That’ll teach me to trade internationally. Although it’s silly that Canada is international. We’re all North America, so we should just be friends. I mean, Alaska’s not international, and it’s further than the rest of Canada is.

* Of course, I think of the hot clay pot as the key ingredient in bibimbap, and we don’t have that. But the slightly crisped rice, the bulgoki (korean-style beef BBQ), the egg, even the hot sauce, we got it all. And wow, was it tasty.

** Not that I wasn’t already very lazy. But I’ve also started thinking maybe I shouldn’t have everything I write online. Maybe I should just keep a few best-of columns up, and take down the rest, in case I want to do a book of them later. But I haven’t taken any columns down either, leading me to believe that in fact, I’m just lazy.

*** Even though he was totally right. Seriously, tourism as conspicuous consumption is already pretty obvious given the focus on photos and knicknacks. And then a site launches solely so you can brag to others where you’ve been, and how can you not bring up conspicuous consumption, right?

**** Ten. Including a game that combines complicated strategic programmatic movement with a wind-up toy. I can’t wait.

RBIT is all over the place in June. Yesterday we were performing on Lark Street on Albany, where I was reminded why our improv works much, much better inside. Also, I accidentally got the entire street crowd booing me. See, I was taking suggestions for my freestyle rapping, and someone yelled out “Red Sox”, so I rapped about how I grew up watching the Paw Sox in Pawtucket, which rhymed with what the Yankees can do… and then when the booing started I remembered that Albany isn’t in Massachusetts.

Anyway, this coming weekend (June 13th) we’ll be performing at Dottie’s in Pittsfield, and two weeks after that (June 27th) we’ll be performing at AS220 in Providence as part of the Providence Improv Fest. And then Great Barrington in July and Springfield in August.

Meanwhile, I’m fairly pleased with my column about sports, and while my abortion column from last week doesn’t seem to be online, I just finished writing a column about same-sex marriage that amuses me, which will run this Friday.

On the boardgaming front, I’m still waiting for my long-ago placed pre-order of Dominion: Intrigue, but passing the time with plenty of Power Grid, Race for the Galaxy, and Caylus, the latter of which may still be my favorite game that makes use of the worker placement mechanic, because the provost mechanism (where players can influence which spaces activate after placement occurs) is so fascinating.